“Failure Is Not An Option”
The NASA flight director of the Apollo 13 moon landing mission, Gene Kranz (seated in the photo above), fed up with the question regularly posed to him, "Are you going to get them back?" began getting a bit snarky. He'd respond, "Suppose you're a heart patient, and you're lying on the operating table, and your chest is open. What do you want to see in the eyes of the doctor there? Failure is not an option." If you've ever seen the film Apollo 13, Ed Harris, playing the role of Gene Kranz, was assigned this famous line of dialogue in the script.
While I appreciate Kranz's frustration and the punishing pressure he must have experienced, the message "failure is not an option" has permeated our culture in debilitating ways. Somehow, we've taken a one-time life or death situation, and woven that gravity into our daily life missions.
If you don't know what I mean, ask yourself these questions:
How do I define failure?
What do I believe failing means about me?
With what frequency do I give myself permission to fail?
How often will I take a risk, truly accepting the outcome is unknown?
Going out on a limb, I propose you may need to rethink your beliefs about failing.
I invite you to consider doing so, if you answered the questions something like this:
Failure is the absence of executing a specified agenda.
I judge and shame myself, if I am unable to meet a dictated goal.
To avoid that self-judgment (and the potential judgment of others), I refuse to honor failure as a possibility. Therefore, permission to fail is never given. The very notion is ridiculous!
I would rather lull myself into a false sense of security by believing I can control the outcome, when in fact, control is an illusion.
Let's get a little personal distance from the topic.
I love professional basketball. It's the only sport earning any of my attention. Even then, because I rarely watch television and don't subscribe to any cable or sports channels, I only ever catch the Celtics (my home team), when they make the playoffs. Then, depending upon how the C's fare, I spend a lot of nights drinking Diet Pepsi and eating bar food to see them play.
During the first round of the playoff season, the number one seed in the NBA lost to the team ranked eighth in the league. Meaning, the Milwaukee Bucks, who had won the greatest number of games (58) in the regular 82 game season, lost to the Miami Heat who won only 44 matchups. In typical media style, the Bucks' star player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, was interviewed following the unexpectedly abrupt end to the season. He was asked, "Do you see this season as a failure?" His response was brilliant and inspirational! I encourage you to watch the video, but the short form is this, "some days it's your turn, some days it's not your turn...you don't always win...there are steps to it."
A bunch of years ago, I started writing a book.
About 60,000 words in, I hated it, so I put it to the side (then later lost it on a corrupted thumb drive!). With new inspiration, I started again, and when that prose began to weigh me down, no longer feeling fresh or true to what I wanted to share, I stopped writing entirely for a while. In the past five months, I've written about 90% of a first draft of a completely new book. Each of these manuscripts comprises some combination of self-help with my personal story, and yet, every text is told in a unique way, with almost entirely different content.
In early autumn of 2020, my husband and I drove up to Keene, New Hampshire for an outdoor visit with his cousins, for the first time in over a year. Their 20-something daughter, Emily, stayed with them through most of the quarantine, so she joined us for a while. As a child and young adult, Emily had been very active in the theater community. She attended acting school in New York, as part of her experience. When I described my failed attempt at that first book, Emily offered a version of what Giannis said. "I bet it's like acting. Every audition and every rehearsal, even if they go terribly, helps with the next iteration of whatever you do. I'm sure all those words were not wasted time. You just don't know how they've informed you yet." A bit of brilliant wisdom, for sure!
A week or so ago, I saw a clip of musician, Ed Sheeran, interviewed on The Howard Stern Show.
The part I loved, of what he shared, was this:
"...failing, time and time again. I'm sure you'll agree with me with this, you learn nothing from success. Nothing! You learn everything from the failures. And this is the thing that annoys me about the state the world is in at the moment, no one talks about failure anymore. It's like shame. It's like failure is shame, and let's just bury that and not talk about it. No one goes, what did we learn from this?" You can watch the video here.
Sheeran's message aligns with a teaching I absorbed from my former coach, Laura Rawlings. The mantra I remind myself is this: "I can't do it wrong. Whatever happens, I'll learn something." What if that's what "failure is not an option" truly means? Failing may mean the constructed agenda didn't happen as planned; however, it never means there wasn't value in the experience. And each experience that does not turn out the way I plan, the way I anticipate, the way I wish for, gives me opportunities to grow, learn, and open to a magic of possibilities beyond my imaginings.
This doesn't mean I never enter the self-judgment zone.
When I was driving in the wilds of Sri Lanka a few years ago, and managed to clip the side mirror off our rental car, I tormented myself with criticism. Only when my friend Lisa replied in a text exchange, "Meh...mirror schmirror. That's a minor issue for this trip," did I begin to recalibrate my perspective. Sometimes, I require a helping hand to remember the lessons that emerge from my "failures." In this particular case, I wrote about what that experience eventually meant to me, after absorbing Lisa's simple wisdom.
If you find yourself wary of where the path will take you, or you've attached to a fixed outcome, try on this alternative way of thinking about failure.
Remember, failing truly isn't an option, because the information learned from every step along the way will yield new insights, and may help to point you in a direction you never considered before. The steps you take that happen easily are lovely, for sure; however, it is inevitably the times you slip and fall that you'll grow and learn. Giving yourself permission to stretch into more of who you are meant to be, will absolutely include a few tumbles, because that's the nature of how we humans learn. So instead of the self-judgment, become your own gentle cheerleader, encouraging yourself to fumble, weave in the new learning, and take whatever next step appears.
With love and gentleness,
Joanne