Whatever happens in your journey — good or bad, fair or unfair, expected or unexpected — everything is a life lesson, and every lesson deserves to be celebrated.
Today, we speak of failure, that much-feared virtue which, paradoxically, is the only one capable of guiding us toward the path of wisdom, while success often leads us toward intoxication.
Failure, let us remember, is above all a game — and even in the game of chess (échecs in French), it is defined as a situation in which the king or queen finds themselves in a position attacked by an opponent’s piece.
In its figurative sense, failure is defined as the act of not succeeding, of not obtaining something.
But why do we define a word by what it denies us, rather than by its virtues?
Perhaps because, since the dawn of time, even the greatest philosophers — Descartes, Kant — described failure as a misuse of our faculties or reason.
Yet Freud himself once said something that has since proven true across the history of medicine:
“It is when something doesn’t work that we begin to understand how it works.”
Failure is simply the result of an action that did not produce the expected outcome.
This situation touches every one of us. Failure is our daily companion — we cannot live without it, because it draws its essence from our very nature as humans and living beings. It materializes our existence and symbolizes, in the deepest sense, our humanity.
Every time you encounter failure on your path, remember: it is a tangible invitation to reformulate your ambitions. It calls you to create a new framework — one within which your creativity can express itself more fully.
Failure is a paradox, and paradox is constraint, and constraint fuels creativity — but only when it is viewed outside the initial frame (out of the box), in another frame that you must create.
We are all afraid of failure, even though it shapes our future. Society rejects it, fears it, and even erases it from our daily lives and projects. Yet failure is part of us — a profound definition of our human experience, a clear expression of the life that governs us.
Failure is so rejected that it is not taught in our schools or universities. We must make it a discipline — teach it, experience it, and above all, document it.
In our companies, failure is often repressed with disconcerting energy and rigor. And yet, creativity will never become a shared currency in organizations unless we allow ourselves to fail — and try again. Otherwise, we suffocate the stories that could have inspired confidence — the kind of confidence that cannot be acquired in any other way.
Failure gives us a form of confidence that no academic or professional success can ever offer. It allows us to experience and understand dimensions of life that we could never have grasped otherwise.
It is forbidden to fail — even though failure is what we do best. So, let us simply change our perception of failure and allow our youth to fail — while helping them rebuild new frameworks and reformulate their ambitions.
Let us not impose our fears of failure upon our children. If we force them to fulfill our anxious expectations, then when they fail, it is not they who will have failed — but us. We will have failed through our fear of failure itself.
It’s like the child taking their first steps, while their parents hover protectively, afraid to see them fall and get hurt. People often tell such parents:
“Let them try to walk on their own. They will fall, then stand up again — and only then will they learn to walk.”
We all walk today, don’t we? And yet, could any of us truly say that we never fell before learning to stand?
Success is nothing more than a succession of failures that lead to a final victory. Let us learn to be more humble and more receptive to the virtues of failure — for it teaches us, as individuals and as entrepreneurs, to learn from our mistakes, to rise from our wounds, and to continuously improve.
Yes, that is the true meaning of failure: a process of continuous improvement, and thus, of personal growth.
By Florent YOUZAN & Hanae BENNANI