How To Profit From A Failure?

It is common sense to think that what experience gives us all are the years, which does not automatically imply acquiring wisdom. One thing is what happens to us and another is what we think and feel about what happens to us.

Similar events sink some people and make others stronger. What distinguishes them?

There are those who always learn and those who go through life as if on tiptoe, without wanting to learn from themselves, determined that the world is and will always be hostile to them. We all know older people who have been getting wiser every day through experience … and others who have progressively closed down to learning.

Do you always stumble on the same stone?

In the movie Trapped in Time , Bill Murray, characterized as a frustrated and arrogant weatherman for a television network, is sent to the small town of Punxstawnwey to cover information about the Groundhog Day festival.

A snow storm forces him to spend the night in the city and the next morning, when he wakes up, he is amazed to see that Groundhog Day begins again. Murray will find himself entangled in a time loop that condemns him to relive over and over again the same day.

Throughout the film, we will witness his gradual change of values: only when he manages to be aware of his mistakes and learn from his own life experience will he be able to leave the day in which he is trapped.

In another film of a very different cut, Little Miss Sunshine , we witness the vicissitudes of coexistence of an unconventional family : the father tries to build a successful career as a motivator for professional self-help; the grandfather has been expelled from a nursing home for drug trafficking; The teenage son has vowed to be silent and refuses to speak until his dream of becoming a test pilot is fulfilled, and the plump girl with big glasses has been selected to participate in a typically American beauty pageant.

Despite not liking the idea, the entire family decides to accompany and support the girl, assuming a significant margin of error, and they embark on a 1,287-kilometer road trip in a beat-up truck.

Throughout the trip, the family suffers numerous mishaps : the father loses an important contract as a motivator; grandfather dies unexpectedly; the son discovers that he is color blind and that he will never be able to fly a plane … tensions and adversities that family members manage to fit in by leaning on each other.

Finally, after a frantic race against time, the family arrives at the hotel where the contest is being held. They quickly realize that the youngest daughter does not have the “right” profile (extremely thin girls with a falsetto voice, made up and dressed as if they were women).

In any case, she wants to go on stage to perform the dance that Grandpa had secretly helped her prepare (a burlesque performance of Rick James’ Super Freak). The organizers, furious, order the father to remove the girl from the stage, but instead of doing so, the whole family takes the stage to dance with her.

What do Trapped in Time and Little Miss Sunshine teach us ?

Like Bill Murray, many people go through life with a closed attitude to the possibility of expanding and growing, convinced that they can learn nothing, less from their own experience. They are usually rigid people, who find it difficult to change course and be flexible in their decision-making.

In contrast, the characters in the second film naturally assume a great repertoire of errors and mistakes as something intrinsic to human development, a fact that allows them to learn from their own life experience from the beginning of the film and grow as individuals.

The human being is the only animal that stumbles twice on the same stone. But sometimes, like Bill Murray in Trapped in Time , it seems that we do not chastise ourselves and, despite overcoming hard setbacks in our lives, we repeat over and over again the same mistakes that led us to that situation.

It is true that, especially when we are going through a complicated period, it is very difficult for us to see things objectively and we do not understand why they are happening. However, this is the best time to focus on learning. The important thing is that in the process we can stop and ask ourselves what we can learn from ourselves.

If we do not give ourselves the opportunity and the openness to identify what is limiting us, we ourselves become our greatest obstacle.

To let new things in our lives we have to close, clean, throw away or get rid of what does not serve us, does not work or hurts us. But the most important thing is the learning that these experiences left us.

You can learn from mistakes

The first requirement is to learn to recognize them. If we think that we are exempt from committing them, if we believe that we cannot be wrong, we will never learn.

It is not humbling to admit mistakes. The sad thing is to ignore or deny them and insist on it. In fact, if we stop for a bit, we could even say that being wrong is one of the most exciting experiences out there.

Perhaps one of our great mistakes consists in denying ourselves from the outset the possibility of making mistakes and failing.

Second, we should be able to analyze why a mistake has been made, what has been the cause of it to try not to repeat it.

To do this, we have to accept what happens to us, analyze the causes, forgive and change, understanding that we are beings in perpetual motion. If we succeed, we can move forward in our lives and be happier people.

This is how the members of Little Miss Sunshine’s family act : no matter how crazy what they are feeling, they do not deny it, thus avoiding many social conventions and obtaining an absolutely genuine way of life as a result.

The act of erring consists of attacking oneself and the world, but we can obtain a positive reading of this attack if we manage to be aware of it and detect it in time: in the long term we will find our way strengthened, with renewed self-esteem and confidence. .

Fail better

The book Instructions to fail better. An Approach to Failure (Abada Editores), by Miguel Albero, illustrates the subject at hand in a very pleasant way. Thus, contrary to the common belief that failure must be hidden, we find numerous examples of people who have exposed human failure to humanity.

Thanks to this book we know that in Zagreb you can visit a Museum of Love Failure, founded by a broken couple; We can also find the Museum of Commercial Failure, in the State of New York, or the Museum of Bad Art in Massachusetts, which only shares with the “museums of good art” the fact that pieces are stolen from them.

Albero defends that it is necessary to desecrate success, entrepreneurship, and that failure should be the normal or supreme aspiration of man, in the sense that, given the inhumane modalities that both capitalism and totalitarian socialism offer in their menu, aspire to failure is a kind of personal liberation.