Recently, Mark Manson’s newsletter struck a chord. In it, he writes, “If you’re not failing, you’re not learning. If you’re not learning, you’re not growing. If you’re not growing, you’re not living.” This simple, powerful truth made me reflect on my own experiences with failure and how I encounter it regularly, yet it often feels like something to be avoided.
There’s a quiet kind of failure that no one warns you about. It’s not the cinematic kind — the big, crashing defeat that makes for great storytelling and personal breakthroughs. It’s smaller and subtler. It’s the ignored introduction, the unanswered email, the idea that never quite catches. These are the little moments where I fail over and over again.
I fail a little every day.
But I’ve come to believe that if you’re not failing, you’re not learning.
And if you’re not learning, you’re not growing.
And if you’re not growing, you’re not really living.
As E.F. Schumacher once wrote, in A Guide for the Perplexed in 1977, “If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond doubt, I minimise the risk of error but I maximise, at the same time, the risk of missing out on what may be the subtlest, most important and most rewarding things in life.” Failure and risk go hand in hand, and avoiding them often feels like self-preservation. But what I’ve learned from all those silent rejections, from the days when it feels like the world is politely pretending I don’t exist, is that the alternative — a life without risk — leaves no room for growth.
One of the clearest, most humbling lessons on failure, though, hasn’t come from books or essays. It’s come from watching my own children.
Children are born into failure. From the moment they arrive in this world, they are stumbling through it, quite literally. I’ve watched my children try, fail, and try again more times than I can count — falling over when they learned to walk, fumbling with words when they learned to talk, struggling with puzzles, bikes, friendships, math homework.
Each time they hit a wall, I braced myself, wondering if this would be the moment that discouraged them. But time after time, they surprised me.
They would cry, maybe for a moment, maybe longer. But then they’d try again.
They didn’t view their failure as a reason to stop — they saw it as part of the process. Their minds were wired for curiosity, not perfection. And their self-worth wasn’t yet entangled in flawless performance. They fell, they fumbled, and they got back up. Stronger.
Watching them has reminded me of something adulthood quietly takes away: the fearlessness to fail, over and over, and still believe in your ability to figure it out.
As we age, we start to see failure not as a stepping stone, but as a stop sign. We grow cautious, shrinking away from risks that could teach us, harden us, expand us. Fear of failure slowly fences us in.
Mark Manson’s perspective, like that of Ray Bradbury and Pixar’s Ed Catmull, and so many others emphasises that embracing failure is essential for both learning and living. They argue that creativity and success are only possible when we’re willing to fall and get back up again, not once, but over and over.
And so I’ve learned to honour the little failures that come with putting myself out there, especially the ones that sting. The ignored messages. The small ideas that go nowhere.
The conversations that don’t spark. The half-baked attempts. These are the signs of a life still in motion.
Because there is no learning without some difficulty, without some fumbling.
And if you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure — all your life. It’s as simple as that.
So I’ll keep failing, a little, every day.
Because the moment I stop, I know I’ve stopped growing. And the moment I stop growing, I’ve stopped truly living.
Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay