I'm Going To Fail And So Are You
“Our mission was called ‘a successful failure,’ in that we returned safely but never made it to the moon.” Jim Lovell, as played by Tom Hanks, Apollo 13
I have a lot of sayings posted on my desk that help keep me motivated and moving forward even on bad days. Today’s blog is about one of them. Now to be fair, if I write this blog long enough, I’ll probably end up blogging about every single one. This one, though, is special to me and one of my absolute favorites. Sadly, I honestly don’t remember exactly where it came from…
It reads simply, “Every day of my life.” That’s the beginning and end of it. Short and sweet but for me it’s packed with meaning. I’ll get to that in a second. Over the years, many people have asked me what the quote means, since it’s pretty ambiguous. And when I’ve told them, more than one person has said they think it’s really depressing…
What that saying reminds me is that every single day of my life, I fail. I fall short. I screw up. Maybe you think it sounds negative, and I can see where you and the others are coming from on that. Admitting that you will fail everyday seems a lot like giving up. For me, it has the opposite effect because it’s a reminder that I am going to fail and that’s okay. There’s nothing I can do about. I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. I have issues… plenty of them, actually.
Yet in the midst of all that failure, my career has been very successful. Heck, I wouldn’t even say in spite of it, I would say because of it. My failings and bad decisions throughout life have brought me to this very moment and while we don’t always see that when it’s happening, it’s very true.
Soren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Here’s a great example. Many years ago when I received my bachelor’s degree, I was working as a manager at a local bagel shop. The week after I graduated, I gave my notice and left my job two weeks later. Why? Because I wasn’t going to work at a bagel shop with a college degree. I was too good for that. Yes, I get that I sound like a total jerk… and that’s frankly because I was being a total jerk.
I like to think I have grown a little bit since then. Anyway, my fiancee was not too pleased with me up and quitting, and reminded me that my neither bachelor’s degree nor my rugged good looks were going to pay the rent on their own. So I took a job mowing lawns for the summer with my uncle. Honestly, it was a great job and a great time really getting to know my uncle. End of the season comes and I needed a new job, so I went to a temp agency. The agency placed me at a mortgage company where I stayed for almost 12 years. That gave me the experience to move to another company, where I learned about coaching. And now, 5 years later, I’m a full-time coach.
So one stupid decision — a failure of judgement — landed me here doing my dream job. That’s pretty awesome.
How about you? Do you fail everyday? Spoiler alert: You do. Whether you want to admit it or not. It’s okay. Failure is great. It’s freeing and it’s useful. Of course that’s only the case if we learn from our failures. We have to be willing to use those failures as building blocks to get ourselves further down the road of success in this life long journey.
Next time you fail at something, which will likely be soon after you read this, stop and take a moment and soak it in. Ask yourself what you can learn from it. And these don’t have to be big grandiose failures. They can be as simple as losing your patience with a coworker or your kid, still even in those little moments of weakness there’s a lesson to be learned.
The trick to learning from those moments is actually pretty simple. It just requires you to be mindful, pay attention and notice the things around you.
For better or worse, I tend to be an emotional person and it turns out to be really useful in having mindfulness. When I fail, I take the moment to think about how I feel or how the others in the situation seem to feel, and I try to burn that into my memory. Connecting the failure with actual emotions helps me to make it more tangible.
When it comes to being mindful, another thing that can help is to start taking notes about your failures and your successes. Jot down what you think were the key driving factors in the outcomes you observed. After a while, you may be able to start connecting the dots on what behaviors and tactics seem to correlate to different types of failures and successes as well.
Now you just need to decide this if strategy will work for you or if something else might work better. But in the meantime, go forth and fail. You’re going to do it anyway, likely even on your best days. Now make sure that just like our pals on the Apollo 13, you’re a “successful failure.”
-Jason