Courage to Fail

I like phones and tablets. I just love the form factor. Not only are they cute and powerful, but they are also personal too. They have evolved so much to the point of being a reflection, a mirror, of our culture. That is why I love personalizing them with third-party launchers and widgets.

So, when I first heard the news about a keynote from Alejandro Flores who, of course, is an important engineer at Amazon’s Web Services division, my very first thoughts were: “is he going to talk about the Amazon FirePhone?” Turns out he did. But this was no mention, sidenote, or a joke regarding something dumb akin to that we surely did once in our lives. The Amazon FirePhone was mentioned in pride and acknowledgment. Surprising—not many confess their own failures.

Of course, my intentions are not mockery. My guess is, given its ultimate failure to catch up, workers were fired, and with that, efforts, hopes, and dreams too; laughing at that would be the upmost expression of pretention. My intentions are more like that of a chuckle: something cringe, and that is it. Again, the unexpected came when this was mentioned with pride. And for that, I can only show my respects.

Indeed, failure is something not to be ashamed of. Failure is necessary for growth. From our mistakes, we learn, reflect, and rebuild, hopefully now knowing better. Failure, at the very least, although no less important, is proof that we tried. And like a vacation we may never take once again, we should look back at them with a satisfactory mindset, knowing that what was worth about it all is the ingenuity we had when we tried.

That is the case of Amazon too, it seems. They have managed to learn and, now, build a market for successful tablets.

One must have courage to fail for success to happen.