Good morning! I would like to issue an invitation to you to have an experience that, if you let it, will expand the way you perceive life, cause you to have more humility in dealing with people, give you a greater appreciation of your blessings, and improve your understanding of your values. This morning I invite you to experience failure.
I have failed many times in different areas of my life. I have found that there are real failures and pseudo-failures. There are instances where I may feel regret at an outcome but I was never really committed to the goal and so it was easy to comfort myself with excuses and not take responsibility. Also, there is so-called failure that ultimately flips into a nice, neat, successful happy ending; where after experiencing set-backs and impossible odds I persevere to win and ride off into the sunset a hero. Those are pseudo-failures; those are not the cases of failure I am encouraging you to examine. Today the failures I am I referring to are those gut wrenching moments we have experienced and will again experience, where despite our best efforts and full commitment, the outcome is unpleasantly and irretrievably different from our desired goal. For me they include the times when I communicated the most appropriate way I knew how but still was unable to have the content of the message not ruin a valued relationship; or when in one of the international field hockey competitions I participated in every game got more painful and every day I watched the accelerating disintegration of my formerly functional team-members into scared, disconnected individuals.
My invitation to experience real failure may be somewhat difficult for you to accept. I have myself oftentimes found it very hard to constructively relate to the failures I have experienced. At the same time, until I figure out how we can eliminate failure from our life and successfully develop and grow mentally, ethically, spiritually, and productively, I believe we have to find a way to make peace with the times when life does not go according to plan.
In 2000, I had one of the single most depressing moments of my adult life. I received “the list”. It came innocently packaged as just another white envelope in the mail. On the front it carried a Canadian stamp and strangely, it appeared it was addressed in my own handwriting.
I had forgotten that five years earlier, in the final semester of my MBA at the University of Western Ontario, each member of the class had been handed a letter sized piece of paper and asked to write on it 5 things – personal or career related - that we intended to accomplish within 5 years. Unsuspecting of the future havoc this would cause me, I obediently and with some excitement completed and handed in my list.
Five years later, that piece of paper brought the me that I had hoped to be face to face with the me that I had become. It was not a pleasant meeting. The me on paper had hobbies, a family, and a rewarding career. The me that I had actually become had one job that felt like two, and little time for a personal life or hobbies. With the exception of the career related items, I had failed miserably in achieving the items on my list.
In the introspection that followed I realised that what cut me so deeply was not the non-achievement of specific items themselves, rather it was that the non-achievement reflected back at me a total collapse and stifling of aspects of myself that I regarded as intrinsic to my personality. I had faded to a work email address and a flattering performance rating. It was alarming to me to discover - I had a price.
I know experiencing failure is not easy. In my case, when I opened the envelope with the list I felt the paper cut immediately, but it took days & weeks for me to acknowledge that I was bleeding, and months for me to attend to the wound. Thankfully by experiencing the failure I found the answers and motivation I needed to get healthy - years later when I looked at my life I could give it a clean bill of health.
There is a powerful distinction between failure and experiencing failure. In my opinion failure is meaningless; left alone it subtracts, it adds nothing. To give failure positive meaning we have to have the consciousness and the courage to open the door and ask failure to sit with us and help us understand why our results are different from our intentions. And then we have to listen to the answer and act. I hope you one day accept my invitation.
(July 2008)
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