ad it not been for failure, humankind may never have known the magnificent Audubon bird paintings that gave rise to the Audubon Society, the inspiring music of Handel's Messiah or the electric light bulb.

It was only after John James Audubon's business failed in 1819 that he began traveling and painting birds. George Frederick Handel unleashed his creative genius after a night of deep despair over his failure as a musician (he lived in poverty and had suffered a stroke). And Edison is well known for his 1,000-plus failed attempts before creating a workable filament for his electric light bulb.

The world landscape is strewn with such stories of success rising from the ashes of failure. Yet failure tends to strike fear in our hearts like nothing else. There is so little tolerance for it throughout our culture, especially in business and government. The pressure is tremendous to get it right every time, to be in control, to succeed and win—always.

But because we are human, we cannot help but fail. We suffer from failed relationships, failed parenting, failure at work, failure in health. And when we do fail, the wounds may penetrate so deeply that we begin to make safe choices, to settle for less than we really want, less than our best and boldest selves can do, out of fear of failure.

What would it be like to cast failure in a different light, to take it out of the darkness of disgrace and guilt, to remove the feeling of "disaster" associated with failure, to look for what it tells us about our well-being and our conduct in life? What if we could see failure—in our work lives, in our personal lives—as an essential part of the path of creation? What enormous amounts of energy would be freed up? And for what?

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat," said Theodore Roosevelt.