When Thomas Edison was very young, a teacher told his mother that he was “too stupid to learn anything.” By age 10, he had set up his own laboratory in his family’s home. He became a full-time inventor and set up his laboratory at Menlo Park at age 20. He wasn’t stupid; he was simply born into an industrial, standardized system which sought to stifle his creativity, to make him compliant to the system. The teacher was bad at teaching; the system didn’t know how to properly educate a child.

Our educational system frowns upon children who don’t sit still, who ask too many questions, who can’t regurgitate facts on standardized tests. We are taught to be children who sit still, shut up, and absorb the facts and figures being thrown at us, seldom ever learning how to do anything. Thomas Edison, one of the most influential inventors who ever lived, was one of these children. Each of us is one of these children.

“I have never let schooling interfere with my education.”

– Mark Twain

Edison was not only creative, he was also a failure. And that is something for which we should all strive.

Edison tried over 10,000 different ways of creating a light bulb before finally making the one for which he is famous. A reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 10,000 times?”. Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 10,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 10,000 steps.”

Our educational system frowns upon failure, the greatest teacher of all. The lessons we learn from failure stick with us forever and tend to be much more valuable and useful in helping us make better decisions in the future. We are taught that failure, getting the wrong answer, or writing something poorly, is to be avoided at all costs. Yet the only way to get the right answer is to learn what the wrong one is; the only way to learn to write well is to start writing, most of which will be bad in the beginning.

So what?

Our children, our teens, and yes, us as adults as well, have to get used to the idea of trying new things, of failing. The failures of which I am speaking are not fatal – these are failures in creating something new, or trying out a new skill, or seeking a new way of doing things, of giving something to the world when it might not be accepted.

It might not work. So go fail over and over again until you succeed at something. Try new things, make something, start something, give something to the rest of the world. You might fail. And that failure will teach you a lesson. It will be one of the 10,000 steps in the right direction.

Fail and fail often.