You have to get comfortable with failure. You have to actually seek failure. Failure is where all of the lessons are.
Will Smith
The meaning of the quote
In 2013, Will Smith‘s sci-fi film After Earth flopped. He later told Esquire it was the most painful failure of his career.
“What I learned from that failure is how you win.”
He stepped away from work for a year and a half to figure out what had gone wrong, then came back and kept making films.
Smith explains the idea behind the quote in a short video he posted on his YouTube channel in January 2018. He compares failure to a workout. You lift until your muscles can’t manage one more rep, because that failed rep is where they adapt and grow.
For Smith, practice is controlled failure.
So the quote asks for more than putting up with failure. It asks you to work at the edge of what you can do, where failing is likely. Work that never fails is too easy to teach you anything, and research reported by Scientific American suggests learning may go fastest when you get about 15% of the answers wrong.
Smith ends the video with advice from John C. Maxwell’s book Failing Forward, which is to fail early, fail often and fail forward. Failing forward means you take each failure’s lesson with you, the same idea behind Maxwell’s quote Sometimes you win.
Action steps
You don’t need a failed movie to learn from failure. Small failures you plan on purpose teach you the same way.
- Pick 1 skill and push it past your limit. Play the song at full speed or speak the new language before you feel ready.
- Check how often you miss. If you get almost everything right, make it harder. If you get almost nothing right, make it easier until you miss about 1 in 7 tries.
- Write down the lesson before you move on. After each miss, write 1 line about what went wrong and what you’ll try next time.
The next time something falls apart, don’t rush past it. Stop and ask what it taught you, because Smith says that’s where the lessons are.
About the author
By 1990, Will Smith had won the first Grammy ever given for rap, spent the money and ignored his taxes. The IRS sent him a $2.8 million tax bill and seized many of his possessions.
Smith later said being famous and broke was the worst mix, because people still recognized him, only now they were sitting next to him on the bus.
His girlfriend at the time got tired of watching him mope and pushed him to hang around the set of The Arsenio Hall Show. There he met music executive Benny Medina, who took him to a party at Quincy Jones’s house. Smith had never acted, but he auditioned on the spot for a sitcom based on Medina’s life, and Jones had a contract drawn up that night.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air ran for 6 seasons and turned a broke rapper into an actor.
He took a shot he could easily have failed, and that is what the quote asks of you.
Smith tells the full story of these early failures in his memoir Will. Nearly 5 years after After Earth, he recorded the short video where you can find this quote.
Resources
- Will (Book)
- Failing Forward (Book)
- Before Fresh Prince, Will Smith was broke and in trouble with the IRS (Article)
- Sometimes you win (Article)
- Failing is a feature (Article)
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