Hilary Lister has been a quadriplegic for many years. She cannot move any part of her body except her head, and that only in a limited way. But she can talk and think. She set herself the task of sailing single-handedly round the coast of Britain.

The first attempt failed.

Her reaction? “I have learnt so much that I shall make it on the second attempt.”

She did.

Most of us are deeply grateful that we do not have to put up with Hilary’s problems, but we all have challenges in our lives. Failure is neither a test nor a measure; how we handle and recover from it is both.

We are all agreed about the need for good creativity in our frightening and developing world; creativity to handle the disasters that seem to be overtaking the planet; creativity to make proper use of the technical developments that are coming – and coming so much faster than any of us believed possible.

Did you read of the first sensitising artificial hand controlled from the brain?

There are several reasons why we are not as creative as we could be; two of the most important ones concern courage and culture.

Creativity is a function of taking risks, especially the risk of failure. It is one of the most difficult things to do. Our potential loss of face makes us wary about attempting something unless we are virtually certain of success. That makes us quite cowardly; but if we do not risk short-term failure, we risk long-term total failure. We have an excellent term for it in Singapore: kia-su. Kia-su-ism kills creativity.

It is easy to understand the need to try and fail in a laboratory. It is called development, trial and error, experiment and other euphemisms to downplay the simple fact of failure.

We need to look at the whole of our lives as a laboratory, a series of test runs – the end product of which is success but where, along the way, we find many failures. Cricket fans will appreciate the significance of the word, “Test”.

Surely we all want success and we want it all the time? Indeed, but we also know that is not possible. So how should we deal with failure?

My recipe is to evaluate the chances and importance of possible failure before we decide whether to intervene or to allow the lesson to be learnt. In the same way that a good parent allows a child to fall over, scrape the knees, get a bump but does not allow the child to run in front of a moving bus, so we have to reflect on the meaning of the risk we are taking, not just on the extent of it.

Of the dozen or so businesses that I have built in my career, three have failed and the rest have succeeded. Would the other nine have succeeded if I had not had the three failures? I do not think so. My failures in business taught me more about risk taking than my successes. They also taught me about recovery.

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same,” Kipling said. His words were never more needed than today.

The war we are waging in this world is not a war on terror, it is a war on fear, and it will only be won when each of us faces the future with courage, especially the courage to fail. Learning that lesson has been not just about my business career, it has been about my life.

There is still more to learn.

John Bittleston mentors people in business, career and their personal lives at www.TerrificMentors.com