The Oscar nominations came out last week and if there was an award for the ‘Best Embrace of Failure’, the sure fire favourite would have to be Sunshine Cleaning. From the makers of ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ (which inspired a post that turned out to be one of my highest hit posts of this blog) comes another winner about losing.

One of the film’s most poignant explorations is the subject which touches the most abject and profound of failures – suicide. On the most superficial level, one could think that suicide is the ultimate embrace of failure, but the film illustrates powerfully how it is not. Suicide is not turning failure to good. It is not ‘embracing’ the failures of one’s life, but trying to avoid them through the ultimate escape. Instead, suicide multiplies the pain and trauma of failure a hundred fold for those who remain. The film’s very first scene starts with this subject and goes on to feature it as the central ‘adversity’ to the film and protagonists.

Like Little Miss Sunshine, the film is a case study in adversity to every character has their own adversities to cope with. Lost wife. Lost mother. Lost love. Lost limb. Lost innocence. Lost way. Lost childhood. Failed job. Failed business. Failed venture. Failed school.

While the heroine Rose could have easily described her lot as, ‘I was desperate and took the crappiest of crap jobs cleaning up the most putrid of messes in the most horrific of circumstances.’ Instead, she sees the brilliant light of her broader impact and importance, “We come into people’s lives when they have experienced something profound and sad and we help them.” The embrace transforms her life, the lives around her and everyone she touches with her important service delivered with her inspirational outlook.

In not just an embrace,, but an actual celebration of Failure, the ‘Think (Here) Blog’ has sponsored this week as ‘FAILweek’.

“The first week of February is '#FAILweek' where entrepreneurs and bloggers of all industries, experience levels, and from every corner of the globe come together to celebrate their past failures.”

While I have explored, dissected, analysed, reflected and illustrated a wide range of failure over the past half decade of blogging on the topic, aside from a few personal anecdotes, I haven’t actually delved that deeply into my own plenty-choose-from-contrary-to-outward-appearances failures.

FAILweek’s first mentions ‘entrepreneurs’ which are indeed a vein rich with failure gold. As I now have taken leave of corporate life starting my own ventures, the FAILweek call to action made me reflect on one of my earliest entrepreneurial initiatives...a complete failure.

Biere Benin. Biere Benin is the local beer from Togo, West Africa. As it happens, I took a year off from university to go live in Togo working as a travel writer. One of my many exotic discoveries was the local beer. Biere Benin. It was truly a revelation and delicacy.

When I returned to the USA in 1981, I undertook to see if one could import Biere Benin. Exotic imports were trendy (see below under ‘Trends’). Any exporting would be a help to a developing country like Togo. I approached a few distributors and they were encouraging and interested. So I developed a business and marketing plan and worked with the brewery to adapt the product packaging for the US import requirements. The opportunity seemed prime...

• Quality – First and foremost, start with a quality product. Sure, the mystique among the ex-pats in Togo was how great this Biere Benin was, but maybe the sun-baked throats would have loved any malt beverage. I was most convinced when I introduced the beer to visiting travel writers. A big part of my job was hosting journalists on assignment visits. These were seasoned hacks who had tasted local brews the world over and were paid to be critical in their reviews. Every one confirmed that BB was one of the best they had sampled in their many travels (“German tourists prefer is to German beer” from one of my press trips).
• Trends – The hot thing in the beer market was exotic imports. Beers from China, Poland, Mexico were just entering the market. The ‘yuppie’ demographic was willing to spend its increasing discretionary income on a premium for imports which provide new experiences and reflected the cosmopolitan style.
• Slogan – My college roommate and master word craftsman, Marc Scapicchio gave me a brilliant slogan for the campaign: “Rich enough of the connoisseur’s palate, bold enough to slake the African thirst.” Secret weapon.

After over a year of work, with no real money to invest as a college student, I had lined up a tentative order for a container load of product by one of New England’s top distributors. And then...it all crumbled. So what happened?

• Quality Perceptions – In the mid-eighties campaigns on the problems of disease and famine rose culminating in the historic Live Aid event. While this trend raised awareness of a terrible plight as well as millions of charitable donations, it nonetheless tainted ‘brand Africa’ as a dirty, squalid place. Not the kind of place where you would want to buy your refreshing beverage.
• Trend Shifts – By the time I was able to manage the negotiation and repackaging (delayed by the limited funds and nothing like the Internet but telexes and postal mail), the beer winds had shifted. By the mid-eighties, the new trend was micro-breweries from around the country. Imports from other US state rather than other world countries. In fact, the local brew Sam Adams beer had just been introduced.
• Anchor Customers – While it is all very good targeting a growing and lucrative segment (‘yuppie connoisseurs’), most imported beers have a mainstay that introduces people to the product and provides a regular outlet regardless of retail trends – ethnic restaurants. Tsingtao got started in Chinese restaurants, Corona in Mexican, Tiger in India, etc. The thing was that there just weren’t any ‘African’ restaurants to provide a dependable outlet for sales.

I lost the deal with United Distributors as they were overwhelmed by the growth for mainstream exports like Corona and were reading the new trends for micro-breweries. Turning adversity to advantage is all about lessons and growth as the silver lining. I learned enormous lessons about the practicalities of getting a product to market that goes far beyond the spreadsheets and segmentation of a clever plan. I was proud to have tried, and was pleased to have not really lost much except my pride and my dream, but in their place I gleaned invaluable business lesson and insight they can’t teach you in schools and a fond memories of a noble venture.

I recently read Michael Brooks’ book Thirteen Things That Don’t Make Sense which delves into a diverse set of scientific subjects from some very specific unexplained phenomena (eg. ‘The Pioneer Anomaly’, The Wow! Signal), to some very broad scientific concepts that really lack strong models or explanations (eg. Sex, Free Will, Life).

1. The Missing Universe
2. The Pioneer Anomaly
3. Varying Constants
4. Cold Fusion
5. Life
6. Viking
7. The Wow! Signal
8. A Giant Virus
9. Death
10. Sex
11. Free Will
12. The Placebo Effect
13. Homeopathy

The underlying message of the book is that these failures are great boons to scientific exploration and progress. It is a powerful antidote to any complacent person who thinks that science has already discovered everything of significance.

“There is something inspiring about this – and any – anomaly. When Thomas Kuhn wrote ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ in the early 1960s, he wanted examine the history of science for clues to the nature of discovery. The clues led him to invent the term – now a cliché – ‘paradigm shift’. Scientists work with one set of ideas how the world is. Everything they do, be it experimental or theoretical work, is informed by, and frames within, then set of ideas. There will be some evidence that doesn’t fit, however. At first, that evidence will be ignored or sabotaged. Eventually, though, the anomalies will pile up so high they simply cannot be ignored. Then comes crisis. Crisis, Kuhn said, is soon followed by the paradigm shift in which everyone gains a radically new way of looking at the world. Thus were conceived ideas like relativity, quantum theory, and the theory of plate tectonics.”

“Admitting that you’re stuck doesn’t come easily to scientists; they have lost the habit of recognizing it as the first step on a new and exciting path. But once you’ve done it, and enrolled your colleagues in helping resolve the sticky issue rather that proudly having them ignore it, you can continue with your journey. In science, being stuck can be a sign that you are about to make a great leap forward. The things that don’t make sense are, in some ways, the only things that matter.”

Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid again. This is my 10th post inspired by his comic and commentary genius. His current initiative is his ‘Evil Plans’ and he is starting to reveal portions of them. This week he posted ‘Evil Plans and Big Companies’ and half of his 6 points embraced failure...

“2. If your EVIL PLAN is not aligned with what your company is doing, you have two choices. Quit and go do something else, or give up your EVIL PLAN.”

“4. Risk. I always liked Robert Scoble’s line, “If what you’re doing doesn’t risk getting you fired, it probably isn’t that interesting.” People who are very risk averse don’t get to play in the EVIL PLANS sandbox. That, too is just reality, and no crazy-ass cartoonist’s blog post will change that.”

“6. Practice. Fail. Practice some more. Fail some more. Keep practicing and failing. Eventually you’ll get there.”

On Christmas, our son Chase’s girlfriend, Isby, gave him a stuffed ‘Magikarp’, his favourite Pokemon character. For a sizeable chunk of the Millennial generation, their initial lifetime exposure to ‘strategy’ will not have been chess, or checkers/draughts, or board games, but Pokemon battles. When I asked why it was his favourite, his response was, “Magikarp is very bizarre. It is about the weakest character there is. Its only ‘attack’ is ‘Splash’ which does absolutely nothing. But if you are really patient, Magikarp evolves into Gyarados, one of the most powerful Pokemon.”

Bulbapedia (Wikipedia for Pokemon) describes, “[Magikarp] is usually overlooked by trainers because it is pathetically weak: even in the heat of battle it will do nothing but flop around. It is not a strong swimmer, and currents in the water will sweep it downstream. They are normally seen using Splash, which is unusual, as it makes them easy targets to predators.”

Now with his own Magikarp cuddly toy, Chase truly embraces this seeming failure of a Pokemon. A chip off the old block.

I’ve often turned to film for great illustrations of embracing failure. As it happens, this blog is the third highest Google entry for the search “Land of the Misfit Toys”. That post always gets a bit of a spike of hits during the holidays, but this year it has rocketed with the appearance of the Verizon advert which uses the characters. Over 90% of the visits to my blog in the past month have been for this post. Misfit toys indeed!

This year’s yuletide inspiration comes from one of the all time season classics, It’s A Wonderful Life. The film is one of my favourites, second only to Miracle on 34th Street as the best Christmas movie, but it was my online soul mate Failuremag.com which featured a superb post on the film which couldn’t be more apropos this season with the continued economic woes and community businesses facing the exact same issues as George in the film…

“At its core, It’s a Wonderful Life is a parable of a good, honest man who, after years of struggling to do the right thing, questions his life and the choices he’s made. Teetering on the brink of despair, the protagonist, George Bailey, finally concludes that his life has been a failure. Surmising that it might have been better if he had never been born, he contemplates suicide, only to be rescued by an angel determined to get his wings.

“While It’s a Wonderful Life is often referred to as a sentimental movie, the issues it presents—questioning what makes a man a failure or a success—are hardly lighthearted. Perhaps that accounts for the strong reactions it evokes. As the year ends, we tend to take stock of our own lives, questioning our worth and our place in a world that often doesn’t behave as we expect. Like George Bailey, things didn’t go as expected for It’s a Wonderful Life, the movie. But its story would have a happy ending too, emerging to become synonymous with Christmas and one of the most popular films of all time.”

“That’s the great thing—the film is about a whole life. Good things happen and bad things happen and a bank run happens and someone nearly drowns. The great thing about Wonderful Life is that it’s ambivalent. Failure is in the eye of the beholder. It depends on your expectations, your goals, and what your value system is.”

Curiously the piece goes on to describe art imitating life as the film itself struggled with failure through its creation and release.  The film is full of overtones of the ‘Death of Dreams’.  It takes an angel to show him the ‘success’ behind the veil of ‘failure’ as he celebrates in the final scene (video above), “A warrant for my arrest…isn’t it wonderful?  I’m going to jail!…Look at this wonderful drafty old house…”

I asserted at the outset of this blog that my focus in embracing failures excluded ‘tragedies’ which are truly disastrous events for which even the boldest silver linings seems like paltry compensation for the pain and loss entailed. Nonetheless, I recently read Stephen Jay Gould’s superb book ‘Full House’ (‘The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin’) and at the outset he talks about his cancer (from which he eventually succumbed in 2002) with a message I think suitable to the themes here. He protests against the insidious effects of the ‘positive attitude’ pressures that often abound in these terminally ill diagnoses...

“We must stand resolutely against the unintended cruelty of the ‘positive attitude’ movement – insidious slippage into a rhetoric of blame for those who cannot overcome their personal despair and call up positivity from some internal depth...No button reading ‘positive attitude’ protrudes from our hearts, and no finger can coerce positivity into immediate action by a single and painless pressing. How dare we blame someone for the long-standing constitution of their tendencies and temperament if, in an uninvited and unwelcome episode of life, another persona might have coped better? If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed to the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.”

Actually, the entire subject of the book is a form of embracing failure. The ‘failure’ for the stunning and powerful process of ‘evolution’ to actually account for any form of ‘progress’ in the natural world. He debunks the notion that ‘survival of the fittest’ necessarily leads to the divine destiny of human supremacy and the triumph of ever more sophisticated life forms. On the contrary, he makes a powerful argument that the most successful being to ever exist on the planet Earth is the bacterium.

Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari was imprisoned for 18 months for among other things charges of spying based on a fake interview in which he participated for the top US comedy programme ‘The Daily Show’. Was he bitter? Did he want begrudge Jon Stewart whose ribald complicity left him tortured and abused. Not in the least. He didn’t even harbour deep ill will to his captor, interrogator and jailer from the Revolutionary Guard. This clip on the Daily Show website tells his intriguing story as well as his perspective on turning the tragic adversity to advantage...

“It’s evil and stupid. You know whenever you take anything to the extremes, you see the humour in it and you see the stupidity in it and I think what the Iranian government did and my interrogator as representative of the Iranian government was to me stupid and funny at the same time. It was not funny when I was in the interrogation room blindfolded, in a dark room, being beaten...you know that was not funny. But going back to my cell, I had to laugh. You know that was my defensive mechanism...You know my interrogator for some reason after some time became my muse, he became my muse. He gave me ideas. He was so exaggerated in everything that he did, he just gave me ideas. I just laughed.” 

The acclaimed movie The Wrestler portrays a vivid picture of the deep downsides one hits when one does not embrace the failure of one’s dreams. I wrote about the Death of Dreams a while back with the conclusion that as hard as it may be, one does have to let go of certain dreams.

The soothing balm to dying dreams is (a) savouring the memories, and (b) replacing them with new dreams. The star of the film and the ring, Randy ‘Ram’ Robinson has a bag full of both that he can embrace, but instead he turns to the seductive route of a bag of steroids, painkillers and other artificial enhancements to keep his fading dreams on life support.  He has adoring fans, a proud legacy, a job he can actually enjoy and do well at, the spark of a renewed relationship with his daughter, and even the long sought after love of his life.  And yet all are jettisoned for the sake of not letting the dream die.

In the end, he painfully plays out the pain and loss one can suffer when one doesn’t embrace failure.  Really painfully.  In fact, if you don’t let your dreams die, then they can kill you [spoiler clarification – I’m not actually saying that Randy dies in the end].

Scott Adams has long been a hero of mine with his insight into corporate life. One of the things that appealed to me when I first started working at Microsoft years ago was that while I recognized a number of the dysfunctional characters and behaviours from previous roles, but I then couldn’t imagine Dilbert scenarios playing out in Microsoft offices (as Microsoft has grown in size and complexity, maybe the cartoons provoke more than a self-recognizing giggle from time to time these days).

His latest book ‘Stick to Drawing Cartoons, Monkey Brains’ publishes a range of his blog posts from recent years which cover a broad range of commentary and reflection. One of the recurring themes in talking about his own experience is the power of embracing failure...

“First, allow me to confess that I have failed at 90 percent of the things I have ever attempted. Failure rarely bothers me. I always learn something in the process, and the screwups provide a nice backdrop of humility for the few times when things work out.”

“To put all of this in context, I remind you again that I fail miserably about ten times for every one success. (That’s an accurate estimate. I’ve literally kept score.) The failures always involved activities for which I was completely unqualified. Ironically, I couldn’t even ‘keep my day job.’ On the other hand, my successes have all been in areas in which I had no obviously relevant background or experience whatsoever. I know that many will say I shouldn’t have written this non-Dilbert book, especially since it isn’t about business. Non-Dilbert books are not my area of expertise. ‘Stick to drawing comics’ is the advice I will hear more times that I care to count. You might be thinking it already. I’m used to it. If I had listened to that sort of advice in the past, I would never have done anything interesting in my life, much less be successful. Was it smart to write this sort of book, or will it turn out to be another in a long list of my failures and embarrassments. Beats me.”

“While I’ve had some notable successes, the vast majority of things I’ve attempted have been flops. But I shake them off and keep on plugging. I always learn something from the flops that helps me later. For example, failing at my corporate career made me a better cartoonist.”

His chapter ‘Lights Out’ tells the tale of doing a ‘keynote speech’ for a big event (which earns him a big fee and is a huge step outside his comfort zone) where everything just fell apart:

“I was standing in front of a corporate group, a few minutes into my keynote address, when the lights went out. The lights returned in a few seconds, but the power surge fried the AV equipment. My professional keynote speech, of which 75 percent involves showing comics and telling stories about them, was dead on arrival. As it became clear to the assembled executives that the equipment wasn’t going to work, they looked at me with what I can only assume was a mixture of pity and ‘glad it’s not me.’ Researchers say that public speaking is one of the great fears in life. But what if you have no speech and you’re already in front of the crowd? That’s gotta be worse. But I didn’t feel fear. I’m not wired in that way. I felt amused. This was something new. I like a challenge.”

He goes on to describe how he made a few quips, turned the session into a Q&A and steered difficult (and boring) questions into more interesting areas. In the end, he concluded “It was the most fun I’ve ever had giving a speech. I feel most alive when things go wrong and routine gives way to emotion. With any luck, something will go wrong today, too. I sure hope so.”

He has a chapter called “Knowing When to Quit” (“Quitting is underrated.”). “So how do you know when to ail out of a losing idea? I heard a useful rule about predicting success during my (failed) attempt at creating a hit Dilbert TV show...If everyone exposed to the product likes it, the product will not succeed...The reason that a product ‘everyone likes’ will fail is because no one ‘loves’ it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10 percent of the consumers have it.”

He also concludes the chapter with, “If you plan to try ten things knowing that nine will fail, it’s a good idea to pursue ventures that won’t kill you if they fail. I prefer challenges where the worst-case scenario is that I’m embarrassed or tired, as opposed to bankrupt or dead. And I prefer challenges where the upside potential is unlimited even if unlikely. But those are personal choices. I find it easy to shrug off failure, so failing 90 percent of the time works for me. Your mileage may vary.”

Finally, “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

Today’s inspiration comes from the more spiritual side where there is plenty of soul food on the banquet table of embracing failure. I heard Salavation Army Editor in Chief Lt Col Charles King on the ‘Pause for Thought’ piece of BBC2 last week (1 hour and 49 minutes into the broadcast if you want to hear it on iPlayer here).

He discusses how ‘accepting’ failure with a courtesy of apology is often not enough. His proposal for ‘making amends’ is really ‘embracing’ the failure and its repercussions and taking responsibility for them rather than dismissing them with a cordial statement. I also like his pragmatic argument that embracing failure with forgiveness has proven health benefits.

“[A book I read] shows an old fashioned Salvationist wearing one of those Salvation Army bonnets that Salvation Army women haven’t worn for thirty years holding a poster that’s been altered to say, ‘We’re wrong.’ The editors used it to illustrate a review of a book on the importance of owning up to your own mistakes and forgiving other peoples’...It declares that simply saying ‘sorry’ is not always enough. It says the word ‘sorry’ is uttered 368 million times a day in the UK...usually as a reflex. But sincerity requires something more specific. For example, ‘I was wrong’. Also, it says, making amends is better than saying ‘I’m sorry’ no matter how grovelling the apology, putting it right is better...Although forgiving the mistakes of other people is hard, research shows it is linked to lower blood pressure and better sleep quality...It is excellent advice for business people, no doubt, and as it happens, all to be found at the heart of Jesus’ teaching in the New Testament. Forgiveness is absolutely a requirement for those who would follow Christ’s example and so too is repentance which is what saying ‘sorry’ is all about.”

Katie Ledger’s just released book, ‘And What Do You Do?’ is a primer to personal entrepreneurship. Building up ‘You’ Incorporated. As explored on many occasions (Secrets from Failure, Don’t Worry Be Crappy, The Alza Moment, Startupfailures.com), ‘entrepreneurship’ is a ripe field for illustrating the upsides of embracing downsides.

The book is constantly highlighting the important of overcoming the fear of failure, understanding ones failures, accepting the inevitability of failure and learning from failure. In fact, one section is entitled ‘Learning from Failures’.

“We prefer to use the word ‘setbacks’ instead of ‘failure’. However, it’s a term commonly used and one that often has dire psychological consequences for people who use it, which is why we’ve put it in inverted commas here. The word ‘failure’ is normally used pejoratively. Rarely can it be used descriptively as almost always it’s someone’s opinion. And almost always what we really mean is that something that we have tried hasn’t worked out. That is the be all and end all of it. Yet sadly we then label the experience as a failure and all too often broaden that out to state that we are a failure. We believe strongly that we wouldn’t get far in life without some things going wrong for us. The challenge is to ensure that we learn from what went wrong.”

More than just accepting bona fide, past failure, Katie promotes actively embracing potential, future failure...

“Whatever your current work status, we would very strongly urge you to think like a freelancer. If you knew your job was being axed in two months’ time, what exactly would you be doing today, tomorrow and the day after that? If you knew you’d be searching for a new job or jobs,how would you go about it? Where would you start?”

She goes on to talk about the opportunities that ‘reinvention’ present. The entertainment world is rife with examples of reinvention – Madonna, Kylie. But I can speak from personal testimony of the power of personal reinvention. My father reinvented himself from an architect to a clergyman becoming an expert in church architecture. My wife, Lori, is in the process of reinventing herself from a classical singer to a vocologist with an eye to becoming a specialist in treating professional voice users. The lesson here is that the field one ‘abandons’ is not a ‘loss’, but rather the foundation to bringing specific and distinctive extra dimension to the new field. One does not have a ‘hopping’ career (hopping from one job to another), but a ‘portfolio’ with each set of experiences expanding and enriching each new venture.

A great read with colourful (in both illustration and language) cartoons from digerati doyen Hugh Macleod.

As Konosue Matsushita is a paragon of Leadership/Management harmony, it is not surprising that his path to that status was filled with a lifetime of embracing failure.

“In a pattern that would be repeated throughout his life, KM turned hardships that often exhaust people into a source of learning and, ultimately, into a driving force behind his subsequent success.”

“He was thrown into poverty at age four, lost one sibling at age five, two more at age six, and was forced to leave his mother at age nine. These events would have unleashed powerful emotions: sadness, anger, humiliation. As his parents helped direct those feelings, he undoubtedly began to dream of a far better future. Those ambitions then helped him to take advantage of the harsh apprenticeship years...At a very young age, he also developed a sense of independence and a willingness to take risks. Perhaps most of all, he learned something about coping with difficult times and benefiting from them.”

“In many ways, the initial phase of KM’s life ended on that day in June of 1917. He graduated from a difficult childhood, an apprenticeship, and the journeyman years, and he moved in a new direction...His life would become even harsher, at least for a while. But that possibility did not deter him much. By this time, Matsushita knew he could handle hardship and grow even stronger as a result. He had been doing just that for nearly two decades.”

“In subsequent speeches and books, Matsushita said repeatedly that he thought economic hard times were good for the company. He clearly believed, from his own experiences earlier in life, that adversity could make one stronger. ‘Workers must submit to many test and difficult discipline before they can be considered mature and trustworthy.’ He wrote in his autobiography. ‘One of the most effective tests of workers’ dedication and resourcefulness is imposed when their company encounters financial difficulties and must pull itself out of a crisis.’“

USA Today interviewed Annie Duke on a topic I have touched on several times here (Harmony and Humility, Embracing Variance), the application of the lessons from poker to the world of business. Her strong finish in Celebrity Apprentice provided a more familiar setting to business problems. Many of the most common insights are about accepting failures that are inevitable...

“Q: You were defeated on the final episode of Celebrity Apprentice by Joan Rivers. Any lessons learned?”

“A: The lesson is that business is not always fair. The person who does the best job doesn’t always get promoted. I worked the hardest, I was the most creative and the best leader. Things are not always fair and I know that from poker. You can put your money in with aces and your opponent has fives. You’re supposed to win 82% of the time, but 18% happens. Poker teaches you that there things you have control over and things you don’t.”

“Q: Business leaders wrestle with playing it safe vs. Taking a risk. How do you decide when to fold or go all-in?”

“A: ...It’s not about being right, it’s about being right often enough...Shrug you shoulders when you are wrong. Great players free themselves from the worry of being wrong.”

My parents have the notion of the ‘18%’ factor with regards to vacations. Their view is that when you are on holiday, you are outside of your familiar area, your routine, your support infrastructure and your flexibility is limited. As a result, what invariably happens is an out off the blue expense that under ‘normal’ circumstances you would consider to be a ‘rip off’. It can often be distressing. The over charged cab fare, the currency exchange miscalculation, the unanticipated surcharge. My parent’s point is that one just has to accept these extra, seemingly very bad luck costs as just part of the vacation experience. You will realise that somewhere along the trip you are going to have to cough up some extra, unanticipated amount. But if you accept these mini-financial failures, you can move on and they won’t ruin your holiday. They call the ‘18%’ – ‘vacation tax’. And whenever an unfortunate extra charge hits them on holiday, they just shrug their shoulders and say, ‘oh well, vacation tax!’ 

Hugh MacLeod has been regular inspiration to insights on especially the ‘embracing failure’ posts here – The Merton Prayer, The Genius and the Showing Up, Crazy, Deranged Fools, Futile Marketing, Changers and Contributors, The ‘Mid’ Life Crisis of the American Dream, The Death of Dreams, Seth Godin “The Dip”.  Much of Hugh MacLeod’s ‘Ignore Everybody’ book carries a sub-text of ‘embracing failure’. He openly shares his own frustrations, obstacles and stumbling blocks and paints them as critical passages on his path to personal satisfaction and other successes. But the chapter that elucidates it perhaps the most explicitly is #13 ‘If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.’

“The pain of making the necessary sacrifices always hurts more than you think it’s going to. I know. It sucks. That being said, doing something seriously creative is one of the most amazing experiences that one can have, in this or any other lifetime. If you can pull it off, you’ll learn many incredible, magical, valuable things. It’s not doing it – when you know full well you had the opportunity – that hurts for more than any failure.”

A song echoing the sentiments of ‘The Race’ itself emerged into the inspirational words concluding the historic Obama victory - ‘Pick Yourself Up’ from the 1936 Fred Astaire film ‘Swing Time’.

In its Obama Inauguration coverage, the Sunday Times noted the allusion in his line “Starting from today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

“Pick yourself up, take a deep breath, dust yourself off
And start all over again, nothing’s impossible I have found
For when my chin is on the ground, I pick myself up
Dust myself up, and start all over again
Don’t lose your confidence if you slip
Be grateful for a pleasant trip, just pick yourself up and dust yourself off
And start all over again,
Work like a soul inspired, til’ the battle of the day is won.
You may be sick and tired, but you’ll be a man my son.
Will you remember the famous men, who had to fall to rise again?
So take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start again.”

Billy Childish pens an article in the Sunday Times called ‘In Praise of Limitation’. Sort of a variant of praising ‘failure’, ie a failure of possibilities.

He speaks from the first hand experience of having lived a rock and roll lifestyle where fame and fortune gave the delusion that life had no limitations and that this was a good thing. Now, having ‘enjoyed’ that supposedly enviable lack of limitations, he has seen starkly how detrimental and painful it is.

Specifically, Childish presents a 12 point ‘manifesto against the cult of hedonism’ which starts with the following three points (which are my favourites)...

1. Limitations are not obstacles, but what help to make us decent, humane human beings.

2. Reality, as opposed to drug-induced idiocy, enables us to meet ourselves and gives traction in an otherwise gluttonous and pointless existence.

3. If you don’t limit yourself, nature will limit your life for you.

We’ve just concluded this year’s commencement season watching and celebrating our daughter Isley’s commencement from Exeter University a week ago. Just a couple of days ago, I capped off her graduation driving down to Exeter to pick up the last of stuff for storage in our garage until she settles into her own place. Like so many of her 2009 vintage, she is struggling to make that step into the labour force and finding the whole transition of constant set-backs and dead-ends especially frustrating after three wonderful years of development, growth, support and ambition.

Back in November, I naturally posted about Obama’s election under the Leadership and Management side of this blog, but he has proven to be just as prescient on the subject of turning adversity to advantage. Thanks to Amber for her post on Obama’s perspectives on failure featuring the characteristically eloquent quote from Obama’s commencement address at the University of Southern New Hampshire. Very apropos words to Isley and her classmates in facing similar challenges...

“Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”

Congratulations, commiserations and courage to the Class of 2009.

‘Torn’ – My new acronym for “Taking Ones-self Really ‘Npretentiously”.

As I have written several times, one of the core personal qualities to embracing failure is humility (The Merton Prayer, Bill Gates Last Day, Failure is Always an Option, Harmony and Humility, Lousy Teacher). One of my favourite demonstrations of humility is Natalie Imbruglia’s Amnesty International benefit concert appearance to perform her hit song ‘Torn’.

A typical and well done love ballad about sadness and loss that became ‘one of the biggest hits of the nineties.’ As one of her defining and crowning successes, she could have been very precious about it and quite possibly miffed when it because the subject of one of the all-time top Internet parodies – David Armand’s mime rendition (if you were one of the few on the Internet who somehow missed this video, watch it first to get the context). But instead of distancing herself from this complete failure of taking a serious song seriously, she embraced it in a stunning performance for an outstanding cause. The result is as touching and inspiring as it is funny. One of the key mottos of embracing failure is ‘Never take yourself too seriously’ (Benjamin Zander’s Rule #6) and Imbruglia is a poster child for that sentiment.

One of the characteristics that I always admired about Bill Gates was his propensity to never take himself too seriously. As commented on here before, he is quite humble and modest and dressing up in funny costumes and doing silly skits couldn’t be father from his comfort zone, but he does them because he recognises that it can help the business and can bring a smile to people’s faces.

Sometimes a failure is just what one needs on the playing field to inspire greater victory. The ‘wake up call’.

As the rowing season finishes up for the year, this lesson hit home this year with the results of the biggest race of the year by the team of 14 year old girl rowers that I coach for our local school, Sir William Borlase Grammar School.  They are the strongest group I have seen in my 6 years coaching and we all knew they had a real shot at a national medal. They had trained and prepared exceptionally well.  And on the big day, tragedy and horror, within the first half one girl had fallen off her seat and another had caught a boat stopping ‘crab’. Despite great rowing, they were in last place.  That could have been the end of it, but instead the girls got it together and seemed to find guts and determination that they didn’t even know was there to power through a come from behind upset into the Bronze medal third place position. Some cheering fans reflected that if only the mishaps hadn’t happened, they could have finished even higher.  But my fellow coaches and I agreed that the mishaps actually sparked something deep inside them that spurred the truly exceptional performance in the final 500 metres.  Speaking to one of the girls afterwards, she acknowledged that when the mistakes happened, they all just got so mad that they dug deeper than they ever thought possible.

The event evoked my own personal experience with sports failure that ended up in the sports highlight of my life. When I was at Ipswich High School, I played American football. As it happens, our team had been one blessed with an exceptional array of talent. For years as we came up through the grades, everyone thought we would be one of the great teams that my hometown of Ipswich had ever had. When we got to our senior year, we indeed notched up big win after big win, until one cold and wet Saturday we met our arch rivals - Newburyport - who too had a very strong team that year. After a long, arduous battle back and forth, the Newburyport team scored a touchdown that put them 1 point over us in the final minutes. It seemed as if our dreams of not just that day, or even the season, but several years of anticipation had been dashed. However, given the vagaries of tournament maths, it turned out that with the remainder of our season flawless and a few other breaks by other contenders, the grand finale State championship bowl selection turned out to be, yes, Ipswich vs. Newburyport. The final score: Ipswich 54, Newburyport 13. The game was a complete, dominating romp by us. The key? The bone-shaking trauma of our loss a few months before. That failure stirred something powerful inside us to leave absolutely nothing to chance on the big bowl day.