Women, like men, should try to do the impossible. And when they fail, their failure should be a challenge to others.

Failure as permission for others

There's something we rarely talk about: the specific kind of courage it takes to fail publicly. Most of us are taught to manage risk carefully, to stay within proven lanes, especially if we're stepping into spaces where people are already skeptical of us. But Earhart's point cuts through that logic. She's not celebrating failure itself—she's saying that when you attempt something genuinely hard, the attempt matters more than the guaranteed success.

What makes this surprisingly radical is the second part. Her failure wasn't meant to be a cautionary tale that keeps others small. It was supposed to be a provocation—a signal that the boundary people thought was fixed actually wasn't. When someone tries the impossible and falls short, they've actually proven something important: that the thing is worth attempting, that it's not obviously impossible, that maybe the next person won't fail. We see this play out everywhere now, from women entering fields where they're vastly outnumbered to anyone attempting something their background supposedly disqualifies them from.

The quiet tension here is that most of us are conditioned to hide our failed attempts. We want to show up only when we've already figured it out. But Earhart suggests that your visible, honest failure might be the most useful thing you contribute—not because failure is good, but because it opens a door for someone else.