Sorry about the title, but it’s not mine. It was inspired by a speech Denzel Washington (yes, the actor) gave to university graduates a few months ago.
Honestly, he surprised me a lot. I didn’t know he could be so inspiring. As you will see if you click on the youtube link, he delivers his speech with a lot of fervour and I am sure that the students present were very motivated by him. Between you and me, if he spoke French, I would take him in my team of speakers ;-).
I’d like to come back to what Mr. Washington had to say. In his eight-minute speech, he explains “his” rules for success. Having heard many such speeches, the rules of success, apart from a few variations, are often the same from one speaker to the next. We don’t reinvent the wheel!
However, Mr. Washington surprised me with his second rule: Fail big! Which could be translated as: “Fail big”, or, if you’re going to fail, do it big!
It may seem odd that a motivational speech should include this kind of advice, when you know that all your life, you want to avoid failure and do everything you can to avoid it. We prepare, we plan, we take courses, we get advice, we hire a coach and so on. All to avoid failure. And Mr. Washington comes along and tells us to do it “big time”.
It is true, having experienced a few, that you learn a lot from failure. So, if I extrapolate Mr Washington’s reasoning, small failures = small lessons, medium failures = medium lessons and large failures = large lessons.
Without taking it literally, and obviously not to the point of failing in a big way on purpose, for the simple reason of learning more, we can conclude that we should NEVER be discouraged when we experience a big failure because, in the end, it will make us go faster and further.
This is the real lesson to be learned. It doesn’t really matter how big the failure is, because you will learn something in proportion to how big it is anyway.
In conclusion, I’d like to sum up Mr. Washington’s words with Jean-Marc Chaput’s allegory. “When you get a little kick in the butt, it moves you forward a little, but when you get a big one, you move forward a lot more.
Good success!
