Failure is a Data Point

 

Stand-up comedians are some of the bravest people around. Their craft involves standing in front of an audience, just you and a microphone, baring your soul and hoping you get a few laughs. Indeed, many comedy clubs are tough crowds, eager to heckle someone off the stage and quick to smell blood in the water when someone is floundering. 

Failure is an essential pathway to success for the stand-up comedian. A good joke never arrives fully formed, but rather needs to be told 100 different ways, the first 99 times bombing and yielding you a torrent of boos. A whole set, let alone one good enough for its own special, therefore involves an almost unimaginable amount of bearing failure. 

This is not an unfortunate byproduct of success, like medicine that is good for you but happens to taste like crap. It is in fact a necessary ingredient in getting to success. For without failure, the comedian doesn’t know how to change the joke so that it will land. As one stand-up comedian said on a podcast I recently listened to, “failure is a data point.” 

I firmly believe that success in life is the same as success in stand-up comedy. You have to want to accomplish something. And you have to be willing to bear many data points in the form of countless failures, in some cases quite painful and public in nature. Putting those two things together, that means you have to want to accomplish something enough that you are willing to bear many failures. 

Failure is hard for a kid in 2025. Nobody likes to fall on their face. Very rarely do we see the people we admire fall on their face. Young people desire success no less strongly than past generations, but they have very little support in the hard parts of the journey to success. 

Which is why good parenting is so important. Are we the kinds of parents who, day in and day out, are helping their kids believe at their very core that no matter what happens in life they are loved and accepted by their parents? Are they seeing in how we live our lives a humble acceptance of failure, an embrace of the painful process of going through failure to get to success? 

I fall short on all these things. I will extend myself grace that I do have my good moments. And I will hope our kids also extend themselves grace, to fail over and over again as they stumble towards success.