Failure is the best teacher
What this weekly newsletter is all about: Analyzing, discussing, and prescribing best practices for families in both education and youth sports. Please follow, share, or comment. Thank you!
Newsletter content:
- Overview & book excerpts;
- Article of the week;
- Video of the week;
- Tweet of the week;
- Exercise of the week
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Overview & book excerpts-->
Our fear of failure is actually due to our ego. We do not want to make a mistake at work because we are afraid that people will think less of us, not because we are acutely fearful of losing our income. We are afraid that our children will make a mistake in a game and feel the sting of embarrassment and scorn from their teammates, and this will crush their self-esteem. Coaches are afraid that their practices will not look perfect and people will gossip that they do not know what they are doing. The refs fear getting berated because of a missed call. We fear that we will make a mistake driving on the road, and our passengers will call us out. This list is endless and unique to each of us.
Some undisputed facts:
- Everyone fails: If you never fail, you are not active in life. That may be the most tragic failure of all, no?
- We have been conditioned to see failure as inherently negative, as an indictment of who we are, as something to be ashamed of.
- Many of the people who try to convince others that failure is something to be feared and avoided at all costs are those who have never reached the heights that they initially aspired to; misery loves company. Their regrets are minimized by getting others to buy into their worldview.
- If we don't fail, then we never learn. We are evading the one thing that will actually help us!
Babies aren not ashamed when they fall down. They love it.!They think it is hilarious and are pumped to give walking another shot. The people that consistently achieve things that the rest of us marvel at maintain that love of learning and resist the temptation to give into the trepidation that has shackled the majority of us. (See below for the video of Kobe breaking down how failure doesn't even exist!)
Soccer star Ally Wambach used part of her commencement speech at Barnard College in May 2018 to highlight the opportunity that we have if we are brave in the face of defeat. Wombach gave four pieces of advice to the graduates, and this was number one: “Here’s something the best athletes understand, but seems like a harder concept for non-athletes to grasp. Non-athletes don’t know what to do with the gift of failure. So they hide it, pretend it never happened, reject it outright, and they end up wasting it. Listen: Failure is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to be powered by. Failure is the highest octane fuel your life can run on. You gotta learn to make failure your fuel.”
The problem is that society has conditioned us to believe that failure is the worst thing that can happen, rather than the beautiful opportunity that it actually is. So what can we do?
Jeff LoVecchio has a very popular podcast called The Hockey Think Tank and also trains NHL players and prospects. He notes that the players who most often end up making it are the ones who have been forged via the struggle. “We talk about this all the time on the podcast. You want your kid to struggle, and if your kid is not struggling, you need to give them that opportunity. So throw them in a practice with older kids where they can get taken down a notch and realize that they are not the best player. I think all of the best players had some type of struggle in their youth development. I played against Sidney Crosby in youth hockey and he was playing two years up. He was really good, but he wasn't the best player on the ice because he was younger. He may have had the most talent but he had to struggle when he was playing against older and more physically developed players. I want kids to struggle when they are younger, because you don’t want that first experience of struggle when they get to juniors, D1, or pro.”
So amend your relationship with failure. Bill Jean King says that "Pressure is a privilege". Well so is failure. Failure should not be feared; it should be embraced for what it shows us. If Edison had been afraid of failing, then he would never have invented all the products that he did. He used those failures to continue to move up the ladder one experiment at a time. Failure is what allows us to recalibrate. It gives us feedback if we are on the right path, or if we should completely start over. Most importantly it cultivates our grit. So don't run from it...use it.
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Article of the week--> The Root Cause of Stress in Kids. Tim Elmore is spot on with his analysis that first we need to look at ourselves before we can actually help our children deal with, and more importantly lean from, failure.
"I believe we, as parents and teachers, allow our emotional baggage to get in the way of helping them transition into healthy adulthood. They’re unready because we actually failed to get them ready. We are fragile adults, getting offended if anyone (including their teacher) criticizes them. In reality, they likely need some constructive criticism."
"Let’s work on our own mental and emotional health so our kids know what happy, passionate, satisfied grown-ups look like. Let’s drop the perfect expectations. Let’s embrace the fact that failure happens to all of us. (In fact, it has to happen in order for us to fully mature.) Let’s embrace risk — and the consequences of bad decisions — so we know how to handle the tough times ahead. And let’s embrace all our warts and wrinkles while staying passionate about life. The next generation deserves a healthy leader."
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Video of the week--> This week's newsletter could really just be this video on repeat. It encapsulates everything we need to classify, face, and then reject fear. Most importantly, it is straight from the certified GOAT; The Black Mamba. The player that others were reverent for because of his work ethic, and his unrelenting competitive spirit. Kobe could literally not turn off his drive to win. Apocryphal stories detail him crushing little kids in pickup games because he was not able to tone down his battle level. So if someone scoffs at you for being "soft" by not prioritizing winning above learning, or who thinks "fear of failure" is the best motivator, tell them that Kobe would disagree.
"I play to learn... If you play with a fear of failing you'll have the pressure on yourself to play to capitulate to that fear, if you play with 'I want to win I want to win' then you have that fear of what happens if you don't [win]."
"Failure doesn't exist. What does failure mean? It is a figment of your imagination...If you fail on Monday, the only way it is a failure on Monday is if you don't try again on Tuesday."
"The worst possible thing is to stop and not learn."
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Tweet of the week--> Baseball is the most glaring illustration of daily and public endurance of failure. If you get 3 hits every 10 times you are up at bat, you are in the hall of fame. So you can strike out 7 times in a row, but if you go 3 for 3 the next game, you are back on track. As Crash says in Bull Durham "That means if you get just one extra flare a week, just one, a gork, a ground ball — a ground ball with eyes! — you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week and you’re in Yankee Stadium."
Milwaukee Brewer Christian Yelich spoke with Greg Olsen on how he deals with failure:
"My biggest advice to anyone who plays any sport...learn how to deal with failure...Eventually it's going to happen. The way you deal with it is kind of going to determine how long you are going to last."
"Watching when you had success is underrated, I think."
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Exercise of the week-->
See you next week!