Image via Wikipedia A small reflection about the Importance of failure in life and 7 ways how to manage that. I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. Thomas Alva Edison I have been thinking for a while in the concept of failure and its implications in life, both personal and professional. To have a heart failure is ultimately serious, perhaps lethal but in the end the most terrible thing you can experience is to have a life failure. We live in a world that we can define as a short attention span society. By attention span I mean the amount of time someone can concentrate on a task without becoming distracted and move away without producing. Although some authors, such as Neil Postman in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, believe that the attention span of humans is decreasing as modern technology, especially television, and the web increases I disagree, in effect although the sources of distraction are bigger than ever, on the other hand there are as well more ways of being productive and do a good management of time. Web and technologies can be both a distraction or tools to organize and improve our lives and work methodologies. Ultimately what matters is our capacity to shift from some wrong or negative behavior towards new ways of living better and getting focus in what is important. The same goes for the perception of what is risk taker and what is secure. The path that drives someone to failure can be seen as a tragic fatality or as learning lesson (the 10,000 ways that don’t work of Edison). Passionate by this theme I have been thinking for a long time in this and researching in some key areas how failure impacts my life, my work, my projects, my relations and others. Also In this reflection I have understood ( I have to admit most of the times painfully) that some of my best achievements came most of the times from failure projects or ideas (or ways that did not worked). Thus this text that goes through 7 fast points of reflection where I go through the importance of failure – the feared and terrible experience and concept – perhaps the most thought-provoking theme to read in the present landscape of short attention span and obsession by perfection, success… 1. In a short attention span world, Failure is perhaps the most thought-provoking theme! In a complex time when civilization is reviving itself into a pathologically continuous re-adaptation and disorder(s) of a sort of a short attention span world, failure is perhaps the most thought-provoking theme to look seriously. Why? Picking the tweet of Tim Cohn with the sentence of Bill Gates: “In China, when you’re one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you” one needs to question and redefine the real meaning of success. To have impact or success in a world with 6 billion persons it is about have some kind of voice (and … Continue reading Heart failure or Life Failure and Short Attention Span: 7 x 2 points of reflection