Everyone fails from time to time. We try to learn from our mistakes and move on, leaving them behind. But one museum is doing quite the opposite. It's a showcase (展示)for failures, both famous and forgotten.
Inspired by the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia, Samuel West, a psychologist from Sweden, decided to make our silly mistakes public. He founded the Museum of Failure in 2017. Now the museum is hitting the road, with a traveling exhibition in Shanghai from Jan 18 to March 17. The Museum will display over 100 "failed" products from big-name companies such as Nokia, Apple and Coca-Cola.
"I really hope you see that these mega-brands (大牌)that everybody respects screw up too," West told The New York Times. "I hope that makes you feel less apprehensive (惴惴不安的)about learning something new."
West's opinion isn't new. The famed German-American physicist Albert Einstein once said, "A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new." This idea has even been embraced (接纳)by big companies in the US. Silicon Valley, for example, is the home of some of the worlds most innovative tech companies. A common slogan is, "Fail fast, fail often."
However, there are reasons for this. The best companies are those that encourage failure, embrace out-of-the-box thinking and allow employees to make mistakes and see what happens, wrote Simon Casuto of Forbes.
This may lead to carelessness and a lack of effort. Some people are skeptical of this so-called "culture of failure". They are worried that if failure becomes "a badge (奖章)of honor", as Wired magazine put it, it may even be seen as "uncool" when someone tries to reduce the risk of failure.
"Sometimes people hide behind failure, when they could have prevented it," wrote Anna Isaac of The Telegraph.
So it's important that you set apart the two kinds of failure — the kind that shows laziness or incompetence and the kind that takes you forward. The key is whether you've learned something from your mistakes.
