Twitter's Fail Whale: Is Failing is Cool?

"...if your internalized view of failure is anything that is not perfect, then you are disempowering yourself from exercising your inherent creativity." Peter Sims HBR

For anyone that doesn't know, Twitter's "Fail Whale" is an image that appears on their webpage when they are experiencing an outage.  Immediately after reading Peter Sims HBR article today it came to mind as a great example of facing "failure" and admitting to it.  What exactly are we afraid of?

With the ever present transparency that social media and the web give us, embracing failure is crucial.  Twitter's Fail Whale as well as countless comical 404 error pages bring to light that errors will occur not just in technology, but in life. 

Sims along with many other's examine the power of failing and assert that we should redefine what it means to fail in order to encourage creativity.  

Technology and math have given us the ability to mitigate risk in businesses processes, hiring, and even buying flights online.  This gives us the ability to make great decisions, but the safety net phenom it has blanketed society with may not be totally necessary. For example, if Dropbox founders were not a tad naive and strong-willed they may have listened to the hundreds of advisors that probably told them that their solution was not novel.  But they weren't worried about not being perfect, they had an idea and a formula they believed in.  Many of our hero's have failed and failed big.  It's only after they have succeeded do we look at their failures as lessons or opportunities.  

So what is your definition of failure? Is it limiting your creativity? Maybe we each need our own Fail Whale. Celebrating those moments where we realized that we set the bar high and missed it, and it's OK.

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