So I’ve been thinking a lot about failure lately. About how it builds resilience and how good it is for human growth. And how most adults try to avoid it like the plague.

I’ve read articles oriented toward business leaders, listened to people who have worked at Stanford’s d school, and have tried to embrace failure in my own personal life. And sometimes it’s really hard.

Often times it can be much easier to just let things go. But what are we really letting go of when we stop trying?

A few posts ago, I tried sharing a video I made with a devil puppet and it came out looking really weird and elongated.

Instead of giving up on sharing videos, I finally did something I’ve never done before. I uploaded some videos to YouTube. My first was some fire footage I took on Halloween. It seemed to come out okay. Then I loaded one of the puppet videos I made at work for my son (an octopus telling jokes).

And in the interest of embracing failure, I also uploaded the three videos my coworker and I made to include in a project planner for my library’s administration. The project planner I never heard anything directly about after it was submitted.

If these videos weren’t “good enough” for the library, it is a serious failure on the administration’s part to not communicate that to me. The only response I received to the work I put into the planner was an email that went out to all programming staff. It stated that we (our library) are only working on programming related to Job Help and Ready, Set, School (which is only through Facebook and only aimed at 4 & 5 year olds).

I see my library administrations failures – especially related to their lack of desire to communicate with the backbone of the staff. They persist in trying to open for browsing even as the pandemic is getting worse. Not showing that you care for your staff is also failure. They are succeeding in failing.

Me, I keep picking myself up and brushing myself off.