​The Only Failure Is Not to Try
Fear of failure is one of the greatest obstacles to developing the skills required to master any endeavor, creative or otherwise. Example: When I was in college, I and a friend went downhill skiing for the first time. As soon as I’d mastered a basic snowplow position, I immediately started experimenting with keeping my skis parallel. I fell – I fell a LOT! But by the second day, I was on the intermediate slopes trying to get through the moguls. I fell even MORE. In fact, I was black and blue on both sides of my body from hitting the hard-packed snow so many times. But I managed to get down the intermediate slope without falling by the end of the second day. Trudging painfully back to the lodge, I met my friend who proudly announced that he hadn’t fallen even once! But he was still doing snowplows on the bunny slope.

​I was reminded of my skiing experience some years later when I was trying to mentor a student in the lab who was supposedly the smartest high school student in all of San Diego County. He wanted to become a creative scientist. His first assignment was the same one that I had been given when I was hired, which was a somewhat intricate series of procedures that literally no one in the entire history of the lab had ever managed to do right the first time. All of us had tried to figure out what made the procedure so finicky, without success. And all of us, after several – sometimes MANY – tries, had managed to make it work. We figured that doing the procedure was like learning to play a new musical instrument: there were patterns to learn, skills to master, and matters of timing that could only be acquired through trial-and-error before everything “clicked.” I explained all of this to the high school student, and he confidently started the experiment. It failed, no surprise. I told him to try again the next day; it would go better. He refused. “I’ve never failed at anything!,” he exclaimed and never returned.

One final story, which is that of Michael Jordan, certainly one of the best and most innovative basketball players ever. When asked what his secret was, he said that unlike most of his fellow players, who honed the skills they were already best at, he focused exclusively on mastering the things he at which he was worst.
Failure isn’t being unable to do something: failure is refusing to keep trying to get better at the things you can’t do!

What Is Failure?
Failure is not part of my vocabulary. To try something, no matter the outcome, is to learn. Let me give you an example. Many years ago, I got interested in M.C. Escher’s designs, particularly those that involve what are known as “tilings.” Tilings involve shapes, usually geometrical ones, that can cover a surface without leaving any gaps. A checkerboard is a good example, in which 64 red and black squares entirely cover a square-shaped surface. Escher became famous for morphing regular geometrical shapes into animals and people and other fantastic things. After gathering up my courage, I decided to see if I could design Escher-like tilings, too. Some of my efforts succeeded, some didn’t, but the “failures” were actually more useful for teaching me what the “rules’ are for this kind of artwork than were the successes. Simply put, when you succeed at something, you don’t learn anything new but when you don’t, you have to figure out why in order to improve your performance.

After a few years, I got bored. Doing something that Escher had already done better wasn’t very exciting. Then I learned about another artist-scientist named Roger Penrose who had taken a similar trajectory as mine, first learning how to mimic Escher tilings and then inventing an entirely new type of tilings that no one had ever imaged before. These “Penrose tilings” are made up of two odd shapes that cover a surface completely but do so in such a way that the pattern never repeats. They are called “aperiodic tilings.” Very cool! Reading about Penrose tilings, I then learned that there was a yet another tiling challenge that no one had succeeded in solving, which was to discover the “ein stein.” This ein stein has nothing to do with Albert Einstein; it is German for “one stone” or, in this case, a single tile that, like the Penrose tiles, covers a surface aperiodically. Now THAT sounded like something that could be fun to try my hand at!

I spent a couple of years trying to discover the ein stein and, at one point, I thought I’d discovered it! However, a few weeks later, I was able to demonstrate that my tile wasn’t truly THE ein stein, just something close. I kept at it.  Then, a few months ago, another amateur ein stein hunter succeeded where I hadn’t. Had I “failed”? Not at all! When I looked at this other guy’s solution, I was immediately able to see what he’d done that I hadn’t and to appreciate, as I could not possibly have done otherwise, how clever he had been. And I had learned an enormous amount about an area of geometry that I would never have had a clue about had not decided to pursue the ein stein. I don’t see how this can be considered a failure!

​By the way, Penrose also “failed” to find the ein stein – but he did win a Nobel Prize in Physics a few years ago!