I am very fond of Thomas Edison’s response to cross-­examination regarding his quest to find the right filament for his prototype light-bulb. It had been proving a laborious, expensive and unrewarding business, so you have to admire the inventor’s pluck when he responded: ‘I haven’t failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.’ The inventors of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) would have approved strongly of Edison’s attitude, not least because his eventual success appears to validate NLP’s cherished maxim that ‘there is no failure, only feedback’. But can we really apply this principle unilaterally without turning ourselves into something scarcely recognisable as human?

By all means let’s learn from our mistakes, but I am uncomfortable with the underlying desire to deny that failure even exists. This smacks of the kind of unflinching positivism that can easily make us look even more ridiculous than the failure itself. Why aren’t we allowed to fail sometimes? Aren’t both failure and success part of the natural punctuation of a life, responsible for the beats and pauses that lend it its distinctive rhythm and cadence?

Sometimes you need a failure to act as a full stop, a no-entry sign that decisively terminates one phase of your activity and nudges you in new, as yet unexplored, directions. Walt Disney is a classic example. Had he not failed as a newspaper editor (ironically because he ‘lacked imagination and had no good ideas’) and gone on to found several spectacularly unsuccessful businesses, the world might never have been introduced to Mickey Mouse. If Isaac Newton hadn’t made such a pig’s ear of running the family farm, his uncle would never have sent him off to Cambridge where he became the world-renowned scholar we’ve all heard of.

If you want to insist that the ‘feedback’ from these pioneers’ early experiences was, ‘You’re a bit rubbish at this so chuck it in and do something completely different’, I can agree with you, but the point was that Disney and Newton benefited from this invaluable input only because they genuinely did fail in the first place. And I mean really failed: the crash-and-burn type of failure, not the sanitised NLP Failure Lite, i.e. the failure-that-isn’t-really-failure sort of failure.

Failure shunted these men unceremoniously towards their destinies. It also proved a gift of sorts for the world’s most successful author, J. K. Rowling, as she freely acknowledged during a commencement address she gave to Harvard students in 2008. She focused on her writing because she had lost everything else. Her marriage had failed, her parents disapproved of her, she scarcely had enough money to keep herself above the poverty line. As a result, with everything else gone, she clung to the one thing she had left. She discovered not only a purity of focus but also a heightened sense of herself. As she put it: ‘Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than I was and began diverting all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.’

But failure is helpful and necessary in its own right, not just as a stepping-stone to ultimate success, as NLP teaches. It shows us who we are and, perhaps more importantly, who we are not. Our failures define us just as surely as our successes do. Failure can be good for the soul – often far better for us than success, which tends merely to inflate our egos and leaves us back on the treadmill scrabbling after new prizes. We need real failure to knock the pretensions out of us and show us our limits. Without failure, what will puncture our bubble of self-delusion, downscale our expectations and put our plans for world domination on hold?

Even scientists sometimes make mistakes ...

Sometimes when this happens, having to rein in our ambitions and work on a more modest scale is not the tragedy we anticipated. It can have unforeseen benefits: what is lost in grandiose breadth is made up for in new depth. By not pushing ourselves to our limits and finding ourselves unexpectedly liberated from our ambitions, we can take time to appreciate, to focus on what we’re doing, to enjoy simpler pleasures. It is very difficult to have true peace of mind when you are constantly striving towards some luminous goal over the horizon, however worthy it may be.

Our inbred fear of failure is often arrogance in disguise. We dread failure because Psychobabble has conditioned us to believe that we can, indeed deserve to be, anything we want. If we let it, failure can teach us a becoming humility, but somehow I don’t think this is the kind of feedback that the NLP crowd is referring to.

The collusion that exists between narcissism and popular notions of success was deftly exposed by a recent comment from Jason Fried, the co-founder of 37 Signals, a Chicago-based web application company. He remarked that obscurity can be a good thing because failing in private removes a large part of the associated fear. This implies that our fear of failure is actually a fear of public humiliation, fear that people will think less of us and that consequently we will think less of ourselves. Maybe we need to get over that?

Although the NLP maxim looks like it offers us a life raft, the refutation of failure is ultimately a denial of ourselves. When we experience failure we recognise that we have been unable to meet goals and standards that we ourselves have set, that we invested in, that we believed were worth something. Since we set the parameters of success in the first place, to refuse to acknowledge failure is tantamount to denying our own reality. When we brush aside the web of values and hopes we have carefully spun as matters of no importance we kill off a bit of ourselves too. Sometimes we need to accept and mourn the death of our dreams, not just casually dismiss them as inconsequential. NLP’s reframe casts us into the role of a widower avoiding the pain of grief by leap-frogging into a rebound relationship with a younger woman, never pausing to say a proper goodbye to his dead wife.

When we demote the consequences of all our actions, including our worst mistakes and transgressions, to mere ‘feedback’ we also risk disengaging ourselves from any meaningful moral responsibility. We place ourselves firmly at the centre. Incoming data from the world becomes relevant only insofar as it is useful in helping us progress towards our goals. In NLP’s self-referential vision of life as a cybernetic loop, other people don’t ultimately matter very much. They are just part of the data stream.

But the distress that our transgressions and mistakes cause other people is not just feedback to help us make more appropriate, adaptive choices in future. In the moral arena, as we are all painfully aware, you absolutely can fail. Is the angry husband who stabs his wife just collecting feedback? Is the rogue trader who defrauds his bank merely gathering information? From mundane, petty acts of spitefulness to acts of mass genocide, our conscience is there to confirm for us that these acts are indeed failures of a fundamental kind, sometimes on a grand scale. To treat the pain of others merely as fascinating information is a symptom of psychopathy.

Rather than distancing yourself from moral failure or treating it as an exercise in data collection or an opportunity to figure out what does or doesn’t work too well in life, it is crucial for our well-being as individuals and as a species that we own these sorts of failures. Rather than rationalising them, we need to let ourselves inhabit them, feel their sting, and allow them to connect us to the pain we have caused. Only when we acknowledge and submit to them can these failures change us and allow us to grow.

NLP wants a world without shame. This may sound appealing, but unpleasant though shame can be, we probably all need a good dose from time to time. It’s definitely okay to make mistakes and mess up and there is always a possibility of redemption. The wise Canadian actress Mary Pickford knew this, and I warm to her definition of true failure as ‘not the falling down but the staying down’. Just as the human tongue has receptors to detect both sweet and sour tastes, we need to learn how to savour both success and failure in their turn. Failure is not just something to be managed away and transmuted into the down payment of ultimate success. Failure is not just feedback, because we are not mere machines. Failure is part of a process that makes us human. As James Barrie, the children’s author, said: ‘We are all failures ... at least the best of us are.’

Given that failure is generally a more plentiful commodity than success, we need to embrace it rather than keep manically trying to beat it off with a stick or hiding our faces from it in terror and shame. When the time comes, as it surely must, let’s make no bones about it. Let’s look each other squarely in the eye and announce to ourselves and anyone who cares to listen: ‘Want to know what I’ve done today? I’ve failed! And what’s more tomorrow there’s a very good chance I may do it all again ...’ Try it for yourself. You might be surprised how liberating it feels.