the success of failure... future fridays

The title of a random article about internet startups, "Nothing Fails Like Success" caught my eye. It caught the frequency of that ever-present nagging voice that somehow I am still constantly failing, and resonated loud and clear.

While the article is squarely outside of my area of interest, it reminded me of this Samuel Beckett quote, and I learned more about the context of it which is far more interesting than  the over simplistic sound byte of a few words.

In a wonderful Krista Tippet interview I heard in On Being recently, the author, John O'Donohue reminded me that we have come to expect growth as a natural by-product of living. But really growth comes about as a result of pushing against something. And often that push feels so. damn. hard.

How often are we teaching our students how vital failure is as uncomfortable as it is?

"First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all."

'Worstward Ho' may be a difficult work that resists any stable interpretation, but we can at least be pretty sure that Beckett’s message was a bit darker than 'Just do your best and everything is sure to work out ok in the end.'

But if Beckett's words don't provide quite the cause for optimism we thought they did, the story of his life actually might. "Beckett had already experienced plenty of artistic failure by the time he developed it into a poetics," writes Chris Power in The Guardian. "No one was willing to publish his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and the book of short stories he salvaged from it, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), sold disastrously." And yet today, even those who've never read a page of his work — indeed, those who've never even read the "Fail better" quote in full — acknowledge him as one of the 20th century's greatest literary masters. Still, we have good cause to believe that Beckett himself probably regarded his own work as, to one degree or another, a failure. Those of us who revere it would do well to remember that, and maybe even to draw some inspiration from it.

via {open culture}
article via {a list apart}