My Year of Hopefulness - The Blessing of Mistakes

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." ~ James Joyce, Irish novelist, from Ulysses

The passing of time can be a frustrating thing. We may spend time on one activity that leads us to a dead-end when we could have spent that time on something that would have lead us to a success. It's easy to become overwhelmed by how many ways we have to spend our time; so many in fact that we might feel that no matter how much we love what we're doing, we could always be doing something that would make us even happier. The odd paradox of choice, as Barry Schwartz calls it. Too many opportunities leads us to too many opportunity costs. These increased opportunity costs are beginning to effect the way we view failure and mistakes.

Rather than valuable learning tools, we might be tempted to view them as a waste of time. Why should I try and fail and learn when there are so many other things I could be trying and possibly succeeding at? And yet we know that failure is a part of this life. We have to fail. We have to stretch ourselves well beyond our comfort zones, well beyond even the most optimistic view of our own abilities. If we don't push our limits and fail, then we'll never know exactly how much we can achieve. Unrealized achievement that was within our grasp had we pushed a little harder is far worse than failure.

I think about failure a lot. In terms of jobs and relationships and pursuits I've considered, even in places where I moved and tried to make a home. Sometimes I feel badly about all my failures, and then I consider so many of my brave friends and family who just refused to let fear stand in their way. My friend, Phyllis, who just today wrote to me and said she left her job to focus on her own business full-time. "I'm secretly scared sh*tless," she said. "I think that’s probably fairly normal for anyone who quits a well-paying job in this crappy economy." I agree. And I'm so proud of her and inspired by her actions.

My friend, Allan, has a good paying job, albeit a little boring for him. He had the opportunity to continue with a new assignment there - one he could certainly do if he could just resign himself to not liking the job. Instead, he's taking a risk and going back to school for a graduate degree in mathematics, his greatest passion.

I have a few friends who are getting married next year. And guess what? They're all scared, too. They're afraid of failing, of being hurt, of hurting someone else. They're afraid of letting other people down, of wasting someone else's time. They're afraid they aren't enough. When I asked them if they really thought this was a good idea, to be getting married, they all said yes unequivocally. "Marriage," one of them said to me, "is the greatest leap of faith there is. We can be afraid of failure. We just can't let it prevent us from going after happiness."

What if we could think of failure as a blessing? What if we could seek out failure as a great teacher? And what if we opened up our hearts and minds and accepted and forgave our own failures and the failures of others, too? Would that kind of acceptance and forgiveness make the failures easier to bear and the successes that much sweeter to earn?

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Stepping up and out

This week I got approval and funding for a project that I've been pitching for a year. A solid year of effort, and beating a drum that most had no interest in hearing. For the past year, I've felt alternately foolish and hopeful. One minute I thought I just didn't get it, couldn't see past my own stubbornness. The next minute I'd think, no, it's everyone else who doesn't get it.

I now realize that it wasn't a matter of people getting it; it was entirely a matter of timing and circumstances. I wanted an idea to flourish ahead of its time. Had I gotten approval a year ago for it, the idea would have crashed and burned, no doubt about it. And then I would not have only felt foolish - I would have looked foolish, too.

The universe tries to protect us from ourselves. It throws down roadblocks to test our passion and perseverance, and also to give the rest of the world time to catch up with us. At the time that I first developed the idea, I didn't see it that way. I was so willing to toot my own horn, thinking that I knew something others around me didn't. In reality, the universe was saving me from me. It's a difficult, necessary lesson to learn; when the path is cluttered with resistance, it really is best to wait it out with quiet strength.

This is not to say that we should all zip it and go stand in line waiting for our turn. I still maintain that it takes the ability to step up and out for an idea we believe in that really creates progress. However, the next time a project is not going exactly according to plan, I'll have more patience with myself and with those around me. If the idea's a good one, it's time will come. Perhaps not on the schedule I'd like, though at the time when it has the greatest chance to not only survive but thrive.

My Year of Hopefulness - Fear #3 of entrepreneurship

"I'll fail."

A hallmark fear for anyone starting anything new - whether it's a business, a new job, getting a degree, starting a relationship, moving to a new city. Every time that we adopt a change in our lives, we open ourselves up to the risk of failure. The flip side of that possible failure is a tremendous upside for growth, learning, and improvement of our current situation.

Failure has a very negative connotation in our culture, and it's often unwarranted. Failure means to discover what doesn't work. Knowing what doesn't work puts us one step closer to knowing what does work. And once we know what doesn't work, we can correct it and move forward. Peter Skillman of Palm is famous for advocating for early failure. Try something. If it doesn't work, switch gears, and take another run at it.

Whenever I am afraid of failing, I consider what I would have to do to completely protect myself from it. And the answer is often that I would end up not doing anything. That's no way to live. Our time on this Earth is too brief, too precious, to stand still for every long. Life is about experience, and with every new experience comes the risk of failure.

Like death and taxes, failure is a part of life. It can be a wonderful teacher if we cast in that role in our lives. Whether it changes our lives for better or worse is largely up to us - it all depends on what we do with the lessons it teaches us. Do we use them as valuable information or do we take them on like a yolk, a source of discouragement and despair? How we look at and use failure says a lot about how we live our lives.

When failure leads to friendship

I have a long list of subjects to write about with everything that is happening in the world at this moment. But I'm taking a little pause tonight to talk about a very simple subject, and one that is so crucial to getting through the times we're all finding these days: friendship.

I was part of a team today working on a local charity fundraiser. I was to be the big finale - the chocolate fountain. I got the fountain from my mom and got started about an hour and a half in advance. It was melting just fine though not flowing properly. It was too gloppy and sticky. So I added so milk to thin it out. Bad idea. It turned to fudge. I was so upset - this was supposed to be the finale event of the day and it was quickly becoming a disaster. (For the record, if you need to thin chocolate, you need to add a little vegetable oil, not milk.) 

Until my co-host looked at me and said - let's take the rest of the chocolate, melt it in the microwave, put it in a nice bowl, and put it out with the dipping items. People will love it. And they did. A few people asked where the advertised fountain was, but no one much cared. They were just happy to have any kind of treat at all. Another co-host announced that the fountain had become a fondue. And everyone accepted that change just fine. 

Despite the fact that I was disappointed about the fountain, I did feel good that I had failed at my task and a co-host was able to pick me back up and help me keep going. It's this leaning on each other, helping one another deal with our disappointments, that's going to save us in this tough economy. We need to be joiners and supporters as much as we need to be leaders and innovators. 

I wrapped up the goopy fountain and brought it home to clean. As I was rinsing off the last of the chocolate, I began to laugh at myself - a sure sign that the disappointment had passed. And I smiled knowing that friendship had filled in the space where failure had been. 

"Failure as an event" ~ Seth Godin

I've been reading Seth Godin's blog a lot recently and he recently wrote a post about the dreaded "F" word - Failure. We shutter at the very thought of it. We are told this is the last thing on Earth we EVER want to do or be. It's a death sentence. Seth has a different perspective, and in the economy we're living in, his view is critical to our long-term health. For Seth, failure is learning. 

I thought a lot about this yesterday as I worked away at my desk, thinking about the 10% of my company that was be laid off this week. I'm sending those people all of the good energy I can scrounge up, and I am incredibly grateful to have my job. A number of my classmates have lost their jobs, some of them having to leave the country because their visas expired without a company to sponsor them. I've been thinking a lot about them lately, praying for them, hoping that even in this unfortunate economy they can find a way through. I've been wondering how I'd feel if I was the one who had lost my job. Would I feel like a failure? And if I did, what would I do to turn it into a learning, as Seth suggests? And this led me to think about the times I've failed, and what that failure meant to me.

At first I had difficulty thinking of any time I've failed - my mental blocking mechanism was running on overdrive to keep those failures at bay. But they're important. So I kept digging into the recesses of my mind, and the failures were there, in abundance. Here are some of the big ones and what they taught me:

My college running career

I had dreams of running in college though I knew no one makes a living after school doing that. It prompted me to consider applying to Penn because of the Penn Relays, the world-class running event hosted by the school. My junior year in high school I injured myself so badly that I had trouble walking for the entire cross-country season and the Spring track season. My hope for a college running career went down the drain. But Penn stayed on the list of schools I applied to. I was accepted on merit, not as a runner. And it became my alma mater. I learned the very valuable lesson of diversification. I was a good runner, but I was an even better student. I worked as hard on the track as I did in the classroom. And that diversification saved me.

  

Princeton

But Princeton was my first campus crush. I wanted in, badly. I was going to study engineering and walk the same grounds as Einstein, my scientific hero. It was love at first site. But the school didn't love me back. I cried, a lot. For the first time in my life, someone told me I wasn't smart enough. And that was crushing. And very good for me, long-term, because it tempered by dangerously large ego and taught me how to rise above defeat with grace.  

Penn, at first

I got two C's my first semester at Penn in courses for my major. I had gotten one B+ in school in my entire life prior to college, and that crushed me. But C's??? What was going on here? I was dealing with the fall out of losing my dad, and being a very poor kid at a very rich school. I was WAY out of my league. These kids were smart, much smarter than me, well traveled, ambitious. I had to sprint to keep up with their leisurely strolls in every facet of my college career. I was an alien on those grounds until I found a niche in the theatre community that would change the course of my life, even though I didn't know it at the time. I learned how to be flexible, how to adjust and change course. I got comfortable with being uncomfortable. I gained a work ethic that has served me well for over a decade now. And because I knew how it felt to not feel accepted, I gained an empathy for outsiders and learned to value, appreciate, and seek out extreme diversity.   

My relationship with my dad

I lost my dad when I was a teenager. We never got along. Ever. And he passed away before I had the chance to understand him and his perspective. We never made amends, and we never will. His death taught me about forgiveness, of others and of myself. And there is no time like the present to offer and ask for forgiveness. His short life taught me about the urgency of living. And the massive disappointment that he faced in his life, that ultimately destroyed him, taught me that we must put aside failure, and move forward, grateful for what we do have rather than dwelling on what we don't have. 

Several long-term romantic relationships

If I had married any of the boyfriends I thought I might marry, I'd be divorced 5 times over by now. It is only now that I really feel I have come into my own, understand who I am, and have the confidence to live the life I imagine. Marrying any of my past boyfriends would have been an enormous mistake, and I am grateful that those relationships failed me before I had the chance to fail them (which surely would have happened.)

NBC

Since I was a little girl, I have wanted a seat on that couch on the Today show. And I got my chance to be within arms-length of that couch during my second year at Darden when I went to NBC to interview for their MBA rotation program. I had imagined myself walking into 30 Rock everyday, donning my badge. I imagined myself whipping around that office, changing the face of network television. I was going to be a star. (Seeing a pattern yet?)

And then I went through 8 hours of demeaning interviews by people who thought I wasn't good enough to join them from the moment I walked in the door. They were the worst interviews I've ever had. And it was humiliating. I had spent months preparing for those interviews, and all for naught. An alum brought me in as a favor, knowing I'd never make the cut. I was ashamed and embarrassed, and it was the best thing that ever happened to my career. I reached for something far beyond my grasp, and I missed. As a result, I went to work for a retail company after a very long job search, and my boss there has become an invaluable mentor to me. I discovered the world of innovation and product development, and picked up the trail of a path that I am thrilled to be on. Again, I learned about the power of humility, the courage it takes to hold your head high and look failure in the eye, and move on with continued confidence. 

All of these failures taught me a few valuable lessons:

The universe knows your destiny better that you do

Preparation and grace are key to moving forward

The world is a very generous place - it will give you the same lesson over and over again until you learn it and the don't need to go through it any more

Seth is right - failures are moments of learning. And while in the moment, it may be difficult to be grateful for failures, we can take comfort in the fact that accepting and acknowledging their existence helps us to leave them behind in search of better times ahead.    

JK Rowling's Commencement speech - The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

I read JK Rowling's commencement speech she gave at Harvard last month. She talks about one thing that new graduates are abundant with - imagination. And she talks about one thing that terrifies them - failure. 

What struck me most about her speech was her unfailing sense to be brutally honest. She grew up without money, and admits that while it is a scary proposition to live that way as an adult, growing up poor makes you fearless in a way that frees you to follow your imagination. She articulately put into words the way I have been living since I graduated from college 10 years ago. When you've gone to bed hungry, you've hit bottom. And you begin to build upward - there's simply nothing else you can do. 

http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html