ONE SIGNIFICANT HALLMARK OF THE AMERICAN DREAM (“pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right) is to never give up hope—never assume that things would not work out. Things always workout and they will again this time around as well. What is implied in this gem of American genius is that it is OK to fail and still keep pursuing happiness. I personally believe that no other country or culture offers a social acceptance of “failures” to this degree. It is this knowledge that “a failure is just another step in the right direction” that enables each of us in this country to take much bigger risks than we would otherwise. It makes us all courageous, innovative, active, and prosperous.

Individually, each of us must learn to adopt this uniquely American trait in our personal lives. Unfortunately, many of us come from a social upbringing where it was necessary to take a “failure not allowed” course of action. We were brought up with constant warnings about how we might fail and therefore we’d better be careful. This applied to even simple actions like carrying a glass of water from one end of a room to the other end in a manner that it does not spill over, or to make sure that the glass is a little less full to avoid the fear of spillage altogether. We have developed ways of thinking and mannerisms that led to safe and failure-proof action items. And of course whenever we did fail, we were punished, physically, verbally or socially.

It is unfortunate that we often propagate this way of thinking to the next generation. Our children—who want to pursue the American dream to the fullest and who see us as a role model of success (or so we would hope) —cannot understand our dichotomy in actions. They are not able to figure out how we were able to pursue risky entrepreneurship while at the same time we nag them to be careful and wary of failures. They struggle to find conceptual clarity—how on one hand we, as business people, are paragons of American success and yet on the other hand, as parents, continue to apply brakes on their dreams and ambitions. We as parents and as Americans owe it to our children that we listen to this dilemma and provide simple answers. We must accept that our old rules and upbringing cannot be copied here. We somehow believe that it is possible to constantly show a risk-free option to our children and yet expect them to have great successes in their future. I believe that nothing can be farther from the truth.

Even in our own case it is easy to forget that most of us came here because we did not like the way we were being brought up. In most case, we decided against our parents’ desires and came to this country to pursue goals the way we wanted them—and not the way our parents outlined or were familiar with. We are successful here because we fought against the tyranny of constant nagging. But we forget this conveniently, and expect our kids to be just like us—without giving them an option of failing. We must stop this if we want the best for our children.

There is another undercurrent that we must face as a community. A lot of our so-called successes materialized because we got really lucky. We happened to be in the right technical professions (engineers, physicians, and scientists) at the right time. There is no denying that we worked hard, took risks at the appropriate times, failed several times and got up again to make one more attempt. But in the end we were lucky. Our children might not get so lucky. They might have to go through the school of hard knocks. They may have to go through more than their expected share of failures before they succeed. They will need to know now that it is OK to fail and yet be able to hope and pursue happiness and that in the end it does happen. Our form of constant careful orchestration of their dreams and ambitions is not going to be immensely helpful to them in the future.

Let us take the same managed risks with our children’s dreams and ambitions that we did with our own business successes. Have them experiment with the knowledge that even if they fail it is perfectly acceptable. Let us provide them with the best support system we can. Let us provide them with the best education we can. But after that let them try to take off on their own. The heights that they can soar to would leave us breathless. And it would make them and us very happy.

Vinod K. Agarwal, Ph.D. founded LogicVision in 1992 and has served as its President, Chief Executive Officer and a director since 1992. Prior to founding LogicVision, Dr. Agarwal was the Nortel/NSERC Industrial Research Chair Professor at McGill University in Montreal and served as a consultant to Nortel Networks Corporation, Hitachi, Ltd. and Eastman Kodak Company for developing their design-for-test/embedded test environment. In 1992, Dr. Agarwal was elected to be a Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to the field of BIST and fault tolerant computing. Dr. Agarwal is a co-inventor of several U.S. patents on embedded technology.