The cone of shame doesn’t always fit
I had a failure when I was recording my Bad Joke Friday video which came out on March 24th, 2023 (Hope you’re a fan of my Bad Joke Friday videos. You can find them on Instagram and Facebook. Search for zainmackeycoaching.) I was trying to tell a stupid joke about a dog getting arrested for having too many barking tickets.
Instead, I said, “too many barfing tickets.”
I lost it on camera. I think that video and the joke are much funnier for the failure. Instead of re-filming, I left it. Why? Sometimes your mistakes are more brilliant than what you were searching for in the first place. There are countless examples of people who were trying to create one thing and stumbled on another. Things as varied as the Slinky which started out as part of a meter for battleships and Penicillin that was a research failure until the scientist noticed it was killing all the mold in the discarded petri dish.
Artists, scientists, cooks, homemakers, kids: you don’t have to be a genius or even an adult to make a happy discovery by accident. What you do have to recognize is that not every failure is a failure. True, for the big stuff, failure can be a mean little devil that leaves an emotional wound and makes you doubt yourself, your abilities, and your will to continue. All the more reason to embrace that failure, learn from it, use what you can and start over. Failure can also be accidently funny like it was for me in that video. My mistake didn’t cause any lasting change in the world, but it might have made someone who was feeling low laugh. And that’s a successful failure in my book.
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