Not yet! On Failure

Not Yet!

Product Consultant Rama was thinking about failure and motivation a few weeks ago and drew on an example of a conversation he had with his son. He wrote a blog post about this to share with our product team and beyond! 

The other day I was walking my son home from school when I noticed he was looking rather glum. When asked that the matter was, he said he had failed in his Big Write. Now he is only in year three, and I wasn’t quite sure how he could “fail” on Big Write.

On probing a bit further, it turned out his teacher had asked him to stay on during the break time so he could improve his writing. What bothered me was he had taken it into his head that he had somehow failed. Perhaps it was peer pressure, or maybe an offhand remark from a teacher.

I said nothing then, and when we got home, we kicked about a football in the back garden. It is remarkable what a little physical exercise does to your mood. Back in the house, I started to unpick the failure theme.

“I have been failing in Big Write since I was in year 1,” he said, a shade of his earlier glumness coming back.

Picking up a couple of sheets of A4 from the printer, I settled down with him on the dinner table.

“Can we draw this out so I can get my head round it?” I asked.

He nodded. I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but children are far more willing than adults to go along with crazy suggestions. I mean, how do you draw failure?

After mulling a while, I said, “why don’t we draw a picture for each time you failed?”

So we took our sketch pens and ended up with a few cut-away figures like this:

“That’s great,” said my son, “these figures look like the letter F…for failure.”

“Sure, but are they all the same? The third time you did Big Write, did you do better than the first time?”

“I did,” he said thoughtfully, “and the second time was better than the first time, too.”

“Ok, so the third block should be a bit higher the first and second?”

This principle having been agreed, we decided to rearrange our figures so it now looked like this:

We considered this for a while. Then I said, “Don’t you think we have talked enough about failure? Now, can you think of a time when you were successful?”

He immediately perked up.

“Oh yes! I got house points for scoring two goals at PE last week.”

If we could draw failures, it was only fair that we drew successes as well. Whether it was sheer laziness or lack of imagination, we chose the same pattern, except it had a flag at the top, like this:

“Now imagine you are looking back from the flag, what do you see?”

My son wasn’t listening. He was poring over the diagram.

“Hey, all those failures are pointing towards the flag, but there is a gap between them!”

Of course, he had to fill them with something, so drew a couple of smaller figures to join up the two, so it now looked like this:

“Now, let me get this clear,” I said, “what did you mean earlier when you said you failed?”

He shook his head impatiently.

“Can’t you see I have changed my mind, Daddy?” Adults can be so slow! “Failure is when you quit and fall off the stairway. But if you keep going, you get to the flag.”

“But what is NY?” I asked, puzzled.

“Can’t you guess?” he asked smiling. “It stands for Not Yet!”