Anne Morrow Lindbergh and the Courage of Failure
Anne Morrow Lindbergh was one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated writers, yet she remains something of an enigma to modern readers who know her primarily as the wife of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. Born in 1906 into privilege—her father was a prominent diplomat and banker—Anne herself was a remarkable figure whose accomplishments were frequently overshadowed by her husband’s fame and, tragically, by the kidnapping and murder of their infant son in 1932, one of the most sensational crimes in American history. Despite these circumstances, Lindbergh carved out her own distinguished career as a pioneering aviator, author, and philosopher of human relationships. Her quote about courage and failure emerged not from a moment of success but from a lifetime of navigating profound loss, public scrutiny, and the persistent struggle to define herself beyond her circumstances.
Lindbergh’s observation about the equivalence of courage in success and failure likely came from her 1955 bestselling book “Gift from the Sea,” a slim but profound meditation on women’s lives, relationships, and personal fulfillment that she wrote while staying alone on an island. The book became a modern classic precisely because it addressed the quiet desperation many people—particularly women—felt trying to balance competing demands on their attention and identity. In this context, her reflection on courage takes on particular poignancy; she was writing about the courage required simply to try, to experiment with new ways of living and being, regardless of whether those experiments yielded the results one hoped for. The quote captures her belief that society often celebrates only visible success, while the internal fortitude required to risk failure goes largely unacknowledged and unrewarded.
Before becoming a writer, Lindbergh was an accomplished aviator in her own right, though this aspect of her life is frequently downplayed in popular accounts. She learned to fly as a young woman and served as a navigator and radio operator for her husband during long-distance flights, including a record-breaking journey from North America to China in 1931. She was, in essence, a co-pilot in both aviation and adventure, yet history primarily remembered her as accompanying her famous husband rather than as an equal partner undertaking dangerous pioneering work. This personal experience of having her achievements diminished by association likely deeply informed her thinking about courage, failure, and the importance of simply attempting something meaningful regardless of recognition. She understood intimately how attempting something difficult—whether an untested transatlantic flight or a personal reinvention—required tremendous courage whether it ended in triumph or catastrophe.
The context of the 1950s and 1960s, when Lindbergh’s most influential writing emerged, also shaped her perspective. Post-World War II American society was intensely focused on measurable achievement and visible success, particularly for women entering the workforce in new numbers. Lindbergh’s gentle but insistent argument that courage itself—the willingness to try, to risk, to fail—had intrinsic value was almost revolutionary. She was suggesting that a woman who attempted to balance motherhood, marriage, and meaningful work, even if she “failed” by conventional measures, was exhibiting the same courage as someone who achieved visible success. This democratization of courage, making it accessible to ordinary people in their everyday struggles rather than the province of famous explorers and adventurers, proved deeply resonant.
Interestingly, Lindbergh’s philosophy of accepting failure as a necessary component of a courageous life contrasted sharply with the mythology surrounding her own life. She lived in an era and a marriage where failure was heavily scrutinized; every mistake or misadventure involving her or her family was fodder for newspapers and gossip. The kidnapping of her son was treated as a spectacular public tragedy, and she endured not only private grief but intense public judgment and curiosity. Her ability to develop a philosophy that honored attempted-but-failed efforts while living in such a spotlight suggests a remarkable psychological resilience. She was not writing from a position of having successfully navigated life’s challenges, but rather from the midst of ongoing struggle with how to live meaningfully despite setbacks and heartbreak.
The quote has resonated particularly strongly with modern audiences because it addresses a fundamental human anxiety: the fear of failure. In our contemporary culture of endless self-optimization and social media performance, where people curate highlight reels of their successes, Lindbergh’s assertion that failure itself is courageous strikes a countercultural note. Therapists and life coaches frequently cite her words when encouraging clients to take risks, pursue passions, or recover from setbacks. The quote has become something of a comfort to entrepreneurs, artists, students, and anyone attempting something difficult, offering permission to view the attempt itself as worthy regardless of outcome. In this sense, her words function almost as a corrective to our winner-take-all mentality, suggesting that the distribution of courage is more democratic than we typically assume.
What makes this quote particularly powerful is its implicit challenge to our metrics of success. Lindbergh is not suggesting that failure and success are equivalent in outcome or that trying and succeeding produce identical results—clearly they do not. Rather, she is making a subtler and more profound argument about the internal resources required to attempt something difficult without guaranteed success. She recognizes that the person who tries and fails must overcome not only the practical challenges of the task but also the psychological weight of that failure, the disappointment, and the temptation to never try again. In this way, such a person may actually require more courage to persist in the face of setbacks