Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
The meaning of the quote
In January 2013, Stan Wawrinka lost to Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open after 5 hours and 2 minutes of tennis. The fifth set ended 12-10 at 1:40 in the morning. Wawrinka had lost his last 10 matches against Djokovic, and he wiped away tears in the press room as he told reporters:
“I really fought like a dog.”
2 months later he had this quote tattooed on the inside of his left forearm.
That September, Djokovic beat him again in 5 sets in the US Open semifinal. In January 2014, Wawrinka went back to Melbourne, beat Djokovic in the quarterfinal and beat Rafael Nadal in the final to win his first Grand Slam title.
Each loss had brought him a little closer.
Beckett fits the whole idea into 6 short sentences. The first 3 admit what happened. You tried, it didn’t work and it doesn’t settle anything. The last 3 tell you what to do next. Try again, expect to fail again and make the next failure a better one.
A better failure gets you closer than the last one did. Wawrinka still lost in New York, but he lost a tighter match against the same player, and each loss showed him where the match turned and what he had to fix.
Researchers studied thousands of people who kept going after a setback, from scientists applying for grants to founders starting companies. Kellogg Insight reported that the people who eventually succeeded weren’t more gifted at the start. They kept the parts of each attempt that worked and changed the parts that didn’t. The people who stalled kept going back to the drawing board and starting over from scratch.
Starting over from nothing is just failing again. Keeping what worked and fixing the rest is failing better. It’s the same reason a Princeton professor published a CV of his failures, which you can read about in The greatest teacher, failure is.
Beckett wrote the quote in the book Worstward Ho, a short prose piece from 1983. In the book, the line sits inside a bleak story about a voice struggling to keep going, and a few lines later it turns to failing worse. Readers lifted the 6 sentences out and turned them into a motto, and athletes and startup founders have carried it ever since.
Action steps
The next time something you tried doesn’t work, run through these steps before you try again.
- Write down what went wrong. Do it the same day, while you still remember the details. 1 or 2 lines is enough.
- Write down what worked. Most failed attempts have parts that went fine. Keep those for the next try.
- Change one thing. Pick the biggest problem on your list and fix only that. If you change everything at once, you won’t know what made the difference.
- Pick a date to try again. Put it on your calendar before the disappointment talks you out of it.
Wawrinka got his tattoo straight after a loss, and he wore it into the next one.
About the author
Samuel Beckett was born near Dublin in 1906. He studied languages at Trinity College and went back to teach there, then walked away from the job to write.
His first novel, Murphy, was rejected by 40 publishers before Routledge took it in 1938, and it never made much money once it was out.
So he tried again and changed one thing. After World War II, he switched from English to French, a language he said let him write without style.
In French, he wrote Waiting for Godot. It opened at the small Théâtre de Babylone on January 5, 1953, and some of the audience walked out. Beckett was 46, and after more than 20 years of writing, the play made him famous.
In 1969, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His partner, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, took the call in their hotel room in Tunis, turned to him and said:
“What a catastrophe!”
Beckett had dreaded that kind of fame. He skipped the ceremony and gave much of the prize money away to other writers.
14 years later, he published Worstward Ho. Today you can find it in the collection Nohow On, along with 2 of his other late prose pieces and the 6 short sentences that ended up on a tennis player’s forearm 30 years later.
Resources
- Nohow On (Book)
- Waiting for Godot (Book)
- Why do some people succeed after failing, while others continue to flounder? (Article)
- Beckett in love (Article)
- The greatest teacher, failure is (Article)
- Samuel Beckett (Wikipedia)
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