May 17, 2011 by Steve Kuperberg

Why don’t we talk about failure more often?

It’s easy enough to point out the failures of others, of course. That’s cost-free to us.

On a quick, unscientific review one recent afternoon, I decided to search the social media site Twitter for use of the hash-tag #FAIL (for those unfamiliar with Twitter etiquette, users frequently add hash-tag codes to their posts to allow others to search easily on a particular topic).

My search returned literally hundreds of uses of the #FAIL tag over the span of just minutes—the vast majority of which were pointing out the failures of others. Very few referred to failures of the author—and then, mostly, in the form of self-deprecating humor about the trivial, like locking keys in the car or procrastinating on an assignment.

Admitting our own failures is difficult. It means admitting that we did not succeed in accomplishing something that we set out to achieve, in a culture that expects success. It means admitting that we are less than perfect—that’s not easy to do. But it’s also essential if wish to learn and grow.

In the culture of campus Israel advocacy, the perceived pressure to succeed and to minimize failure is tripled.

First, the campus culture values and emphasizes achievement. Second, many campus Israel supporters come from an upbringing which shuns public confessions of failure, leaving such accountings to private interpersonal and divine interaction. Finally, add in an advocacy component—in which people identify a public goal they wish to achieve, with the attendant implication that the status quo is unacceptable—and the pressure to brush failure under the rug becomes very great indeed.

But why should that be so? After all, the notion that we learn the most from our failures is well-established. Consider what some famous people have said. Albert Einstein remarked: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” Woody Allen once said: “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.”

Even Senator Al Franken, of Saturday Night Live fame, once observed: “Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.”

Failures are important because they reveal essential misconceptions about how things actually occur. An unexamined failure is a lost learning opportunity. As a network of campus Israel supporters, we need to be clearer about what doesn’t work so that we can learn from our mistakes and lessen the cost to others of avoiding them.

In that vein, I am proud to state that we here at ICC are chock-full of failures; they happen all the time.

One of my personal favorites is an effort I championed last year to launch a Student Coalition Against a Nuclear Iran, for which we had the support of a myriad of national campus and non-campus organizations.

But SCANI was founded on an important misconception. Those of us involved in the planning of the initiative believed that a top-down call to action would be sufficient. We were wrong. SCANI resulted in many individual students getting involved, but the effort failed to take on and spread as a movement.

Although it grew, and continues to grow, when we launched SCANI in January 2010, there wasn’t yet a widespread recognition on campus of the need for action around the Iranian nuclear threat. As a community, we had skipped the important steps of ensuring that the base of activists who would care about such an initiative felt informed and empowered to take action. It was an important lesson for any advocate.

ICC will be spending significant time and resources in the near future evaluating the campus environment and looking at what has worked, and hasn’t worked, in campus Israel advocacy.

The learning we take from our failures is important not least because of the urgency of our needs. Looking forward to the fall of 2011, we can already predict that members of the campus Israel community will need to be articulate and powerful in describing their connections to and experiences with Israelis to their larger campus communities. If we do not take account of our previous failures as well as our successes before doing so, however, we risk repeating avoidable mistakes.

With apologies to Charlie Sheen, I would much rather we carry the hashtag #winning than #fail.