This is a no brainer rule, right? This past weekend, we went to the lake and those without bad knees or other valid excuses, tried to stand on a board the boat was pulling. Those trying fell, and fell, and fell, and fell, and fell, and fell, and failed.

When I was no longer a kid, we went snow skiing. The snow was nice, the weather was great, the instructor told me what to do and I showed him I could repeat what he showed me. Then he taught my wife who struggled to do what he showed her.  She fell, and she fell, and failed.

The moral of the story is not to avoid these kind of experiences. I was so scared of falling and failing that I spent the entire day skiing on the bunny slopes being passed by three year olds. It wasn’t any fun and I never want to go again. My wife though, she fell so much she eventually learned how to ski a little and went up on the mountain to ski and have fun. Despite the falls and the near death experience, she learned from her failure and enjoyed some skiing, unlike me who learned nothing and enjoyed only leaving.

In the business world a culture has developed that failure is not permissible and any failure is met with certain termination and the possibility of never working again. This is the culture into which the author is speaking. The absolute greatest way to learn to do something is to fail in so many ways that you finally can do nothing but succeed. Take investing. I had a discussion this week with someone about investing. Both of us learned the most when we had an investment fail to the point that we couldn’t afford to sell it. Those who have not failed at investing haven’t invested.

One of the many duties of a Christian is to give your own witness. That is to tell your story of meeting Christ and finding your Savior. The great thing about your witness is that it is your story and no one can tell you you got it wrong, except yourself. When we first tell our story, we walk away thinking we messed it up, and we are a failure. It happens to everyone. We didn’t smile, we didn’t look the person in the eye, we didn’t tell them about this part or that part, or we didn’t speak up or whatever. We become better when we walk away determined to do better the next time. When we learn from our failure.

Each of the three water “skiers” eventually learned how to stand up on the board and “ski’. They learned because they failed over and over and adjusted based on what they experienced. They learned from failing. Much of life can only be learned by failing. If you didn’t fail, you didn’t learn.

As a structural engineer, I never wanted to learn from a failure of something I designed. But when I was in school, I made mistakes, and when I was out of school, I made mistakes. My mistakes were found in checking processes set up by those who came before me. They taught me to learn from my mistakes and to not make them in crucial areas that could result in injury or death.

So that key message is to not be paralyzed by fear, but to go out and expect to fail, expect to learn from failure, and experience the joy of learning something that can only be reached through failure.