At Curiosity Club, every quarter, we want to trigger your curiosity… with one word ! And, with our curiosity – this tool with which we can search, discover, get interested in, meet – we are going to break down this word: what it means to us, to you and to all the women that you meet in every Curiosity Club around the world. For the next three months, we want to explore.
FAILURE
“Not such a fun first word, is it ?” Yes, we heard that. Whether it’s related to school, love or work; sports, friendship or business ventures, failure is universal and, frankly, it’s no one’s cup of tea.
Because to fail is first running aground, not navigating anymore, stopping, touching the bottom, banging the little nutshell of one’s life against that sharp piece of rock we couldn’t see through the waves, which we couldn’t get around in the storm… By the way, “to fail” would derive from the Latin word “cautes”, which means “reef”.
Because “check(mate!)” is the word shouted by our opponent when our king – our self ? – gets trapped in a dead end.”
Failure, I never fail to see it in people’s eyes, in society’s eyes, the very society that seems happy to throw us all into a rat race to achieve impossible success.
But we also cannot fail to point out that if sailors anywhere had been terrified of any tiny piece of rock piercing the waves, we would have never discovered the Americas.
We also realized that, had Léonore Baulac not failed, not once but twice, the audition to join the Ballet School of the Paris Opera, and had she not persevered and succeeded at her third attempt, she wouldn’t be the wonderful, incredibly talented, but also down-to-earth, sensitive and humble prima ballerina that we met at Curiosity Club Paris in 2017.
Today, we cannot fail to know, because we’ve watched several talks with “failure” in the title, because we’ve listened to “FailCon” – these conferences about failure that are popping up pretty much everywhere – and, most of all, because we’ve actually experienced it in our lives, that failure also means bouncing back, getting back up, resisting and persevering. That by overcoming our failures, by turning them into learning grounds, knowledge of ourselves, of others and of life, rather than a place where things go to die, we make our lives, our hearts, and our brains brighter, and we grow.
“French society suffers now because it didn’t give enough second chances, at the risk of curbing the audacity of its youth and all the talents that make up the rich patchwork of France”, cried Fleur Pellerin in 2014. “To dare, to fail, to start again: that’s life’s teachings, that’s what drives us forward and makes us improve ourselves.”
We want to delve deeper into this word, to turn it upside down, to tear it apart, with you and with every woman that we’ll meet, together, at the Curiosity Clubs of Paris, Marseille, Lille, Toulouse, Lyon, Rennes, Brussels, Milan, London and Mumbai !
What about you ?
