It Is Okay to Fail: Finland Has a Day for It
Karl Balloch
Let me tell you something amazing. In Finland, there is a national day to celebrate failure. Yes, you heard it right. Every year on October 13, Finns sit together and talk about the things that went wrong.
It was an interesting thing for me to learn. In my home country, failure was something you hid from others. If you got poor marks in an exam, it would be hard to walk down the street. Uncles would ask questions. Aunties would sigh. So, Finland, a country that gives failure its own day? When I first heard about celebrating failure, I thought, these people are strange.
This interesting event started in 2010 with students at Aalto University. They saw that many Finns are afraid to try new things because they feared failing. So they said, “Let us talk about failure. Let us make it a normal thing.”
I have failed many times after arriving in this country. I have written emails in broken Finnish and received polite, confused replies. I have sat on a train going in the wrong direction.
Failure or making a mistake…
Failure or Mistake can happen to any of us any time. It doesn’t matter how old or experienced you are. Just recently, I was booking a flight online. I saw a super cheap ticket and snapped it up right away, feeling quite pleased with myself. But then, a couple of days later, I checked the itinerary again and my stomach just sank.
It turns out, I had accidentally picked a “self-transfer” option, and to make matters worse, the layover time between the two flights was signifantly short! Personally, I had never done this self-transfer thing before, so honestly, I just panicked. For days, I was constantly worrying, and searching on internet to find tips.
Anyway, the trip went well but it was a proper learning moment for me. After all that stress, I decided to tell my friends about it, reminding them to always, always read every single detail carefully before confirming the buy-buttons. Even now I feel embarrassed and ashamed, thinking about those mistakes.
But what must we remember. Each failure and each mistake leave something behind. After the wrong email, I learned to double-check my words before sending them. After taking the wrong train, I learned to read the signs for the correct platforms. And the self-transfer tickets? This became a big win built on top of one small emabassing moments.
Maybe you are an immigrant reading this, and you feel shy and slow to ask people for help. Honestly, when you first come here, it’s so easy to slip up without even realizing it۔
You might walk straight into someone’s house with your outdoor shoes still on. which is a big no-no here in Finland! Or maybe, without thinking, you’re speaking loudly on the phone while sitting in a rush train, or recording a video in the middle of a quiet public space. And since Finnish social norms are quite different, you might easily ask Finnish friends about their salary, political views, or whether they’re married, are not. These types of questions that feel totally normal to us, but make them super uncomfortable!
These kinds of small social missteps just happen when you’re settling into a new culture. We all learn slowly, step by step.
So what can you do with your mistakes? Remember them for a little while. Note what happened or what went wrong. Ask what you should change. Then write down a few points and move on. Do not carry them in your head for years. Then they become too heavy and slow you down and stop your growth.
Tell someone about your failures, too. Talk to a friend, a teacher, a pastor, a colleague. When I share my failures with my friends, often it happens that a friend carries on add one of his own story. Suddenly, you feel lighter. Shame and embarrassment can not burden you for a long time when you are bold enough to share your failures with others.
And please remember, you are not starting over. You are starting forward. There is an encouraging expression: “Pick something up whenever you fall.” Everything you learned from your last fall makes you wiser.
This October 13,write down one mistake from this year and one positive lesson it taught you. Share it with a friend. Then ask yourself, “What is the next thing I am afraid to try?”
Go and try it. If you fall, Pick something (a lesson) up. Join the Finns celebrating mistakes as someone who has experienced them.
