Try Fail Try Harder Fail Again Fail Better
The Stunning Success of "Fail Better"
How Samuel Beckett became Silicon Valley's life jitney.
Samuel Beckett, tennis guru
Photo illustration past Juliana Jimenez Jaramillo. Photo by Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images.
Stanislas Wawrinka's defeat of Rafael Nadal in the final of the Australian Open final weekend was a milestone not just in the career of a 28-year-sometime Swiss lawn tennis player only also in the posthumous life of 1 of the 20th century's near unswervingly pessimistic writers. This is the get-go time a Thou Slam title has e'er been won by a player with a Samuel Beckett quotation tattooed on his body (barring some unexpected revelation that, say, Ivan Lendl got himself a Waiting for Godot–themed tramp stamp earlier beating John McEnroe in the 1984 French Open final). The words in question, inked in elaborately curlicued script up the length of Wawrinka'south inner left forearm, are these: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Endeavour again. Fail again. Fail better."
The quotation is from Worstward Ho, a late, fragmentary prose piece that is i of the most tersely oblique things Beckett ever wrote. But those half-dozen disembodied imperatives, from the text's opening page, have in their strange afterlife as a motivational meme come to much greater prominence than the text itself. The entrepreneurial grade has adopted the phrase with particular enthusiasm, as a boxing weep for a startup civilisation in which failure has come up to be fetishized, even valorized. Sir Richard Branson, that affable sometime sage of private enterprise and bikini-based publicity shoots, has advocated from on high the benefits of Failing Better. He breaks out the quote nearly the finish of an article most the hereafter of his multinational venture capital conglomerate, telling the states with characteristic cocky-assurance that it comes "from the playwright, Samuel Beckett, but it could merely equally hands come from the mouth of yours truly."
But the oddest and most thematically dissonant invocation of the quote I've ever come across—and I'm inclined at this point to go alee and phone call it a motto—was at the endmost session of a major applied science briefing in Dublin last Oct. The stage was shared by Irish Prime number Minister Enda Kenny, Elon Musk (founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX), and Shervin Pishevar (billionaire venture backer, romantic consort of Tyra Banks). The interviewer airtight the talk—the dual focus of which had been Musk's boggling career and the office of the tech sector in Ireland's economical recovery—by giving the final discussion to Beckett: "I remember being told the Samuel Beckett line, that not bad line; he said 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail once again. Fail improve.' And that'due south what keeps me going, in many means."
This invocation of Beckett sat oddly with the chat that had preceded it, concerned as information technology had been with disrupting marketplace verticals and wealth cosmos and giving people a shot at pursuing their dreams of success. And it seemed to me to echo similar a discordant note confronting the gospel chorus of Fundamental Scream's "Movin' On Upwardly," to which the billionaire investors and their new prime ministerial friend left the stage.
I only really became aware of the extent of Fail Amend'due south meme-ification a couple of years ago, on reading an splendid piece by the novelist Ned Beauman in the New Research, in which he tracks its cool ubiquity from quotation in Timothy Ferriss' The four-Hr Workweek to books with titles like The Complete Idiot's Guide to Great Customer Service. "Watching a liturgy from such a gloomy and merciless author getting repurposed to cheer up mid-level executives," he writes, "is similar watching a neighbor articulate out their gutters with a stick they found in the garden, not realizing the stick is in fact a man shinbone." Until I read Beauman's piece, I mistakenly thought the line had a fairly niche status every bit a platitude detail to literary types. I considered it a sort of writerly platitude-in-residence—something you'd likely find propped in postcard form on a novelist's desk or pinned above the caput of at least one bleary-eyed graduate student in any given English language department. (I meet no indicate in hiding the fact that this was my laptop'due south desktop image through for the starting time year or so of my Ph.D., for what trivial skillful information technology did me in the long run.)
But I experience as though I've been coming across the lines everywhere since reading that slice. Wawrinka's inner arm is just the latest and nearly prominent venue for their advent. Notation this strenuously twinkle-eyed rendition by Liam Neeson, part of a vague PR initiative past the Irish gaelic government to somehow heave the economic system by reminding America that nosotros produced both the Waiting for Godot guy and the Taken guy. (I find it hard to lookout man this, by the mode, without imagining Beckett on the phone to Neeson, calmly intoning "I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.") In that location's as well an exhibition called "Fail Better" virtually to open at the Science Gallery in Trinity College Dublin—Beckett's alma mater, and my ain—described on its website as a showcase of "cute, heroic and instructive failures."
What has happened hither, I suppose, is that a small shard of a fragmentary and difficult work of literature has been salvaged from the darkness of its setting, sanded and smoothed of the jagged remnants of that context. This is the process by which a piece of writing becomes a quote, a saying—a linguistic object whose meaning is readily apparent, useful, and endlessly transferable, like a coin in the currency of wisdom.
Fail Better, with its TEDishly counterintuitive feel, is the literary takeaway par excellence; information technology's usefully suggestive, too, of the corporate propaganda of productivity, with its appeals to "think different" or "work smarter" or "only do it." And the fact is that these half-dozen telegraphic bursts of exhortation really piece of work pretty well as a personal motto, one time that sanding and smoothing has been completed. They are besides—and this is crucial, though apparently not something Beckett would have had in heed—eminently tweetable; the whole thing comes in at just 69 characters, which leaves people plenty of room for whatsoever commentary or testify of approving they might desire to append.
The entrepreneurial mode for failure with which this polished shard fits so snugly is non really concerned, equally Beckett was, with failure per se—with the necessary defeat of every human endeavor, of all efforts at communication, and of language itself—but with failure equally an essential stage in the private's progress toward lucrative self-fulfillment. Failure, in the #failbetter sense, is something to be embraced and celebrated, to be approached with a view to understanding how it might most effectively be transmuted into success. (Dave McClure, the founder of the 500 Startups incubator, told Fast Company that "the alternate name we came upwards with for 500 Startups was 'fail factory.' We're here trying to 'manufacture neglect' on a regular basis, and nosotros think that's how you learn.")
When I retrieve about how Beckett's words have been quotationalized in this way, pressing him into service as a kind of highbrow motivational idea-leader, I notice myself thinking of how his wife Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil reacted to the news of his existence awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969: "Quelle catastrophe!" This isn't to imply that the way in which the Worstward Ho quotation has been "pivoted"—to utilize a phrase beloved of the entrepreneurial champions of the Fail Meliorate ethos—is whatever kind of serious disaster for Beckett merely rather to illustrate that his attitude toward success and failure was more circuitous and perverse than this interpretation suggests. (Although information technology's like shooting fish in a barrel to imagine that he might have been rooting for Wawrinka on Sunday; Beckett was, for all his cynicism, a serious tennis enthusiast.)
As drastically funny as it frequently is, of course, Beckett'due south oeuvre as a whole is famously low on positive vibes. ("Despair young and never look back," he one time counseled the young Irish gaelic novelist Aidan Higgins.) The way in which these lines have get a standard of the personal boosterism repertoire is superbly ironic, and sort of wonderful in its style.
And when you restore the lines to their original context (a reversal that feels near perverse at present that they've come to seem so staunchly pro-business and pro-lawn tennis), it's difficult to imagine a piece of writing less obviously ripe for the harvesting of uplifting phrases. Worstward Ho, it hardly needs saying, gets steadily less inspirational equally it goes on. The paragraph that follows the Fail Better lines, for case, is total of the kind of stuff that would actually be worse than useless as a motivational aid on the tennis court, or anywhere else. "Try once again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Neglect worse again. Still worse once again. Till sick for good. Throw upward for skilful. Go for good. Where neither for good. Skilful and all." It will probably be a while before we see anyone winning a Grand Slam title with that tattooed on their arm.
Source: https://slate.com/culture/2014/01/samuel-becketts-quote-fail-better-becomes-the-mantra-of-silicon-valley.html
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