Learning from Failure

I was reading an article the other day about how hospitals and health care providers can learn from failure. Not only can we learn from failure, but we must learn from failure, in order to avoid repeating them, and in order to give better care. The article reported that hospitals that learn from failure have better patient safety.

This whole learning from failure thing works on an individual basis as well. Reading the article made me think of a post I wrote earlier this year.

“Fail” is a popular word with kids right now. They are constantly saying, “I’m a fail,” or “I failed.” Sometimes they use it on each other, too. Another word for failing is learning. Maybe kids are figuring out that they aren’t good at everything, or that they need to work on certain skills. Either way, failing is part of life. It’s how we respond to failure that really matters. Like Thomas Edison and so many others before us, we have to plow ahead despite failure, or we’ll never get anywhere.

Because these things always seem to work together, I saw a great question in my book of quotes the same day that I read the article about learning from failure. “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” How amazing would it be if we all lived our lives as if we could not fail? Just going ahead and doing amazing things, without doubting ourselves?

What would you do if you knew you could not fail?