Falling in Love with Failure
Thunk.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Crash!
As I meditate peacefully on my back porch, I am listening to the sounds of failure in my living room. My daughter has spent this morning, like so many other mornings, trying to learn to juggle. She can manage two balls easily, but that third one still proves elusive.
I am 100% certain that she will figure it out, and so is she. Why? Because, by the age of four, my daughter had learned a lesson that took me 10 times as long to master:
You cannot succeed at something if you can’t tolerate plenty of failure.
My daughter is good at a LOT of things. People always comment on how talented she is. But they don’t see the relentless behind-the-scenes work that she puts in to get there. They don’t understand all the failure she tolerates on her way to success. The hundreds of falls on her head until she perfected her back walkover. The skinned knees and bruised elbows while she learned to ride a two-wheel bike at the age of four. The hours in the pool learning to eggbeater high enough to earn the solo spot on her artistic swimming team.
She is willing to fail more than any person I’ve met because once she decides she wants something, she refuses to allow failure to get in her way. Persistence and determination are her guiding principles.
When I was in elementary school, I was in awe of the girls on the playground with their perfect cartwheels. I decided I wanted to learn. So in privacy of the hidden room created by the overgrown weeping willows in my front yard, I got to work. How hard could this be?
My first attempt, I barely got my feet off the ground. My second attempt, I managed a little hop. My third attempt resulted in that same little hop.
That was it. I gave up. Clearly, I had tried my best and I just wasn’t cut out to do cartwheels.
This turned out to be a pattern that followed me through to adulthood and plagued me when I opened my own business: Try something once or twice, and if it doesn’t work, give up.
Not the recipe for success in cartwheels or business, I can see that clearly now.
See, somewhere along the way, I had picked up this notion that failure was bad. Something to be ashamed of. Something to be hidden from the world. Making a mistake could cause trouble that I didn’t want.
Better not to try at all than to try and fail. In fact, the best possible scenario for me was to have a big dream, and then find a great excuse as to why I couldn’t even try at all. I’d be happy to share that excuse with anyone who wanted to hear it (which was almost no one, so I ended up sharing with people who really didn’t want to hear it.)
If you picked up the same faulty notion that I did somewhere along your trail, I invite you to learn to embrace failure for the lessons it brings. You have to fall on your head a lot if you are going to learn to do a back walkover, and you have to be just as willing to fall on your face a few times to reach your business goals.