My school had seventeen clubs and none of them were for students who failed things. We had clubs for debate champions, coding prodigies, and varsity athletes. We did not have a club for the kid who bombed the math olympiad, the girl who quit band after three weeks, the sophomore who tried robotics and cried in the parking lot.

I was that sophomore.

After I quit robotics — publicly, embarrassingly, in front of the team — I went home and sat with the particular shame of someone who had believed in themselves and been wrong. I've since learned this is called "ego depletion" in psychology. At the time I just called it Tuesday.

The idea for the club came from a question: what if failure had a room?

I called it the "Experimental Projects Lab." The name was deliberately vague. The real purpose was a safe space to try things that might not work. No expectations of output. No trophies. No presentations to the school board. Just a Wednesday afternoon and a budget of $200 and whatever you were too afraid to try anywhere else.

In its first semester, 34 students showed up. Two of them went on to found their own startups. One wrote a novel. Twelve others, by their own accounts, learned how to fail without quitting.

That last number is the one I'm most proud of. You can teach skills. Teaching someone they're allowed to be a beginner is harder.