I’ve been lurking on the Carnival of Journalism for a while now. Every month I told myself I’d write the next month. I finally got around to it for this month’s topic: Failure.
A failure in your life (personal or professional) that has lessons. It must be your failure and you must take responsibility. But this will be a safe space to discuss our failings and what we can learn from them.
I decided to write about this because I don’t fail.
What I mean is that I’ve developed a sense of optimism and resiliency that forces me to see the upside of a crappy situation and move forward. I fail every day — spill coffee on my shirt, forget to ask a key question in an interview, leave an important detail out of my story. But I frame the situations positively — I needed to get rid of that old shirt, I can ask the question again and write another story, I’ve got a blog post ready for the next day.
I don’t know where I get this from. A first child thing? Pressure from my parents to always do better? Too stubborn to admit failure?
I stopped moving for a few failures, and the one that sticks out the most happened during my first year in college.
I decided to fill my science requirements by concentrating in “brain and cognitive sciences.” It sounded smart and cool, which I thought I was — I won a big-money scholarship, achieved a 4.0 GPA first semester, edited the features section at the student newspaper as a freshman.
I signed up for Foundations of Cognitive Science — perception, language, memory — anxious to have my mind blown.
After a few weeks, the only thing blown was my GPA.
Reading for my three literature classes took priority over the obscure sciency text so I had no clue what was going on during the lectures. Not that it mattered — the class was held the mornings after production nights. If we put the paper to bed on time at 7 a.m., I could fit a two-hour nap in before class. If.
Final grades were determined by two out of three tests. If you did well enough on the first two, you didn’t have to take the last one during finals week. I bombed the first test and picked up the studying. But I was too far behind, and I bombed the second test. I calculated my odds of getting anything better than a C on the last test (which I needed to get a C in the class) were as good as winning the lottery and using the money to travel to the moon (this was soon after pop star Lance Bass announced his mission to outer space.)
My academic adviser told me I had two options: Fail or withdraw. Had I visited her a week later, I would have missed the withdrawal deadline and been forced to take a D on my shiny transcript.
My hand shook so much while filling out the paperwork that I had to start over. I cried in the adviser’s cubicle.
“I fail at waterskiing and playing video games against my brother,” I said. “I don’t fail at school.”
“But you didn’t fail,” she said. “You withdrew. You got out and are going in another direction.”
Lesson learned: It’s not failing to change midcourse, make a plan, move forward. Also, it’s better to seek help at the first sign of trouble — not when the ship is halfway (or two-thirds of a semester) to the bottom of the ocean.
Impending failures can be turned around and I look for them as I work on daily stories, investigative projects and redecorating my apartment. I persist through failures as best I can, and when I’ve flat on my face failed and there’s no way to fix it, I document the failure (journal, post-it on my desk) and start over.
I did this last night with this post. I saved the “failed” part in a file on my computer, a small reminder that it’s OK and even productive to fail.
Making and using a Plan B might not be called “withdrawal” in the real world, but it’s not failure either.
