Failure: the Path to Greatness

"You don't ever forget some of the things we can learn from that season". – Detroit Tiger's 3rd Baseman Brandon Inge, reflecting on Detroit's 119-loss season in 2003. Inge's comments were made right after Detroit clinched their spot in the 2006 World Series.
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There is so much to learn from failure, if we allow it. Failure teaches us, and makes us wiser, stronger and more resilient. More importantly, failure may very well be the ONLY way we can even comprehend certain distinctions about the nature of success.

Failure has different effects on different people. For some, it is to be endured, and if they do, they will be prepared for other challenges life has to offer. For others it is the end of the story. It shuts them down, defines them and leaves them less capable, less confident, less able to handle what life offers. But the greatest benefit of failure is NOT that it is a character building process, or even a learning process. Failure CAN BE a unique, powerful, magical part of long term ultimate success. Maybe it's essential.

When we fail at something, we often feel sad and bankrupt. While it can be an experience that calls forth new strength and vigor, for many people, it is a space to be avoided if possible, and endured triumphantly if one ever suffers the misfortune of finding oneself cast into it. With failure, we are compelled to apologize, figure it out and get out of it as soon as possible!! Too often the experience of failure is demoralizing and embarrassing, leading to fixing and improving.. Too often, our response to failure is to isolate the culprit, which may be a person, an action or a set of circumstances, and then fix/eliminate/redesign that culprit.

But, failure can be an experience that is uniquely and perfectly suited for bold imaginative thinking, thinking that would never see the light of day if not for the failure. Failure is not a problem to be overcome, it is a unique key that unlocks greatness. To buy this concept, you would have to reject the idea that failure means something is wrong. Failure tells us one thing and only one thing it tells us that the whole of what we were doing didn't work the way we were doing it. Based on whatever criteria we are using to measure success or failure at the time, the register points to the failure side of the result. That's it. Every other conclusion we draw about the failure is essentially hypothetical, and mostly a reaction to the disappointment, fear and despair that routinely accompanies failure.

When we experience failure, it's a matter of interpretation what we conclude from it and what we go to work on. But, before one can accurately interpret the implications of failure, there is a bigger issue, and one that is mostly ignored. I call it the "story line". The question that should be asked is, "Does the result register a failure of something, or is it a predictable and/or necessary next step in the story?"

For example, is it a failure for the boxer who gets popped with a left hook, if in getting popped, he saw that his opponent drops his guard in the process? Not if that key discovery then makes it possible for the boxer to knock out his opponent the next time he throws that left hook. In one scenario, the boxer getting hit with a left hook is the whole story, but in a bigger scenario, it's only a critical piece of the whole story. In fact, if one was scripting the story, the "failure" of getting nailed with a left hook might actually be expected and even appreciated, since it reveals the path to success (i.e., taking advantage of his opponent's dropped guard) A path which wouldn't have been discovered if the opponent's left hook hadn't landed.

When we relate to failure as a "bad" thing and success as a "good" thing, we will inevitably seek to protect ourselves from failure. That process can only lead in one direction adopting a defensive posture. (Some athletes call this "playing scared". How many times have we seen that strategy turn victory into defeat?) In our boxer analogy, if the whole fight becomes a process of avoiding the left hook, the boxer may well survive the fight, but he isn't ever likely to win it.

Evaluating the whole story line gets us outside the box of thinking that generally accompanies failure… and success. It allows us to re-examine the vision that gave birth to the story in the first place. We can look at all the actions, all the intentions, all the language, all the props and characters. And you know what? You won't do that to the fullest degree possible unless you fail.

Oh yeah. Failure… bring it on!