My dad encouraged us to fail. Growing up, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn’t have something, he would be disappointed. It changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure is not trying. Don’t be afraid to fail.

Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, has repeatedly credited her father’s weekly “failure” question as a formative influence on her entrepreneurial resilience. In interviews and talks about her early life and career—especially when recounting the rejections and setbacks she faced while developing Spanx—she describes a household culture where mistakes were normalized and effort was praised. By treating “trying and failing” as a success condition, her father reframed risk-taking as something to practice rather than avoid. Blakely uses the anecdote to explain how she learned to tolerate embarrassment, persist through rejection, and keep experimenting—traits she later links to building a company from scratch.

The quote argues for redefining failure: not as an undesirable result, but as evidence of initiative. Blakely contrasts outcome-based shame (“I failed”) with process-based courage (“I tried”), suggesting that fear of failure often masks fear of judgment and can prevent learning. Her father’s ritual makes failure a weekly metric of growth, turning setbacks into data and reinforcing that effort is within one’s control even when results are not. The final imperative—“Don’t be afraid to fail”—functions as a practical ethic for creativity and entrepreneurship: progress depends on repeated attempts, and avoiding failure usually means avoiding meaningful challenges.