Failure, says Costica Bradatan, “is like the original sin in the biblical narrative: everyone has it. Regardless of class, caste, race, or gender, we are all born to fail, we practise failure for as long as we live, and pass it on to others” (in Everyone fails, but only the wise find humility, 18 August 2016).
Instead of viewing failure negatively, mistakes “ought to inculcate humility”, Bradatan argues and refers to Iris Murdoch’s definition of humility—regarded by him as one of the best and most economical—simply stating: ‘selfless respect for reality’. As humans, our perspectives became much too grand.
Three phases are recommended by Bradatan:
- We, as individual humans, need to acknowledge of our cosmic insignificance.
- Once we embraced our insignificance, we need to firmly ground ourselves.
- “Having lowered an anchor into the world” through the first two phases we “regained an existential equilibrium” and “we can move on to” learn from our mistakes.
Richard Barker commented and stated that “evolution’s agenda is not merely to propel DNA into the next generation, it’s to propel the best DNA into the next generation” and added “indeed, that’s the only benefit to evolution”. Barker also adds that shame serves to silence. If we’re ashamed about our mistakes then we cannot learn from them. Barker argues that we neem to be “open and honest (about the incident)”, and interrogate mistakes. There is a lot of value derivable in learning from mistakes.
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