REDEFINING SUCCESS: Remove the fear of failure to learn what’s important

This article was published in The Mindful Word journal of engaged living (http://www.themindfulword.org)

School is said to have many purposes, including socialization and acculturation. (In reality, it’s mostly about being a place for kids to go during the adult working day.) For many people, school’s main purpose involves preparing kids to become a “successful” adult. And, of course, the flipside of that is many people’s concern that lack of school equates to lack of success in adulthood.

That concern is ill-founded for two reasons. One: some of the world’s most financially successful people have little formal schooling. Two: the definition of success is a very personal one.

Financial success and status are the main concern of those who worry that kids who haven’t attended school won’t be prepared for adulthood. If you were to persuade those people to dig a bit deeper, they might expand the definition to include happiness, career satisfaction, becoming active citizens and other more esoteric things. But being a financially functioning adult—i.e. supporting self, family and the economy—is the biggest component of most people’s definition of success.

I’ve written in earlier articles about my belief that life learners are well prepared for this sort of success… if they want it. Of course, not everyone frames success in terms of money. According to the nineteenth century American writer and speaker Ralph Waldo Emerson, to have succeeded is “to have laughed often, to have won the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to have earned the appreciation of honest critics, to have endured the betrayal of false friends, to have appreciated beauty and to have left the world a better place, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition.”

School doesn’t teach most of those things. Nor does it teach what Stephen Downes—a senior researcher for Canada’s National Research Council and a leading proponent of the use of online media in learning—thinks leads to whatever definition of success one might have. He says the route to success means knowing how to:

• predict consequences

• read

• distinguish truth from fiction

• empathize

• be creative

• communicate clearly

• learn

• stay healthy

• value yourself

• live meaningfully

School doesn’t do much about those things either. However, young children are good at being successful on their own in the way of Emerson and Downes. They laugh a lot, are self-regulating and self-confident. They appreciate beauty, are creative and learn easily. They ask incisive questions and constantly experiment. But all of that can be turned off by well-meaning adults trying to prepare them for “success.” They can be made to feel self-conscious when they don’t appear to achieve the gold star prize of outwardly defined success. And then the destination becomes all-important and the process irrelevant.

My adult-induced neurotic perfectionism has taken me many years to overcome. In school and at home, I learned that being successful is good, and that non-success—aka failure—is bad. Failure comes with shame and ridicule. This leads us to fear failure, which is paralyzing.

We become focused on trying not to fail. We become passive and avoid taking risk. We hold ourselves back from living fully and, ironically, from opportunities for “success.” And that brings us back yet again to the respect and dignity that are such an important part of autonomous parenting. If our children are living life on their own terms, rather than trying to meet someone else’s expectations, they are successful. Over and over again.

Read another article by Wendy Priesnitz on life learning: WHOSE LIVES ARE WE LIVING? Practicing helicopter parenting or facilitating life learning

The post REDEFINING SUCCESS: Remove the fear of failure to learn what’s important appeared first on The Mindful Word.

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