I don’t mean to brag and I do hope that I don’t make you all jealous, but I won the Heroic Failure Award*!! Squeee!!! I am quite proud of my accomplishment and my certificate hangs in a place of honor (right over my printer) so that I can look at it daily.
The Heroic Failure Award is a new staff award given out yearly at my library to celebrate someone (or several someones) who took a risk on something that didn’t quite work out. The library director and I brought this idea back from the fabulous Risk & Reward Conference in 2012. We thought this was an excellent way to recognize that failure is not a bad thing and sometimes it takes several failures to get to something that is GREAT! Theodore Geisel was not published on his first attempt; he lived through numerous rejections before his first children’s book was published.
I would like to encourage you to take a risk today and try something new. If it fails remember that failure makes the final product better, it is how we learn and grow and build excellent programs and services. Keep on failing!
*I share the honor of Heroic Failure with the cast and crew of this wonderful video.
Edith Sutterlin
Wonderful idea. The Coursera course I’m taking now on Creativity, Innovation, and Change rom Penn State believes that “Intelligent fast failure” is desirable and necessary to eventual success.
Mary Voors
I love this! (And I really like the video, too!)
Emily Lloyd
Congrats! I really love this, too.