Last week in my first blog article of the year I mentioned that at the beginning of every year connectors often choose a word that will serve as inspiration and direction for the upcoming year. These words are usually very positive words like faith, courage, peace, change, passion, learning, etc. For whatever reason, the word failure stands out as a word calling for my attention at the beginning of this year. It is not because I feel like a failure, although there are certainly moments when I feel that way. It has more to do with what failure teaches me.
One of my all time favorite commercials is of Michael Jordan, the basketball player, walking through the underground parking lot of Chicago Stadium on his way to a game, listing off the ways that he has failed. As he strolls along he says, “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. 26 times I have been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”
Mark Manson in his book ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k’, tells us a story about the artist Pablo Picasso. Picasso was a prolific artist who lived into his nineties and produced renowned works of art his entire life. As the story goes, he was having a cup of coffee in a restaurant doodling on a napkin. Once he finished his cup of coffee he began to crumple the napkin up to throw in the garbage. A lady close by, who was watching closely, said, ‘wait, can I have the napkin you were just drawing on? I’ll pay for it.’ Picasso replied, ‘sure, twenty thousand dollars.’ The lady says, ‘What? It took you like two minutes to draw that.’ Picasso responds, ‘No ma’am, it took me over sixty years to draw this.’
Manson’s point to the story is, “improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something.”
There are a few things that I want to say about the importance of failure in my life, but first and foremost I have to identify its value. That is the point of both these stories about Jordan and Picasso. The understood the value of failure.
Failure is essential in my life because almost everything important I have learned has been achieved through a trial and error process. Every failure has been an opportunity to learn something valuable about what I needed to do differently or better if I was going to experience success.
Maybe the best example of this in my life has been raising children. When I began raising children as a twenty three old child myself, there were books that gave me some insight into parenting, but nothing really prepared me for the daily challenge of parenting. It was often a trial and error experiment where I hoped I was not damaging or killing my children. I have often said that my children have been my greatest teachers in life. And, the greatest lesson I have learned from them has been about the power of love and grace. No matter how many mistakes I have made in dealing with them over the years, they still affirm their love for me as their dad. And, I am convinced that every mistake I made was an opportunity to learn something about being a dad and about being a better person.
What has failure taught you?
Terry
