Failure is a bad word. Failure is what we all strive to avoid. Failure is the opposite of success.
Failure is really having a bad time of it at the moment. It is easy to consider being a failure if you focus on certain specific events and exclude the rest of your life.
So it is time to let failure off the hook for a while, stop being ostracised and welcomed in. “Come on in failure, chill out and have a nice cup of tea†– Yes – I’m English – How could you tell? Without poor old failure we would not have any results at all. Failure is simply a specific result compared to a specific goal. Even when – and if – you consider any person you know, or know of, as a failure if you used a different set of criteria you would find them successful at something. This means as a result of an event, or even any number of events, a failure is very time based, measured usually by the most recent of the events.
So how can one of the most powerful systems of creating and recreating life be such a failure? In any state of change in the biosphere, the system we would refer to as evolution has probably the most amount of failures that any system can have. The result of all these failures though are fascinating and innumerable.
I am not a student of evolution so I have not got any academic restrictions to stop me treating the whole idea systematically. I found I am in danger of looking too deeply into the subject of evolution now considering what might stop me from using it. One such systematic idea is that any change is reversible and reverse evolution is not commonly held, but then again there are always logical and physical restrictions to a system to think of like dropping a plate, once broken the likelihood of all pieces being return to a previous state is unlikely. So I will stick with the systematic view for now unless later some comparison highlights possible asset to it. One such idea was a situation in the mitochondria, in areas of high risk of permanent (think plate dropping) change, that systems have evolved that protect them – a kind of disaster recovery test in the systematic view.
So failure as a result has to be accepted as part of the process and there are clues as to why ensuring it does take place and often is very important.
Failure – my long term enemy, under test conditions will become my friend.