No Matter Try Again Fail Again Fail Better

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The Stunning Success of "Fail Improve"

How Samuel Beckett became Silicon Valley'southward life double-decker.

Samuel Beckett, tennis guru

Photo illustration by Juliana Jimenez Jaramillo. Photo by Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images.

Stanislas Wawrinka'south defeat of Rafael Nadal in the final of the Australian Open up last weekend was a milestone not but in the career of a 28-year-sometime Swiss tennis player only also in the posthumous life of ane of the xx^thursday century's nearly unswervingly pessimistic writers. This is the beginning time a Grand Slam championship has e'er been won by a player with a Samuel Beckett quotation tattooed on his body (barring some unexpected revelation that, say, Ivan Lendl got himself a Waiting for Godot–themed tramp postage stamp before beating John McEnroe in the 1984 French Open up last). The words in question, inked in elaborately curlicued script upwardly the length of Wawrinka'southward inner left forearm, are these: "Ever tried. Always failed. No matter. Try once again. Fail again. Fail better."

The quotation is from Worstward Ho, a late, fragmentary prose slice that is one of the almost tersely oblique things Beckett always wrote. But those 6 disembodied imperatives, from the text's opening folio, have in their foreign afterlife as a motivational meme come to much greater prominence than the text itself. The entrepreneurial class has adopted the phrase with particular enthusiasm, as a battle cry for a startup culture in which failure has come up to be fetishized, even valorized. Sir Richard Branson, that affable onetime sage of private enterprise and bikini-based publicity shoots, has advocated from on high the benefits of Declining Meliorate. He breaks out the quote about the end of an article about the future of his multinational venture majuscule conglomerate, telling us with feature self-assurance that information technology comes "from the playwright, Samuel Beckett, but it could just as easily come up from the mouth of yours truly."

Only the oddest and most thematically dissonant invocation of the quote I've always come up across—and I'chiliad inclined at this point to go ahead and phone call it a motto—was at the closing session of a major technology conference in Dublin concluding Oct. The stage was shared by Irish Prime number Minister Enda Kenny, Elon Musk (founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX), and Shervin Pishevar (billionaire venture backer, romantic consort of Tyra Banks). The interviewer airtight the talk—the dual focus of which had been Musk's extraordinary career and the part of the tech sector in Ireland's economic recovery—past giving the last word to Beckett: "I call back existence told the Samuel Beckett line, that great line; he said 'E'er tried. Ever failed. No affair. Try once more. Fail again. Fail better.' And that'southward what keeps me going, in many means."

This invocation of Beckett saturday oddly with the chat that had preceded it, concerned as it had been with disrupting market place verticals and wealth cosmos and giving people a shot at pursuing their dreams of success. And it seemed to me to echo like a discordant note confronting the gospel chorus of Cardinal Scream'due south "Movin' On Upwardly," to which the billionaire investors and their new prime ministerial friend left the stage.

I only really became aware of the extent of Fail Meliorate'south meme-ification a couple of years ago, on reading an splendid piece by the novelist Ned Beauman in the New Inquiry, in which he tracks its cool ubiquity from quotation in Timothy Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek to books with titles similar The Complete Idiot's Guide to Dandy Customer Service. "Watching a liturgy from such a gloomy and merciless writer getting repurposed to cheer up mid-level executives," he writes, "is like watching a neighbor articulate out their gutters with a stick they plant in the garden, not realizing the stick is in fact a human shinbone." Until I read Beauman'south piece, I mistakenly thought the line had a fairly niche status as a cliche particular to literary types. I considered it a sort of writerly platitude-in-residence—something you'd likely find propped in postcard form on a novelist's desk or pinned above the head of at least 1 membranous-eyed graduate educatee in whatever given English language section. (I see no signal in hiding the fact that this was my laptop'due south desktop prototype through for the starting time twelvemonth or so of my Ph.D., for what picayune good it did me in the long run.)

But I feel as though I've been coming across the lines everywhere since reading that piece. Wawrinka'south inner arm is but the latest and most prominent venue for their appearance. Note this strenuously twinkle-eyed rendition by Liam Neeson, part of a vague PR initiative by the Irish gaelic authorities to somehow boost the economy by reminding America that we produced both the Waiting for Godot guy and the Taken guy. (I notice it hard to watch this, past the mode, without imagining Beckett on the telephone to Neeson, calmly intoning "I will wait for you, I will find you, and I will impale you.") There'south also an exhibition called "Fail Improve" about to open at the Scientific discipline Gallery in Trinity College Dublin—Beckett'southward alma mater, and my own—described on its website as a showcase of "beautiful, heroic and instructive failures."

What has happened here, I suppose, is that a small-scale shard of a bitty and difficult work of literature has been salvaged from the darkness of its setting, sanded and smoothed of the jagged remnants of that context. This is the procedure past which a piece of writing becomes a quote, a proverb—a linguistic object whose pregnant is readily apparent, useful, and endlessly transferable, like a coin in the currency of wisdom.

Fail Better, with its TEDishly counterintuitive experience, is the literary takeaway par excellence; it'south usefully suggestive, too, of the corporate propaganda of productivity, with its appeals to "think different" or "piece of work smarter" or "only exercise it." And the fact is that these half-dozen telegraphic bursts of exhortation actually work pretty well equally a personal motto, once that sanding and smoothing has been completed. They are also—and this is crucial, though plainly not something Beckett would have had in mind—eminently tweetable; the whole thing comes in at simply 69 characters, which leaves people plenty of room for whatever commentary or prove of approval they might want to append.

The entrepreneurial fashion for failure with which this polished shard fits so snugly is not really concerned, equally Beckett was, with failure per se—with the necessary defeat of every homo endeavor, of all efforts at communication, and of language itself—simply with failure as an essential stage in the individual's progress toward lucrative self-fulfillment. Failure, in the #failbetter sense, is something to be embraced and celebrated, to be approached with a view to understanding how it might almost effectively exist transmuted into success. (Dave McClure, the founder of the 500 Startups incubator, told Fast Company that "the alternate proper name we came upwards with for 500 Startups was 'fail factory.' Nosotros're here trying to 'manufacture fail' on a regular ground, and we think that'southward how you lot learn.")

When I call back most how Beckett'south words have been quotationalized in this way, pressing him into service as a kind of highbrow motivational idea-leader, I detect myself thinking of how his wife Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil reacted to the news of his existence awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969: "Quelle ending!" This isn't to imply that the way in which the Worstward Ho quotation has been "pivoted"—to utilize a phrase beloved of the entrepreneurial champions of the Fail Improve ethos—is any kind of serious disaster for Beckett but rather to illustrate that his attitude toward success and failure was more complex and perverse than this estimation suggests. (Although it's easy to imagine that he might take been rooting for Wawrinka on Dominicus; Beckett was, for all his pessimism, a serious tennis enthusiast.)

Every bit drastically funny as it often is, of course, Beckett's oeuvre equally a whole is famously depression on positive vibes. ("Despair immature and never look dorsum," he one time counseled the young Irish gaelic novelist Aidan Higgins.) The fashion in which these lines take become a standard of the personal boosterism repertoire is superbly ironic, and sort of wonderful in its fashion.

And when you restore the lines to their original context (a reversal that feels almost perverse now that they've come to seem then staunchly pro-business concern and pro-lawn tennis), information technology's difficult to imagine a piece of writing less obviously ripe for the harvesting of uplifting phrases. Worstward Ho, it hardly needs saying, gets steadily less inspirational every bit it goes on. The paragraph that follows the Fail Better lines, for instance, is full of the kind of stuff that would really exist worse than useless as a motivational aid on the tennis court, or anywhere else. "Effort once again. Fail again. Improve again. Or amend worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for skillful. Throw upward for skilful. Go for adept. Where neither for good. Good and all." It will probably exist a while before we see anyone winning a Chiliad Slam title with that tattooed on their arm.

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Source: https://slate.com/culture/2014/01/samuel-becketts-quote-fail-better-becomes-the-mantra-of-silicon-valley.html

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