“Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” Margo Channing (Bette Davis), All About Eve (1950)
This month has been filled with major doses of reality. It seems that each day was riddled with one miserable and disappointing failure after another. Over the course of the month, I’ve become very discouraged and begun to question my choices.
Specifically I’ve struggled with developing my skills at work, being prepared for school, parenting my children, staying healthy – physically and emotionally and setting boundaries with my personal relationships.
I’m not used to failing. My experience is to be really good at everything I do. So, this morning as I was sitting in my bathtub lamenting over all of my recent failures, I decided that there must be a silver lining to this dark and daunting cloud. I decided to do a little research and revisit what it means to fail.
Here’s what I discovered.
First, as a culture we’ve all been taught that failure is something bad. Failure means lack of success. A lack of success means you are no good, a putz, a complete and utter failure. If you are not successful, you are a social outcast. It’s easy to connect the dots on this one.
In fact, the act of failing has just the opposite meaning. Failure means you are learning and growing in your skills and experience. Failure is a desirable state of being. Failure is not a disappointment – Failure Is Success.
Secondly, failure is meant to drive us. As I am demonstrating here, failure is best when it kicks your butt into action. If you can discover the root of your failure you’re half-way to the end point for turning it around in your favor.
Finally, failure is not yours alone. Everyone fails. You are not the President of that Club…everyone gets invited for membership. The difference is how we each choose to deal with our failures.
Here’s what I observe about failure and the people around me.
1. Some of us don’t recognize failure. These people cannot be helped.
2. Some of us poke our head in the sand – which I was very tempted to do. These people won’t look at their failures directly. They look away. Because of this, their failures are always gnawing away at them. These are the people you encounter in your life that are constantly angry, unhappy and depressed.
3. Some of us take failure as a challenge to get back up and try harder, learn more, and expand ourselves. I choose to live here.
Marianne Williamson from Oprah Radio points out that if we look at our failures squarely in the face and figure out what needs to be learned we can absolve and forgive ourselves for not being perfect. The silver lining? After we’ve forgiven ourselves, we can go on to love and create in ways we didn’t know we could before we failed. That’s great stuff! You can listen to her complete podcast by clicking on the Miracle Thought for the Day link under the Oprah Power Link section of this post.
So all I have to say is “Viva La Consolata Querme – a miserable failure in her own right”. “May she continue to fail, over and over again on the bumpy road to success”.
Oprah Power Link:
#1 by Jamie White on November 1, 2009 - 3:56 am
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I can see most of your point here, but you go a little off when you try to argue “Failure is a desirable state of being. Failure is not a disappointment – Failure Is Success. “
Not quite. Failure is not an inherently “desirable” state of being. Trying to speak of it in generalities is silly. Do you think surgeons “desire” more of their patients to die so that they can learn from it, just to name one example? Of course not. And even with less than life-or-death circumstances, it eventually will get ridiculous and farcical to treat every single failure as a “challenge” – your use of the world is understandable and I at least can see the point you're attempting to make, but that very word conjures imagery of competition. And treating life like a constant competition – against the Joneses, against your own body, etc. – is something we as a society focus on and encourage far too much, to the point where it's hurting us.
Rather, the best approach, I find, is to force yourself NOT to be so self-absorbed that it HURTS when you fail… trust me, I know from experience that the smarter and more capable you think you are, and the bigger your ambitions, the harder you hurt when you fail.
To borrow (and significantly paraphrase) Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell's advice from their recent, excellently-researched book “The Narcissism Epidemic”: it's when you focus so much on how great you are and how indomitable you are… that you risk the greatest pain when, like all human beings on this Earth, you eventually meet with circumstances you don't like and which are beyond your control . It's not a good idea to “love yourself”; rather, it's a fantastic idea to have COMPASSION for yourself. That is, don't hate yourself, obviously… but always allow yourself to be humble enough to recognize that things won't always go your way, and that you are not perfect… and that that is not only normal, it's part of the human experience.
We all have talents or skills or positive traits, yes, but we all have faults as well and can make mistakes, simply because we are human. It's not bad to make mistakes… it may be bad to make a particular mistake, but making mistakes is normal, and wallowing in the pain of that mistake's consequences pretty much never helps, anymore than denying the mistake happened. Neither extreme is healthy. You are right about that part, that ignoring or obsessing over rather than accepting a mistake or failure and moving on, is not healthy or helpful. But you leave out the part where being humble helps you recover from failure much better than trying to convince yourself you can do anything, eventually. Always remembering that you have limits (and that it's normal and ok to have limits) actually really helps.
So, while I would agree that we do overemphasize an avoidance of failure, and that the best lessons in life are often learned from failures, I would disagree that every failure should necessarily be treated as a “challenge”; rather, it should be treated as a natural part of life, which can and does happen to everyone. Sometimes there are ways in which failure does require extra effort to recover from and I agree that putting that effort out is generally worth it… but sometimes it's a failure that cannot be fixed, only healed from.
Side bonus: allowing one to think in more “mellow” patterns like this (a “que sera sera”, forgive-and-forget type view) is great for your health (reducing blood pressure, inflammation, etc), and makes you a more pleasant person to be around, which in turn will eventually bring you a happier life again, as people open doors for you, or failing that, provide much-needed support. Too often our culture teaches us to be entitled, detail-obsessed successoholics… when it turns out we're happier and healthier without any of those traits bouncing around in our heads. Especially when we fail.
#2 by Consolata Querme on November 1, 2009 - 6:46 am
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I appreciate your thoughtful comments. Let's keep the discussion going.
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