Arvid Tomayko-Peters •• Squish the Squid Productions

In 1965, in his song “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, Bob Dylan sang, quote:

“… There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”

What does this mean?

“… There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”

I’m not sure I exactly know what it means. Maybe Bob Dylan had more than one meaning in mind. But I have a pretty good idea what it relates to. In order to be authentically successful we need to risk failure. We need to give ourselves the room to fail, in order to push the boundaries of our current understanding. Pushing the boundaries of any discipline, whether it be music, art, science or life itself will always involve a venture into the unknown.
All too often society is obsessed with immediate success, obsessed with the ‘bottom line’. Society puts pressure on us to be successful now, to fulfill the bottom line now. But being creative or innovative is not always expedient. There is the possibility, and often the reality of failure. Being original may be painful at times. We may be labeled “losers”, but that’s a risk we must take to do something exceptional. It’s important to allow ourselves, and others the room to stumble, to fall down, to get back up again and push onward. After all, it’s not necessarily the end product that’s paramount, it can be the process that is most important. Take Homer’s Odyssey, for example. Odysseus is a man forced to take a journey to return home. Along the way there are many setbacks. He loses his crew, his boat, he is imprisoned, but what is important is that this adventure defines him. (pause) The safe way is not necessarily the best way.

Each of us has our own area of knowledge and experience in which we are comfortable. The adventure of creativity comes when we try to push out and expand this area, when we explore the unknown. In advanced biology class this year, Mr. Chamberlin talked about a way to look at scientific truth. Think of the perimeter of human knowledge, whether it be your own knowledge, or that of the world, think of it as a circle. There are many people who think we are on the outside of this circle, trying to contract it and close in on a single, infinitesimally small nugget of truth that rests at the center. However, another way to look at it is that we start at the center, on the inside, and expand outward as we gain more knowledge. Maybe the truth is not in the middle, but outside the circle, infinite in scope. To find truth, we must expand the circle, not contract it. We need to draw in other, diverse ideas. We should not forget what is inside the circle, it’s our foundation, but we cannot be confined by it.
Sometimes we want our own success too badly, or are pressured by others to meet the ‘bottom line’. We consider only a portion of the circle of truth, just that part that supports our own opinion and we ignore the rest. This distorts the truth, makes it incomplete, leads to exaggeration, misrepresentation, and intolerance. To be a good scientist, artist, or world citizen, we must consider the whole truth, even if it does not support our own opinion, even if it means that sometimes we must stand naked. Occasionally, we must reconcile and forgive, and in so doing, expand our own circle of truth.
First as babies and small children, then on to elementary school, middle school, high school, and now to a larger world. We, the class of 2003 are ready. It is now our task, our journey to move to the edge of that circle and continue to push its boundaries – to risk failure, to question others’ expectations of us, to open our hearts and minds – and to seek the whole truth.

Thank you.

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