Celebrate failure

I am the kind of guy who thinks that we need to celebrate failure. Not really celebrating it as in a party, but in the way that failure is not that bad. Failure is for me a chance to learn. Failure is also a way for me to get better at something. For sure, it's not happy to fail, but I think it's one of the ways to grow.

You need to take advantage of it. Nobody is dead from failing something (I don't talk about dangerous things, but rather things that we are not able to finish, do correctly or errors we did in our life). Let me give you one example, among a lot, of this on my personal life.

The day I think I would be a partner

In one of my jobs, I had discussions with my boss about being a partner in the business. We had a lot of great discussions about this, and we concluded that we could talk about this after the rush for delivering the new version of one of our software. A couple of weeks after, my boss asked me to go to his desk to talk about business. I was sure I was going to be a partner or near to be one, but he told me that I will lose my job, because we didn't have enough contracts.

At the beginning, I was a shock. I never saw this happen. It was the first time I lose a job, but at least, it wasn't my fault.

What I learned from this

For me, it was certainly a fail to lose my job, but after this period of my life, I could find the positive things, and I learn from these things:

I learn that I really need to have some money saved for times like this. You never know when this will happen again.
I learn that no job is really secure, even not the one I have now.
I learn that I could be successful by being my own boss, and that I can build my business (it's what I did after that).
I learn that all the time I invested in my side projects, in events where I go and with my online presences were a lot benefic on many sides.

I would be able to give you more examples of the things I learn or examples of failure in my life that was caused by me or not, but you get the point. It's not that I couldn't learn these things elsewhere, or that I would never have learned these if I didn't fail, but I learn these from this failure.

FailCamp Montreal

The last time I took a beer with my friend Joey, he talked to me about FailCamp. I was so impressed by the idea, that I thought that it could be a good event to have in Montreal. Here is a little description about what is a FailCamp:

FailCamp is a celebration of failure. It’s about sharing your tales of epic fail and the lessons you learned from them. It’s about learning not to view failure as defeat, but as a learning opportunity and stepping stone to success. It’s about taking away the fear of failure and learning to take a chance, think big and achieve what you thought you couldn’t.

Like Uncle Sam, I want you to...

This kind of event is only as good as if people want to participate, by being there or by presenting. I don't thing it's gonna be a big organization, but I don't want to make one if I'm the only one that will celebrate failure: in other words, I want to validate the idea with you guys (I don't talk about having 100 people, but maybe 10-20 to have enough things to share and people to network with). So I'll need you for two things:

If you think it's a good idea to have a FailCamp in Montreal, please leave a comment here. That will show me that you want one.
If you love the idea, see number 1, and share this page with your network on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn (name it)...

Creative Commons Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nimbupani/2407313614/