Beauty of Failure

"Thomas Edison tried and failed nearly 2,000 times to develop the carbonized cotton-thread filament for the incandescent light bulb. And when asked about it, he said 'I didn't fail; I found out 2,000 ways how not to make a light bulb'"
~Nicolas Cage as Ben Gates in National Treasure

I have no idea if this is true or not, but it is a cool idea nonetheless, and one I want to talk about.


So somewhere over the past few years, I apparently became good at handstands. It was a gradual process, and I really couldn't point to a time when I couldn't do them and then I could. People have also started to notice, which means I am now getting questions asking for handstand advice.
By a huge margin, the most popular exchange I participate in is the following:
"Hey, what can I do to get better at handstands"
Do handstands...
"Are there any exercises that I can do to get better?"
Yeah, there are. They are called handstands


Handstands are a delicate balance within your body. You have to align everything just right so that everything is right where it needs to be so that all forces cancel and you are left perfectly still atop your hands. Moving your body through the air in a handstand is much like writing. Incredibly small moves can create large consequences, and precision is required. Handstands, as with writing, comes in personalized form - everyone does them differently. If you don't write for a while and then write an essay, your hand is going to cramp up because those muscles are not getting used. With handstands, your muscle memory is what keeps you up, not conscious thought, and so if you don't keep training your muscles, they will fail you.


There are some things in this world which are irreducibly complex, and handstands are almost one of them. You can do headstands and other smaller handbalancing tricks, and that will teach you what alignment feels like, but you are honestly better off doing that with handstands against a wall. In the end, the only way to learn how to extend through your arms and legs at the same time and to find a place where everything just settles in, is to fall a couple thousand times.


The idea is this. For any given goal, there are a large number of wrong answers (possibly infinite) and a smaller number of correct solutions. If you continue to attempt over and over and over again, and if you make sure to try to avoid making the same mistake more than once, you will eventually, in theory correct every single possible mistake you are making until you get it right.


We are just such a society that likes easy answers. I know. I am a math major - and wolframalpha is my best friend, and as my math teacher said "mathematicians are lazy." But more than easy answers we like success. That makes sense to me. I get that. Success is good, it makes us feel good and it means we have done something. This is why we as students (and as people) are taught that a good strategy for problem solving is to break the problem up and do different pieces at different times, or just to set small goals for ourselves in a long procedure. In general, this is one of the best advices I can give people. But not for circus. In circus, you have to just go. You have to know the idea, and you have to do it, and do it, and do it until you figure out what works. Because unlike math, or literature or many other worthwhile pursuits, circus has a handwriting aspect to it. Two people doing a math problem could very easily obtain the same solution through the same means, and it is likely the more simple the problem is. And someone can show you, and you can repeat exactly what they did. But with circus, as with writing, your body is unique. You and you alone have knowledge of how it works, and so you can imitate, but you cannot duplicate, what you see in others, and in learning from them, you are forced to develop your handwriting. 


So try a different approach. Just take your problem, and fail a few thousand times, and when you finally get it, it will be just about the best thing ever.