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Lately there's been a lot of talk on the theme of failure and how integral it is to success. In a world where peoples' value is all too often determined by lists of accomplishments and tangible success, failing feels dangerous. Who has time to fail? We're all supposed to have started our own businesses/earned our first million/won American Idol by the time we're about twenty, right?

Fear of failure is the theme of the Stockholm Berghs School of Communication's student work exhibition, and in honor of this some respected creative types have shared their thoughts on the value of failure. Brainpickings has a wonderful roundup of videos of these writers, artists, and designers talking about the nobility of failure and what they have learned from their own various failings. I love this one, in which designer Milton Glaser says, "Genius occurs very rarely. So the real embarrassing issue about failure is your own acknowledgement that you’re not a genius, that you’re not as good as you thought you were. [...] There’s only one solution: You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you’re capable of doing, and what you’re not capable of doing." When you're trying to be creative, when you're trying to do anything at all, it's easy to say, "Well, I'm just not good at that so I won't even try," but as we're always telling our kids, how do you know if you don't at least try?

(Watch the entire video, and many more, over at Brainpickings and the exhibition site.)

More on the upside of failure:
3 successes in life only failure can give you
Turn a failure into a success