| This past weekend I stopped by Duke’s campus for one of my favorite days of the year: freshman move-in. Campus gets filled with an energy that feels electric — minivans stacked with plastic bins, roommates meeting for the first time, families channeling their emotions into pointless arguments about where to put the dresser. It’s hope and chaos in equal measure.
But this year felt a little different because, as I walked around campus, several parents came up to say hello and tell me they’d seen my videos online. It was surreal. Humbling. And also mildly terrifying because now my jokes about students not reading the syllabus are being cross-referenced in real time with actual parents.
At one point, a dad pulled me aside. “I love what you’re doing,” he said. “But I don’t love the name of your course… Learning to Fail. I’ve been thinking, what if you called it Learning from Failure instead?”
I asked him why.
“Well,” he said, “we don’t want to teach kids to fail. We want to teach them to succeed.”
I understood what he meant. I really did. He was trying to protect his kid by making sure my class wasn’t going to make failure sound like something worth aiming for — as if the name of a class might nudge his child toward catastrophe.
The conversation was quick, but his concern has been bouncing around in my head ever since. While it might’ve seemed, to him, like a small semantic suggestion, he was unknowingly articulating the exact problem Learning to Fail is trying to address.
Even the Word Feels Scary
We’ve developed a strange cultural reflex — especially around children and achievement — where the word “failure” feels radioactive. Just saying it out loud seems like tempting fate.
We avoid it in schools. We avoid it in performance reviews. We wrap it in euphemisms like “growth moments” and “learning edges.” More importantly, when we do talk about it, we try to skip to the moral of the story: Look how much I learned! Look how it helped me grow!
But we’re skipping too fast.
We’ve become so obsessed with protecting people from failure that we don’t even want them to touch the idea of it. That’s a big problem because… well… life already forces people to fail. And we’re so afraid of it that nobody knows how to feel okay when it happens.
That’s the gap.
What We Actually Teach
When we only let people talk about failure after they’ve succeeded — when we only allow “failure” to show up as a postscript to a happy ending — we teach something dangerous. We teach people that failure only has value once you’ve proven it wasn’t really failure.
That kind of messaging doesn’t make people resilient. It makes them ashamed. It teaches them to hide failure, and avoid it, and cover it up as fast as possible.
Most dangerously, it teaches them to feel unlovable when it happens.
That’s why so many of us become adults who feel broken by even the smallest mistakes. It’s why we struggle to take risks or try new things unless we’re sure we’ll be good at them. We’re not weak. Instead, we’re taught — from the earliest ages — that failure is a moral defect that should be either outrun or outgrown instead of acknowledged in real time when it’s actually happening.
So no, I’m not changing the name of the class.
After all, the lesson isn’t how to avoid failure. The lesson is how to stand inside of it without crumbling. I want students to feel the sting and not mistake it for worthlessness. I want them to learn to say: This hurts. But I’m still here.
A Name That Needs Reclaiming
We don’t need to protect people from failing.
We need to protect them from believing failure means they don’t belong. That they’re less worthy. That they’ve lost our approval, or our pride, or our love.
We accomplish this by making failure something we’re allowed to name, and feel, and talk about before the turnaround moment happens. Heck, we need to learn to accept that the turnaround moment may never happen, and that’s okay, too.
Failures don’t always turn into success stories. That’s not a bad thing. Or, for that matter, a good thing. It’s just life. And it’s why the class is called Learning to Fail.
I don’t want people to fail on purpose. I just want people to know that when it happens — and it will happen — it doesn’t make them bad, or broken, or doomed.
It just makes them… people.
– AD
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