[On seeing a kid who screamed and kicked while getting bloods done emerging with a “I’ve been brave” sticker] I said to his dad, “Your kid hasn’t been brave, actually. I have a I’ve been a snivelling coward sticker for your kid if you want it.” The sticker has been devalued.  In hospital everyone can do with a little love but the same thing is going on in schools, in business.  I love encouragement, but behind Oscar award level encouragement there is a morbid dread of the possibility of failure. No one wants a child to be a failure, but to experience failure is not to be a failure, and learning how to handle failure must be one of the most important things you can possibly learn, and I worry that we are denying our children the possibility of learning that lesson.
Wisdom is what you get when you don’t get what you want. We have to allow our children to fail, to have that experience. If we don’t have the skill to fail then what you do is you plan to avoid failure, you don’t plan to succeed, you don’t plan to do something new, you just plan to avoid disgrace. You get plans that our health and safety procedures. To give our children that experience of failure in a good way, what we need to do is create an environment where it’s ok to fail, it’s not a disgrace to fail, it’s not going to bring the school into disrepute or stuff up the results. If you are in that environment where you can admit you’re wrong, you can admit you messed up, then amazing things happen. Your failure might be soeone els’s brilliant idea. For example, Spencer Silver, who produced a rubbish glue. His boss realized that he needed something to stop his paper markers falling out his bible – hence the Post-it note. Alchemy was misguided but led to chemistry. America was discovered by Columbus looking for India. Cooking is full of mistakes that became classic dishes.
Where do ideas come from? We give nice stories about our inspiration eg Isaac Newton and the apple, Darwin being inspired by Malthus whereas his books were filled with his ideas long before. Brilliant ideas come incrementally. In the history of ideas, people have told those stories about having those eureka moments, partly because it’s embarrassing to tell how long it took you to get somewhere which now that you’ve got there, looks really obvious. Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox is a short story, but its twist was suggested by his editor. There is also now a financial pressure to claim our ideas for our own, in the age of intellectual copyright, instead of admitting that ideas come from conversations and sharing.
There is no end to what we can achieve, if we are not bothered by who takes the credit for it (Ronald Regan).
[>Frank Cottrell Boyce]