Failure in a task vs seeing yourself as a failure

Just recounting a story from last night's bible study. I thought it quite profound.

There was a study being done to compare 2 groups of "pot makers".

The first group was termed the "quantity" group. Their job was to make 50 pots. The quality of the pots didn't matter. All they were tasked to do was to make 50.

The second group was the "quality" group. They were tasked to make just 1 pot, but to put all their effort into that one pot to make it as perfect as possible.

At the end of the day, when all the pots had been made, this question was asked-
Which group made the best pots?

Whenever a story like that is told, you always know to expect and unexpected answer. But that doesn't make the unexpected answer any less profound.

Well, in case you haven't guessed, the answer is the "quantity" group.

The "quality" group spent all their time trying to make the perfect pot. Despite this, they still made mistakes.
The "quantity" group on the other hand made such terrible pots at the start, but as they made more and more pots, they learnt from the mistakes that they made with each previous pot and in the end, they produced the best pots!

The bible study was about our approach to failure. So the take home message from this story is that it is alright to fail, to make mistakes. What's important is that we learn from them, pick ourselves up and not allow failure to overcome us.

My take on it is that whilst God allows us to fail in situations and tasks, we are to persevere and learn from the failures. ie. We may have failed, but we are not failures. (if you get what I mean...)