I went to a children’s robotics competition built around LEGO Mindstorms technology. Mindstorms is LEGO’s computer platform for using its bricks to build working robots. The organizer was FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an international STEM education nonprofit started by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway scooter.
Every year, “FIRST LEGO League” picks a theme with global significance—the oceans, outer space, urban planning. The student leagues complete research assignments around the theme and program robots to perform specific tasks mapped out on a themed competition board. The teams present their research, and then pit their robots head-to-head against other schools.
Our school district sent three teams in three different age groups. Both of our girls participated, the oldest for the third time, and the youngest for the first.
I’m amazed how well our oldest is fairing in middle school. She’s already aware of her interests and finding them within school projects and extracurricular activities like this FIRST competition. The modern middle school encourages her unique talents and self-possession—something I’ve never associated with middle schools.
She volunteered to write two original scripts this year, one for a group project in school mimicking a six o’clock news broadcast, and the second for her LEGO league’s research presentation mimicking the gameshow Jeopardy. Last year, she worked on the robotics end in the FIRST competition, but this year the script writing was enough for her. She keeps both scripts pinned to her bedroom wall—our storyteller.
The youngest is our engineer. She programmed a robot to “cross a moon crater.” This was my first year attending too, and before I knew what was happening, the youngest was on stage, setting up her LEGO robot to complete her mission in the first of three tries. Overhead cameras captured the robots in action for large screens on the hanger-sized auditorium’s back wall.
Her first try did not go well. Her robot did not work—on the giant screens for everyone to see—and she was shattered. She broke down in tears, which is unusual for her.
She’s nine years old, but she shows similar signs of her sister’s self-possession. She’s never met a construction set—Tinkertoy, Erector, LEGO—she didn’t love. Programming a robot is her niche and she worked hard on the coding for this crater task. I instantly recognized her feelings and the significance of the emotion struck me. She felt shame.
She saw her failure as deficiency and needed to know we still loved her in spite of it. These fears are deep-seated within all of us. Failure—my God—will people still talk to me?
After a few reassuring hugs, her robot’s second and third tries went much better and she was her lighthearted self again. Love and Kleenex is enough at nine, but the moment reminded me of something I want to reinforce in both girls as they get older. It’s the same thing I struggle to teach my graduate students.
Our early life experiences with shame and failure are often so powerful they prevent us from living and risking as adults. Yes, we must fail before we succeed, but perseverance is only part of the lesson here.
When we treat failure as shameful, we want to avoid it and get to the winning. When we don’t win at an endeavor quickly, we lose interest. Most of us wait for a chance encounter with some niche to awaken an inner interest, talent, or drive strong enough to push us past obstacles—and we wait our entire lives.
What we really want to find is a hidden ability that means we never have to fail, and that just doesn’t exist. Michael Jordan himself has said the scope of his success was directly connected to how often he failed to make the shot.
Successful athletes, scientists, and artists all have creativity in common. They pursue new and different ways—to play, engineer, or tell stories. Audiences see most new ideas as foreign and strange at first, so it’s up to the individuals to carry their techniques forward.
Failure teaches them where they need to improve to reach their goals, but failure is also where they find their inventions. Sometimes a loss, or an explosion, or a crowd laughing at you is a discovery—if you can see it. And if you can stand it.
People who have impact learn to face failure and risk, or their efforts would never make it past the first try. These days, we can’t rely on serendipity alone to push a few of us out of our comfort zones—our future has too many problems requiring ingenuity. More of us need to get past our initial humiliations.
On the basketball court, the school stage, and in FIRST LEGO League competitions, it’s our job as parents to create environments where kids understand failure is nothing to avoid. The self-possession that carries us through times when we understand what we’re doing even if no one else does is the engine that keeps humanity thriving.
Every time we try something new, we triumph. Every time we try something new to everyone else, we serve everyone else. Winning and losing have very little to do with it.
In every case, failure is courage first.