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For some reason the topic of failing is popular yet again and clearly in the public consciousness. I am not a football fan, but I am sure a certain incident happening this year (2007 to those of you reading this in the archive section) might have something to do with this sudden interest in addressing losing. Nevertheless just as the USA seem to define everything by success - as best exemplified by the famous American football coach Vince Lombardi - “Winning is not a sometime thing, it’s an all time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing” - so the British become very philosophical about failure.
Modern science is based on this principle. Scientists know that an experiment is never truly a "failure", it's a lesson. It teaches us what not to do and pushes us to look for another approach until we find one that works.
But what happens to many adults when they begin a new activity themselves and it doesn't work out successfully? Too often, they give up. They tell themselves that they are too old, too out-of-date, or too incompetent. Instead of seeing the failure as a lesson, they see it as a mistake. You don't repeat a mistake, you stop. In my observations, this failure to apply a principle we know to be true to our own activity is one of the greatest barriers to growth and change in middle age, perhaps the greatest.
As a youth, I was never successful at athletics, I was intellectually precocious and this was very satisfying. It came easily to me, while athletics didn't. I would try baseball or another sport, do poorly at first, and quit. If I hadn't been doing well as a student, I might have become extremely depressed. As it turned out, that wasn't a problem, so I avoided activities that I didn't do well from the beginning and focused on those that I did. I assumed I had no athletic talent and that I was simply doing what I was meant to do. Inside though, I was very depressed that I couldn't do well at sports and it was a burden in the back of my mind well into my adult years.
At the age of 46, having already begun to understand the importance of failure, I did something truly bizarre. I became a gymnast. Totally ridiculous in light of no athletic background and, most importantly in the minds of others, my age. When I say "gymnast", that's what I mean. Everything from parallel bars to the pommel horse to the rings and so on. It had taken me two years just to find a coach who I could convince to "waste" his time working with me at my age and lack of basic skills. I was pathetic. Worse than pathetic, I was terrible! The gym's professional staff expected me to quit and just not show up after making a fool of myself time after time. They admired my spirit, but doubted my commitment. After all, no other adult without a background in the sport, even at half my age, had gotten much beyond the simplest skills before quitting. Gymnastics is an incredibly demanding sport. It requires great flexibility, great strength, attention to every detail of form, tolerance for pain, and year-round practice. No one ever expected that I would learn enough to compete.
My training was sporadic in the first few years, but my coach stuck with me and I stuck with the sport. I finally decided to compete and, at 52, found myself in a public arena, standing at one corner of the floor, about to begin my first tumbling pass. Because there was no age group for me at a lower skill level, I had to compete in the "open elite" category and be scored as a world-class gymnast would be scored. When it was all over, my scores in the different events ranged from 4.2 to 4.9 out of 10. Obviously, I was not going to be a threat to an Olympic competitor, but was I depressed? No way. I was elated. I'm still a gymnast and, as far as we know, the oldest in the US who competes in regular, sanctioned competition.
That first meet is one that will stay with me for the rest of my life. I had gone from nothing to something purely on the basis of determination and focus, and against "common sense" and the skepticism of everyone else. I certainly wasn't ashamed to get a 4.2. When I was the "right age" to be a gymnast, I couldn't have gotten a 1.0 if my life had depended on it. But to get to a 4.2 or a 4.9, I had to endure hundreds of failures. Had failure been simply the opposite of success, I would never have competed. Accepting it as just a step on the way to success made it possible for me to succeed. It's all so obvious, but that didn't make it easy to do.
The setting may be usual, but my story is not. How may successful gardeners today began with the perfect garden? How many times did they "fail" before figuring out what to do? How many continue to fail today and will continue to fail tomorrow, despite their "success"? All of them, I would suspect.
We can enjoy our fictional “Loveable losers” like Charlie Brown and David Brent, who help us look at the absurdity of being delusional or the sometimes fruitless social desire to be adored by others, but I don’t think it is particularly fulfilling to label you a loser anymore than it is artificially elevate yourself as a winner. Losing provides us with lessons on our life journey whereas winning, as enjoyable as it is, marks our milestones in the right direction. Rudyard Kipling’s over-quoted poem - which is probably so popular because it lays down the philosophy of the ideal Bulldog Briton in the eyes of his countrymen has perhaps the best line regarding how we best handle the issue of success and failure. All together now “Treat those two impostors just the same”.
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