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Failing well

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Happens to be one of the greatest skills I've come to acquire in my time. It helps me retain a level of class, even when things go horribly wrong for me, helps me to cater to all needs when things are out of my scope and helps me just feel overall better about a situation where in reality, I've kind of duffed it.
But what really is Failing successfully? In order to answer that, we need to take a look at what failing unsuccessfully (Hence known as Crashing and Burning) is, and how to avoid it.

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Crashing and Burning

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Is the action of completely giving up on something and moving on. Now hold the phone right there, before people start complaining to me and mentioning how 'They can't possibly of failed that badly, if they simply moved on!'. WRONG. Trust me on this, for I am the fail master. A fail is anything you do wrong. Anything you set yourself up for, which ultimately is never achieved. For example:

Paul wants to make Epic Jim's Adventure (Who wouldn't?)
He sets up his Game design, gets a good team in (Himself the programmer of course, because he wants all the glory!)
He decides, players can have multiple save files!
A frustrating week later, he decides that he cannot possibly manage that, leaves it at one save, and continues with the project.

Would anyone say that he didn't fail there? Even if he did persevere, he still ultimately ended up crashing, but did he burn?
Of course he did! Did nobody notice, the moment Paul couldn't do what he wanted he gave up on it. This is rule 101 of avoiding crashing and burning: Compromise!
Let's look back at our friend Paul, and see what he could of done right:

In between 'A frustrating week later' and 'leaves it at one save', we need to make a few ammendments.

First: Paul goes to the forum! Don't feel bad because you're asking (Or searching!) for help, if nobody asked for help, nobody would learn (Even observing, is asking for help in my book).

Second: If the first option crashes and burns, Paul looks at what he's already got, and decides on how he can make small improvements to it, for example (Although I wouldn't recommend this): Change the save system so that it saves on the clients computers, and teach them how they can easily swap out those save files. That would turn a crash amd burn, in a successful failure.

Lastly: Paul made sure his already huge playerbase is happy, people hate it when they don't get planned updates. There's a hundred different things Paul could do, but he decides to stay in the same functional area, and instead designs a whole new login scheme with easy to use loading and new character buttons. Players are happy, and Paul's winning at failing.

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If one fails at failing, has one achieved a successful failure?

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Interesting philosophical theory there, but in this instance the answer is an outright no. Failing successfully is the foundation of progress, and for me it's completely vital that I utilize it properly whenever I can. Failing successfully isn't only attributed to programming though, you can fail successfully practically anywhere that you find yourself unable to achieve something, a few (fairly random) examples:

I can't scale this wall, but I can paint a picture over it to make it prettier!
I can't beat this boss, but I can learn more about his technique and plan for the next time.
I can't program very good AI, but I can at least make it to the best of my abilities, and make the combat itself intuitive and fun.
I can't X, but I can Y (Where Y is relational to X and beneficial).

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So I urge you all, go out now, go and fail, but fail to the best of your abilities. Compromise!