I was recently in Sydney meeting with Australians looking to buy property here in New Zealand. Whilst I was there, I managed to sneak in a couple of days at a leadership conference, where one speaker in particular left me thinking about something that had nothing to do with property.

Steven Bartlett, the entrepreneur behind The Diary of a CEO, was among the speakers. His podcast sees him sit down with some of the world’s most successful and influential people to talk about their lives, careers, setbacks and successes.

One thing he spoke about really stuck with me: within his business he has a team whose job is essentially to experiment and fail.

Their performance isn’t simply measured by how many things they get right. Their KPIs include the number of experiments they run and, importantly, how many of those experiments fail.

Imagine that a team being encouraged to fail. It goes against the way most of us are wired.

Growing up, at work and in life generally, failure is something we tend to avoid. We don’t like getting things wrong, being rejected or looking foolish.

Often, rather than risk failing, we simply don’t have a go. We don’t apply for the job, pitch the idea or try something new because we might fail.

You see the same thing in sport. When the fear of failure starts to creep in, people stop taking risks, they become more conservative and suddenly find themselves under pressure.

That made me think about Roger Federer, arguably one of the greatest tennis players of all time. He won only about 53% of the points he played, yet he won 20 Grand Slam titles and around 82% of his matches.

If you judged Federer on every individual point, he “failed” almost half the time.

But tennis doesn’t work that way. You lose a point, pick up your racquet and play the next one. That’s not a bad metaphor for life: losing one point doesn’t mean you’ve lost the match.

That’s why Bartlett’s approach struck me. What if, rather than measuring ourselves by how few times we fail, we also measured ourselves by how often we’re prepared to have a go?

This got me thinking about my kids. I have two daughters, aged six and four, and one of them happens to be a bit of perfectionist. She can be reluctant to try something if she thinks she might not be good at it.

We spend so much time teaching children how to succeed, get good grades, win the race, get the answer right and be the best. But perhaps we don’t spend enough time teaching them how to fail?

So, we’ve started a little game in our family. We talk about how many times we’ve failed during the day, then we compare. Sometimes Dad wins, sometimes one of the girls wins and we celebrate it.

And I’ve noticed a change. My daughter is becoming more willing to have a crack at things she might not immediately be good at.

For me, that’s far more important than getting everything right.I think one of the biggest risks for our children isn’t that they’ll fail, it’s that they’ll become so afraid of failing that they stop trying.

We see the successful business, not the ideas that were abandoned. We see the athlete on the podium, not the thousands of times they got it wrong along the way. Failure is often hidden behind success.

As parents, I also wonder whether we sometimes try too hard to protect our children from disappointment. Naturally, we want things to go well for them as we don’t want to see them upset.

But if we remove every obstacle and every opportunity to fail, we also take away the opportunities to build resilience.

Our kids are going to fail regardless of how much we try to protect them. They will miss out on teams, lose competitions, make mistakes, they’ll have ideas that don’t work and we can’t stop that happening, but we can make sure they aren’t terrified when it does.

So, in our house, we’re keeping score. The winner isn’t the person who failed the least, it’s the person who was brave enough to try something, got it wrong, learnt from it and had another go.

If my daughters grow up understanding that failure isn’t something to be ashamed of, but simply part of learning and growing, I’ll consider that a pretty good lesson to have passed on.

  • Hamish Walker is a former National MP and director-salesman of Walker & Co Realty, Queenstown. He writes the Walker’s Words column for the ODT.