Congratulations, you've failed!

At least Nicole Kidman has good grace, even if she doesn’t give good Grace. In the face of guffawing critical annihilation — film writer Peter Bradshaw damned the new biopic Grace of Monaco, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival two weeks ago, as ‘so awe-inspiringly wooden it’s basically a fire risk’ — Kidman appeared the very model of composure throughout. ‘I like to walk a high wire in my career,’ she told the BBC. ‘If I worked in the circus, that’s where you’d find me.’ Whoever championed The Weinstein Company film to open Cannes (and the board had presumably seen it) was setting up Kidman the trapeze artist for a fall of Icarus proportions.

This is not the only high-stakes belly flop in recent weeks. Gary Barlow has been knocked off his briefly held national hero pedestal, not only for another failed solo album — sorry, Gary — but for being accused of tax avoidance, with calls that he be stripped of his OBE. Then, on 14 May, two prominent female journalists, Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, and Natalie Nougayrède, editor-in-chief of Le Monde, were ousted from their posts. Rumours circulated that Nougayrède’s ‘Putinesque’ leadership style was deemed unbefitting of a woman, and that Abramson was sacked after complaining that she was paid less than her male predecessor, although there are counter-reports that her abrasive management style had lost her the support of the newsroom, despite the fact that the paper had won eight Pulitzer Prizes under her tenure. Whatever the reasons for the bloodbath, they cannot fail, like Barlow, to feel the sting of being publicly criticised.

But hold that nervous breakdown. The concept of failure is itself being reappraised and rebranded. The F-word is no longer a dirty one; nor need its fallout be cataclysmic. There’s currently an extensive reading list of self-help books for bruised and battered egos, including Think Like a Freak by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, authors of the megaselling Freakonomics, a sideways look at matters financial and cultural. ‘Civilisation is an aggressive, almost maniacal chronicler of success. This is understandable — but might we all be better off if failure carried less stigma?’ they write in their new book, which gathers together examples of ‘iconoclastic’ thinking that extol the virtues of admitting defeat. It’s important to say ‘I don’t know,’ they advise, ‘for until you can admit that you don’t know it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need,’ and appreciate the value of quitting ‘because you can’t solve tomorrow’s problems unless you are willing to abandon today’s dud’.

The blessing of failing is, indeed, the subject du jour. Malcolm Gladwell devoted his latest pop sociological treatise, David and Goliath, to the advantages of setbacks. He expounds on the benefits of the young shepherd’s lack of physical prowess and experience in close combat, which allowed him to slay the short-sighted, immobile hulk, at what would have been steep odds at the bookies, and draws attention to the surprisingly high number of successful entrepreneurs who are dyslexic, arguing that finding ways around the condition in their childhood contributed to their achievements in business.

Our primal fear of failure, reinforced from an early age in the pass-or-fail culture of the school system, hangs over our careers and relationships. But we are fighting against the inevitable says Megan McArdle, author of The Up Side of Down. Failure will touch all of our lives, in some shape or form, at some point. ‘Since we cannot succeed by simply not failing we should stop spending so much energy trying to avoid failure or trying to engineer it away,’ she writes. ‘Instead we should embrace it smartly.’

There are indicators that we are beginning to do this. In Mistakes I Made At Work, Jessica Bacal examines the learning curves of 25 successful women, including Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Anna Holmes, the founder of Jezebel.com, whose uplifting gems include: ‘Whether you get promoted or not, whether you’re part of the “cool kids club” or not — these things are not indicative of your worth.’

In science, McArdle points to the Journal of Errology, launched in 2012, which invites researchers to post their ‘unpublished trials and errors, futile hypotheses, shortfalls, false starts’, and the recent TED talk Doctors Make Mistakes, which was shared over a million times. A new mood is slowly emerging: an urge to abandon our prevailing puffer-fish-style bravado in the face of almighty cock-ups, and solemnly reflect on, rather than bury, our mistakes.

‘Failure is important in part because of the recession,’ says McArdle. ‘But also because people sense that the institutions that used to support us through failures — marriage, family, church, civic groups — have badly eroded.’ With the estimated divorce rate currently at 42 per cent in Britain and rising, dealing with the failure of a relationship is also highly likely, if not a dead cert. As a result, the concept of breaking up has received an image overhaul: it’s no longer an unmitigated personal disaster that heaps shame upon us, but more the end of an era. In the celebrity sphere, this was pioneered by White Stripes musician Jack White and the British model Karen Elson, who threw a divorce party to celebrate the end of their marriage in 2011. This positive rebranding was furthered by the announcement in March by Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay’s Chris Martin that they had decided to ‘consciously uncouple’ after ten years of marriage, closely followed by pictures of them and their children on holiday in the Caribbean. It’s all about how you spin it.

And talking of ‘spin’, James Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes of his revolutionary bagless vacuum cleaner before he hit on the idea for cyclonic separation. ‘By the time I made my 15th prototype, my third child was born. By 2,627, my wife and I were really counting our pennies. By 3,727, my wife was giving art lessons for some extra cash,’ he once said. ‘These were tough times, but each failure brought me closer to solving the problem.’ The late Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple after the disastrous sales of his now-forgotten Lisa computer. ‘I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me,’ he said in Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography. ‘The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life...’

There is a certain glory to be had in the way we handle failure. Look at Jill Abramson, who only the week after she left the NYT was due to give a commencement address to some new graduates. Did she cancel? Of course not. Instead, she told them this story: ‘Very early last Thursday, my sister called me and she said, “I know Dad would be as proud of you today as he was the day you became executive editor of The New York Times.” I had been fired the previous day, so I knew what she was trying to say. It meant more to our father to see us deal with a setback and try to bounce back than to watch how we handled our successes. “Show what you are made of,” he would say.’