Life

Failure’s Not An Option

It’s Actually A Consequence

Back in 1950, UCLA Bruins football coach Henry Russell Sanders once told a group of players:

“Men, I’ll be honest. Winning isn’t everything…it’s the only thing!”

I’m not sure just how you might take Mr. Sanders’ meaning, but I’m inclined to believe his message pairs quite nicely with this next quote:

“Failure is not an option” often attributed to Gene Kranz, Flight Director of Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle missions.

The problem with “winning is everything” and failure not being an option is that winning or failures aren’t options; they’re consequences.

That’s right, consequences. Think about it for a moment. Winning at anything requires dedication, hard work, and continued practice to improve.

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

— Michael Jordan

The point is, if you wish to not fail all the time, then you need to continue hammering away at it until you figure out what’s causing the failure and fix it.

The problem is when we just start out doing something that may have interested us for years, we’re really not aware just how much work and practice it’s going to take to get good at it.

But we tell ourselves we can do it, we can win big at it, deep down we want to win big at it, and so off we go.

We probably start off like gangbusters, full of vim and vigor, ready to tear the world a new one. And we’re rolling along pretty good until the first lost, then the next, and the next, then failure after failure begins to happen.

Just like that, we pull up short and start giving whatever we’re doing less than our full attention and dedication. We stop practicing, we stop performing the work.

Why?

It’s because when we do realize just how big that d*mned bread box really is, we tell ourselves we’re weren’t even sure we were that much dedicated to doing this thing in the first place. Oh, we still give it a go from time to time.

Sometimes out of sheer embarrassment because we bragged about what we were going to do to all our friends and family members.

But when we’re out of the spotlight, and it’s just us and the work, we frequently welcome diversions or distractions. Because who in the heck wants to work this hard, and put in this much practice just so we can lose at it and go down in the history books as a failure?

This endeavor was supposed to be fun, right?

Now, it’s just some stupid thing we feel like we have to do to save face.

Que the music? We lose. We have just failed even though we spent so many weeks and months convincing ourselves failure’s not an option.

Sometimes, losing and failing are consequences of not having the dedication to actually grow a spine and stick with whatever we initially set out to do.

It could be we lost because we spent those nights playing RPG on our computer when we could have been practicing.

We might have suffered the consequence of losing because instead of working hard on our craft when we could, we spent weekends hooking up with friends at the local watering hole telling everybody how good things were going on our new dream.

Losing and failure are the exact same thing. Both are consequences. However, and this is important. They are both excellent teachers if we’re willing to learn.

Last year I wrote a piece about writing failure:

Much of what I said last year applies to this message as well. I still firmly believe losing and failure are merely consequences of our actions or inaction, and yet I think how we choose to deal with losing and failures will either make us or break us in the long run.

If we’re not doing the work; if we’re not practicing our craft all these months and years; if our dedication isn’t really there, then the consequence of devil-may-care inaction will more than likely remain the same.

We will fail. We will lose.

But if we interpret each failure, each rejection, every bruised and aching muscle, every mental exhaustion as a necessary step toward achieving our goal, then even when we lose or fail, we’re actually winning.

If when failure comes, we choose to get back up and go at it again, and again, instead of cowering in the corner in defeat, we’re not a failure. We’ve managed to win this round. Win enough rounds, and we’ll probably win the match.

The more we “win,” the closer we are to getting what we dreamed of.

So stop dreading so much about losing. It’s going to happen. We need to stop telling ourselves failure’s not an option. Because it isn’t, it’s a consequence, just like losing is.

If we’re both losing and failing, I’m willing to bet we’re more than likely heading in the right direction.

Thank You So Much For Reading

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© P.G. Barnett, 2020. All Rights Reserved.