Robert Barsanti gives a rallying call for failure. Why? Victory reinforces; failure teaches.
I teach with a woman who loves her seniors. She praises them, challenges them to be better, and, when acceptances roll in during the middle of spring, she lists their names and the colleges on one of her chalkboards. Each student then circles the lucky college that he has chosen. Applause and cupcakes all around. It is a wonderful process and her students love her for it.
The imp, in the back of my mind, would like to do something altogether different. Instead of a wall of fame, I would like to build a wall of shame. All of the rejection letters that come in should also go on a wall. Postcards, hand-written scrawls, tear-stained pieces of high-quality bond taped and tacked to a wall in the classroom, before God and everyone. The parents would not send me love notes and the students would not bring their friends in to see, but I suspect the younguns would get a lot more out of this, long-term, than the multi-colored hug in the other room.
Victory reinforces; failure teaches. When we win, all of our best traits and best features walk out into the spotlight and take a bow. Harvard accepted you because of your grades and the three shutouts you had in the playoffs last year. Victory doesn’t change anybody. You won, so you must be doing something right. No one is going to study harder, train harder, or work harder because they won. If anything, you let your guard down.
Failure, on the other hand, highlights all the laziness and bad habits that we have let build up into our system. When Harvard sends that crimson-lined postcard, it says that you didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t get good enough grades, and there is more work to be done. All of the shortcuts and excuses are laid bare upon the table, naked for all to see.
We all have pride in ourselves. We all have happy little delusions that get us through our day. Perhaps we have a lucky coin or a Rabbit’s foot that somehow has brought us victory when we should have lost in the past. Perhaps, instead of luck, we have a long history of exercise and past victories that we hold out as a totem. With this transcript, we all feel, it should be enough. I have done enough. The beauty of failure is that it knocks the spotlight out of our eyes. When we watch our dreams glide away to someone else and hear, in the words of Dickinson, “The distant strains of triumph break agonized and clear,” we are tossed into the darkness at the foot of the stage. The brave will stand there, look at the celebration, look in the mirror, and go back to work. The foolish will just walk away.
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We live in a culture where it has become very easy to walk away from the burning wreck. Failure has become more transitory and ephemeral in the Broadband Universe. Video games have become the lingua franca of my students. They skip school when a new “Call of Duty” comes out. Instead of grammar and history, they sit at home alone on the sofa and play “fat kid sports.” Should their character die, they can reset the game and start up again within seconds. Should they become frustrated, they can find a YouTube video to guide them through the tricky parts and find the “hidden” treasures. Should even this become too challenging, they can use a cheat and make their character invincible, invulnerable, and infinitely supplied. You lose only if you want to lose. It’s no wonder that the number of kids playing football has plummeted. When you lose to Martha’s Vineyard on the gridiron, you can’t reset the game.
Moreover, Facebook salves the sting of failure. On it you only record your victories; your defeats remain unwritten. When you get dumped by your boyfriend, you change your status, remove the tags from his pictures, and “unfriend” him. No one puts their rejection notices up. When you find a new man, all of your friends will happily “like” him on your wall. Facebook gives you a cheering section and a Mom to praise and prop you through the smallest trials of your life.
And it also presents a jury. The Mean Girls have a new tool to humiliate and crush those that step out of line. When the errors and the snares catch any of us, Facebook is there to catch, judge, and mock in front of everyone you know. The wrong friend, the wrong clothes, even the wrong words get electrically scourged. Enough kids learn the lesson early. Step out of line, take a risk, and fail? You will feel the lash forever. So they never step out away from the herd.
When kids reach the end of high school and begin looking at careers and colleges, they flinch from failure. My students won’t apply to schools that they might not get into. They won’t move away and look for jobs or careers in a new place. At each step, they need a cheat code and the herd. Without those, they are lost. And many of my students are lost at graduation.
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Schools leave no child behind. If they have stayed in school as long as Senior year, we will do whatever we need to in order to get them over the finish line and keep our “metrics” clean. Graduation projects have stopped being challenges put to the young man or woman moving out into society and have become celebrations of their spirit. We clean them up, give them good posture and hope for the best. Graduation rehearsal lasts for months.
But then what? Five of my students have made their own minds up and aren’t going. They are as intent on staying in high school as the school is on getting them out the door. They skip all of their classes and hang out in the gym locker room or at the tennis courts. The girls of the group look to take a biological cheat; if they get pregnant, they can live with Mom and Dad for another ten years. They won’t drop out but they won’t walk out either. Instead, they stand in the fading twilight of adolescence, hitting the reset button over and over.
Failure comes to all of us. For the best of us, it slaps our face every day, over and over. In the end, after the hard, red-cheeked wisdom, we turn to the inevitable victory. Our own inevitable stubbornness leads us, unwilling, to the laurels. But without that stubbornness, we remain safe and ignorant in the stands, applauding meekly the acts that we wish we had the courage and the strength to do ourselves.
Only when failure loses its sting does victory became sweet. And maybe a wall of shame would be a good start.
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With all do respect, I think invincibility and invulnerability are slightly different.
Invincibility means that you cannot be conquered. It implies that you will win all your battles.
Invulnerability means you can’t be penetrated or “messed with” You might be conquered, but not killed. Think of Macbeth at the end of the play.
Invincibility and Invulnerability are the same thing.
Learning to Fail — The Good Men Project…
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Robert, thanks for this thougtful piece. I have to tell you, though, I react strongly to the use of the word “shame”. For me, shame and failure are two very different things. Failure is about not reaching goals or meeting objectives. Shame has layers of judgment and value identification and all kinds of stuff that does not feel productive to me. Now, I know I’m missing your point by focusing on the word “shame”, but the real power of your article, for me, was the recognition that we don’t often enough find ways to “ritualize” or “celebrate” defeat or failure.… Read more »
This is not unlike Viktor E. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” in which Frankl notes that suffering (in this story’s case, from failure) is an opportunity for growth and discovery of one’s meaning in life. I find this to be fundamental in how we evolve as individuals. Great article and a wonderful, inspiring perspective!
these wonderfu comments bring home the fact that the examples which kids see in their daily lives (how a parent/grandparent/even public figure whom they admire deals with health challenges, job losses, legal and moral situations, etc.) are so very key. if those around them persevere and meet these failures/challenges head on, with a good dose of the stubbornness element, that is a powerful example. Moreover, when a kid is faced with college rejections, they need some hard self-analysis (and conjecture) as to whether there are areas in their lives on which they can work to improve, or whether the school… Read more »
Great piece, as usual. I am ashamed of my failures. We all are. But I put them out there in full view anyways, because they piss me off. And, for me, the fastest way to get me to work harder and improve is to piss me off severely. I got cut from the 8th grade basketball team and the coach told me I was too slow and too short. That pissed me off. The next year, as a freshman, I made it. I also wasn’t initially accepted into Advanced Placement English as a junior in high school. I lobbied the… Read more »
I agree that failure teaches but the problem with espousing failure over victory is that there are certain instances in which a person has no control over the outcome. A distinguished professionally-trained actor may be rejected for an inexperienced newbie just because the latter fit the part. A disgruntled manager of a company refuses to hire a qualified individual because he didn’t care for the interviewees choice of clothing. In both of these instances, the rejected aren’t given any clear-cut reasons as to WHY they failed, so what lessons have they learned? Should they attribute their failures to internal reasons… Read more »
I work as an artist and am constantly applying for shows, gallery representation, and various other projects. When I receive a rejection, I always ask for clarification of why I was rejected. Then I change wording, or send images of a different art piece, and I apply again. (Or recognise that what I have is just not what they will ever want, and then I know there’s no point in dwelling.) The problem is not with rejection, and rejection doesn’t teach you anything on its own. It’s how you choose to react to failure or rejection that can lead to… Read more »
That wasn’t particularly a response to Kevin Carr. The box I was typing into was at the bottom of the page.
Thanks for this Robert. When I was in business school, and got rejected by scores of potential employees, I decided to take all those rejections letters and burn them in a kind of comic effigy on stage in front of the whole school. One guy, a big fella from Seattle who had a family and also had no job, died laughing to the point of tears. The rest of the crowd was crickets. They didn’t see the humor in it. I have a slightly different take which is that we teach our kids what it means to succeed in narrowly… Read more »