Wandering

The virtue of failure

My first commencement speech, as valedictorian of a small high school in Columbus, Georgia, was a catastrophic failure. As almost every first-time commencement speaker, I was convinced the opportunity to address my classmates and their families and friends represented my chance to change the world. In a written draft I waxed elegant about our generation’s “unique” opportunities and advantages, and I carefully crafted passages to make the audience laugh and cry.

Then a funny thing happened. Our salutatorian gave an almost identical speech and in the middle of the ceremony, and I began to question the validity of my own statements. My mind racing as she parsed through her carefully prepared remarks, I worked out a plan to change my speech on the spot. When I stood up to talk, I began by reading from my prepared draft, then, in the midst of speaking, I crumpled my draft at the podium, stopped talking, and tossed the paper containing my “eloquent” musings somewhere into a potted plant behind me and to the left.

I don’t have to tell you, the impromptu speech that followed was not a monumental success. Faced with several hundred expectant faces and the bright lights of the stage, the only topic I could think of was “fear”; and ten minutes later, there wasn’t a person in the audience who hadn’t experienced the fear that another student speaker was waiting in the wings.

In spite of that failure, however, I count my commencement speech, at least partially, a success. I failed that night because I took a chance at the last moment, and that failure did more to teach me about my future adventures in public speaking than any widely applauded address I’ve given. It wasn’t the first or last time I failed at something, and sometime around my sophomore year of college I realized that all those failures were and are a good thing. Failure itself is not the catastrophe you and I often envision. Rather it is a virtue, a choice, and an opportunity.

Everybody fails. As a boy, Thomas Edison’s teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything. As a soldier, former president Abraham Lincoln entered the Blackhawk War a Captain, and came out a private. Ben Affleck made Gigli. F. Scott Fitzgerald flunked college, Steven Spielberg was a high school drop-out, and Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade. “Never give up, never surrender”…and never show the prime minister a complex fraction or he whimpers like a baby.

Yet these men (and many women like them) were not destroyed by their failures but instead defined by the fact that they recovered from those failures well and were brave enough to fail in the first place. As NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin commented in a commencement address at MIT, “Not experiencing any failure in your life isn’t a sign of perfection; rather it is a sign that your goals aren’t bold enough.” Failure, in its purest form, represents an unsuccessful attempt to push the boundaries of your current level of knowledge or accomplishment, and it is in failure that you learn, live, and grow. No one fails at sitting at home watching Oprah or lounging in Starbucks sipping Café Latte! No one fails jeering Kobe Bryant or gawking at Britney Spears. People fail when they take chances that might be beyond their reach.

Almost a decade ago, Michael Jordan had a commercial in which he addressed his failures. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career,” the Air Apparent declared. “I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life—and that is why I succeed.” His mentality is spot-on. You’re going to fail. We all fail. Do it, move on, and succeed.

Too often in life we are heralded for our accomplishments and maligned for our failures. The very prospect of failing often deters us from taking chances, and we end up living stagnant, predictable lives mired in the belief that only those things that are easy or sure are worth doing. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Failure is a virtue. It represents in every person an attempt to push boundaries and take risks – and it is often on a road littered with failure that we find our path to success.

Note: This post is adapted from a slightly more successful commencement address I delivered at Berry College in 2004.

The dependable virtues: Hard work and punctuality

Cal Ripken was, to use a cliché phrase, baseball’s perennial “Iron Man”. A soft-spoken shortstop and third baseman from Havre de Grace, Maryland, Ripken played 2,632 consecutive games for the Baltimore Orioles between 1982 and 1998. He was a stellar player. Over the course of his career he hit 431 home runs on 3184 hits with a batting average of .271. He was a 19-time all-star; and, though he was no Babe Ruth or Roger Clemens, his achievements on the field would have placed him among the baseball elite even if he had missed one or two games a year. But instead, Ripken never missed a game. He always showed up. He always played hard. And MLB fans voted Ripken’s record-breaking 2131st consecutive game Major League Baseball’s “Most Memorable Moment” because it represented a heroic achievement in what Ripken is truly known for: dependability.

In college, I had one motto: work hard and show up on time. I didn’t always live that motto, and I still don’t. Somewhere short of Ripken-like consistency, I slept through a few classes and turned in the occasionally late paper. Now I show up late for dates and sometimes give less than my best effort in my writing endeavors (as you may have gathered from the frequency of my blog posts). But I generally give opportunities my best shot and make deadlines because I know that even if I’m not the smartest or most talented guy in the room, being a dependable person will open additional opportunities to me that even raw ability might not.

Almost all of us have observed this concept at work. Think of the respected people you know – whether they are construction workers or corporate lawyers. Are they late to meetings? Do you have to check in with them to make sure they are working hard? Do they ever stand up friends or shirk assignments? Almost invariably, the answer to all of these questions is no, because in all of their personal and professional relations, they have respect. They respect the time and resources of the people around them and the obligation their abilities and opportunities place on them to fulfill their own potential.

That is an aggressive series of statements, but I believe it’s true. When we are consistently late to meetings, dinner dates, or dentist appointments we are disrespecting those with whom we are supposed to meet. We are, in a sense, saying that our time is more important their time, and that they should operate not on the preordained deadlines on which we collectively agreed but on the capriciousness of our own personal schedules. This not only wastes their time, it creates a vicious cycle. Deadlines become permanently flexible, and all parties begin to ignore them. The efficiency of scheduling is lost because no one knows when someone else will waste his or her time, and each person begins to operate with disregard for other members of the group. Punctuality is how business people and friends get things done in a world of limited time, and perpetual lateness is an affront to that effort, apart from having negative implications for our honesty in agreeing to a meeting time in the first place.

Similarly, hard work is fundamentally an issue of respect. Just as punctuality is respectful of other people’s time, hard work is respectful of their resources. When someone offers me a paid job or the capital to start a business, they are, in a sense trusting me to make the best use of that job or capital and to take that responsibility seriously. They do not expect me to exceed my own abilities, but they do expect me to perform in accordance with my abilities by working hard. And by working hard and respecting the resources they have devoted to me I earn their trust – a trust that can lead me to additional responsibility and opportunity.

Also, hard work is respectful of one’s self. In this world, we’ve all been given talents, a social position, the benefits of family or some other endowment that confers on us opportunity. We earn that opportunity, by fully utilizing those endowments – by making the most of them – and that can only be done through hard work. That doesn’t mean we have to work all the time, vacations are evil, or leisure time is anathema. It just means that out of respect for ourselves and the opportunities we’ve been given, we should make the most of those opportunities within reasonable limits in justice to the fact that they have been given to us in the first place.

Cal Ripken was a good baseball player because of his unbelievable athletic talent, but he was great because unlike 99.9% of the human population he cared enough to make the most of his abilities. When the Orioles needed him, he was always there. In practice and on the field he seized each opportunity; and while he didn’t have the hand-eye coordination of Tony Gwynn or the raw power of Barry Bonds, he became legend because unlike anyone before or sense he extracted every ounce of good from his talents and did so in a way that respected, inspired, and assured his fans, coaches, and teammates. One day, I’d like to be known for that kind of dependability; but it will take a lot to get there.