Failing Forward

By: Sallie Hardy

Last night, our class had the opportunity to speak with Morgan Radford who is possibly the coolest and funniest person I have ever met.  Radford works as a correspondent for NBC News, and she described herself as constantly living out of her suitcase and having few close friends. 

While talking to us, she highlighted stories of her failure and rejection. After attending Harvard, she lived in Atlanta and began to build her video reel. She was rejected from Columbia graduate school and instead went to South Africa on a Fulbright Scholarship. After that, she began re-teaching herself the art of journalism, and she was eventually accepted into Columbia. 

Radford told us many more stories about being rejected and how hard it was for her. Our class was curious to know how she kept moving forward instead of settling or giving up. Radford said her father would tell her to “fail fast, fail often, and fail forward.” Wow. Dealing with failure is difficult for anyone, but her father seemed to crack the code: fail forward. 

I started thinking about the concept of failing forward as it pertains to the presidential candidates. All politicians have their flaws (and they often have many). Imagine if they were able to use those failures to progress themselves forward instead of allowing those failures to hurt their political careers. Politicians should allow failures and mistakes to shape future policies and actions by using these failures as stepping stones to something better. 

And we, the public, should allow them to do this. 

Sunday night, many people from our class attended a Pete Buttigieg town hall. Overall, he was well-spoken, professional, and just so smart. The way he can speak WITH an audience instead of AT an audience is an amazing skill. I saw many supporters in tears as they clearly felt everything he was saying. Although he was able to bond in this way with his supporters, he definitely has people who dislike him. Near the beginning of the town hall, there was a protest that interrupted his well-rehearsed speech. While many of the protesters yelled “Black Lives Matter”, one man had a conversation with Buttigieg. At first, the man was spewing some inaccurate facts, and Buttigieg did call him out on this. Buttigieg then bent down to him, setting down his microphone to have a private conversation. Although I don’t know what they said to each other, I can only hope it was helpful rather than rash words from both sides. 

Buttigieg continued his town hall as normal once the protesters were escorted out, and he did say that he wants to have meaningful and constructive conversations with his protesters. Audiences rarely get to see a true back and forth dialogue between candidates and protesters, and people are often unwilling to allow candidates to grow and change as they gain knowledge and experience. We should allow Buttigieg to acknowledge and use his past failures as a way to talk about what he will do to help people of color. He needs to be completely honest and transparent about his mistakes in the past to fail forward.