The Last Mistake was a sort of monument to the failure of human artifice at critical moments; its walls were covered in a bewildering variety of souvenirs, each one telling a visual tale that ended with the verdict ‘Not quite good enough.’ Above the bar was a full suit of armour, a square hole punched through at the left breast by a crossbow quarrel. Broken swords and split helmets covered the walls, along with fragments of oars, masts, spars, and tatters of sails. One of the bar’s proudest claims was that it had secured a memento of every ship that had foundered within sight of Cammorr in the past seventy years.
– Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora
A few years back I was in Vermont for a conference and I took the chance to visit Ben&Jerry’s Ice cream factory there. Outside they have a Flavor Graveyard with a tombstone for every flavor that did not sell very well. What I really like about this is that they dare to show people all their failures and in some way celebrate them. I wonder how we can change our thinking around all our failures and be proud of them instead? Failing means that we dared to try something that we were not quite capable of yet. That we pushed our boundaries and hopefully learned something new from the experience.