There is a game that is played in a classrooms and conference rooms across the country and the world. It involves just a few items, Tape, Spaghetti and a marshmallow. The idea is in 20 minutes to build the tallest tower possible and put the marshmallow on top.

Now I’m going to ruin the lesson of this for a lot of teachers, but I feel its an important lesson to learn. According to the Junior Achievement PDF about this activity.

“The Marshmallow Challenge is an activity done to help business leaders realize the power and challenges of team problem solving. Thousands of groups have done the activity and there have been some interesting statistics that have come out of these studies.
1. One of poorest performing groups on average are College graduates with Business Majors (an average of 20 inches.) The reason…they have been told that problem solving is a linear solution where you plan, and then execute a plan. They work to the very end, place their marshmallow on top and have either an “aha moment” or more often an “oops moment”.
2. One of the best performing groups is another group of graduates…graduates from Kindergarten. Kindergartners average 30 inches. Why, because they have a natural instinct to prototype. Much like when playing with blocks as a toddler. They start with the marshmallow and build up. Plus they don’t have the natural power struggle within their teams that adults develop.

Imagine that something Kindergartners do better than adults. I bring this up because as we grow up we forget that trying and failing is OK, that its allowed. Many artists and scientists realize this. They sink hours, days, or years into a project and sometimes many times it fails. Sometimes we don’t get the results we want and some times that picture just doesn’t look as good as you wanted it to. But that’s OK. Life is about trying new things, and something we all seem to have forgotten is life is hard.

A few semesters before I was supposed to graduate college I was put in a situation where I failed, I tried it again and failed again. Now based on my earlier post you would assume, “:Nate you tried again and passed right?” Not quite. instead I took these failures and learned that that may not have been the right path for me. I graduated with a different degree and it lead me toward what I do now at Disney.

Every day I encounter people right out of college who, “just want to get on with their lives” They want to move into a well paying job that is based on want they did in college. The truth is a large percentage of people out there are not doing what they got a degree in, but they are happy. Those of us in that situation tried a few things and realized what we spent years working on was not what we enjoyed doing and again that’s OK as long as you learned something from those experiences.

I tell you all this because today’s photo is another one from the Kennedy Space center. This one is of one of the shuttles. It took years of trial, and error to design a craft that could go and come back from space safely. If it were not for the brave men and women that were willing to put everything on the line to try that terrifying experience out we would not have many of the modern marvels we have today.

So my challenge to you is be more child like. try different things and tell your self its OK to fail as long as you learn something from it and keep moving forward, in the end you will be better for it.