Fear vs. Hope and Compassion: What Poverty Taught Me About the Meaning and Measure of “Success.”

While some families are focusing on the holidays, others are worried about fourth quarter revenue numbers. In a few weeks, some will be contemplating New Year’s resolutions while others will remain consumed by what they’ll do for their next paycheck.

For so many of us, there is a great, yawning divide between fear and hope. Often that fear, the anxieties about the future or even our own capabilities, leaves us with a lack of compassion toward others and, most especially, toward ourselves. Giving in to that fear and not investing in compassion inevitably costs us energy, happiness and success. I know; I’ve lived through it.

As I look toward the future and opportunities on the horizon, I’m reminded of my past and the barriers I’ve pushed through to get to where I am in my life and career today. Growing up in extreme poverty, having been homeless twice and living through decades of abuse, my lens could be skewed to focus on the threats and real possibilities of failure.

But I’ve also been blessed by people in my personal and professional life who have seen and shared the possibilities for a better and brighter tomorrow. I’ve seen compassion. I’ve been offered opportunities to express compassion and hope. I’ve grown to understand that compassion and hope are two of the greatest gifts you can offer to others. Along with forgiveness, they’re among the greatest gifts you can offer to yourself, too. While my experiences are uniquely mine, the lessons I’ve learned about life and leadership are applicable to everyone.

"Fear is an exhausting illusion of prescience and control."

In the past couple of weeks, I separated from my most recent family, North Coast Community Homes. While I love the organization, the people there, and its mission – it was time. My focus and drive has been on innovation and opportunity. With some fluxes and changes in leadership, the organization is refocusing on the very core of what they do. It’s understandable and necessary. It also means that someone with my skill set is a little… superfluous. So with a heavy heart, we parted ways, making room for a team with more focus on charitable giving.

I understand not all partings are so amicable. Regardless, ending my role could have triggered a lot of anxiety. If I measured my success with a laser focus on where I am in my career today, it would be easy to lose sight of how far I’ve come and the many possible roads ahead of me on my journey.

If I reflect on where I am today, I don’t want to examine it in terms of fear: what if I don’t find another role, what if I run out of savings, what if I’m not as capable of success as I want to believe? There are as many of those fearful what ifs as there are possibilities for something brighter and better. Fear is an exhausting illusion of prescience and control.

Instead of fear of a possible unknown future, I can inhabit today. I can draw energy from hope and build on my successes and contributions. Yes, my life has taken painful turns and included grim moments. But the most poignant lesson life has taught me is that we all need to take time to inhabit, express and enjoy our moments of accomplishment.

Why? Why should we take stock of our success? Because doing so gives us energy.

By taking the time to dwell on and experience joy, we renew our motivation. Every single day we experience setbacks, complications and the unexpected. Each of those experiences saps a bit of our energy and resolve. It’s a normal part of life. Our resilience and hope helps us get through those moments so they don’t become paralyzing or worse, toxic.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist. Compassion toward others is easy for me, but being a perfectionist, it’s often hard to offer myself that same flexibility and support. Intellectually, I know mistakes are inevitable. We aren’t machines. We have limited cognitive and emotional resources. Mistake will happen. I try to practice remembering that sometimes mistakes are opportunities.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has a philosophy that can be summed up as “Fail fast. Fail often.” With a focus and drive on innovation and finding product market fit for new offerings, it makes sense that they see failure as a necessary step on the road to success.

Alphabet understands failure doesn’t happen in a vacuum and time doesn’t freeze when we fail. With an abiding focus on hope and possibility, failure isn’t to be feared. Instead it’s a learning opportunity, a sign of progress and a footnote that guides us in a better direction. Alphabet’s philosophy transforms failure from something that saps energy and paralyzes creativity to something that helps them achieve happy teams and billions of dollars in revenue.

Such a philosophy isn’t easy to accept when we’re conditioned to view failure as something to be avoided at all costs and punished when it inevitably happens. Even knowing that failure is necessary to learn, to grow and, ultimately, to succeed doesn’t always make it easier to be forgiving; especially when the consequences of a mistake are (or seem) insurmountable.

When I was 13, I experienced homelessness for the second time in my life. My mom and stepdad were living in a car. I was couch surfing, staying for days or weeks with whomever would take me in. Eventually, I got a collect call from my mom that shifted my focus from just living one day to the next to wanting something better for the future. My mom was sobbing as she explained that my stepdad had punched her, pushed her out of the car, and driven off. She didn't know what she was going to do.

I had neither answers nor resources. I also couldn't stay helpless or focused on my own day to day survival. I had met my grandfather twice in my life, when our housing was stable enough that he could come visit us. I knew he lived in a small town in Michigan. So, I dialed information, found his number and called. I explained our situation and told him we needed to come home, because neither of us had any options. He arranged to purchase plane tickets for my mom and me. And just like that, there was the possibility of light at the end of the tunnel.

When I first moved back to Michigan from sunny Southern California, it was with a heart full of hope that my life might finally be changing. My mom and I spent a few months living with my grandfather and his new wife before settling into a little efficiency apartment. My mom is intellectually disabled. At the time, she was also overcoming drug addiction. She didn’t have the life skills to live fully independent or make smart decisions regarding how best to manage the income from the small monthly check she received.

Our tiny apartment quickly filled with garbage, which attracted ants and roaches. We constantly ran out of staples, such as milk, toilet paper, and even those large bags of bulk cereal. With winter in full swing and no connection to anyone in this new town, I was miserable and lonely. My whole life had been flashes of light and warmth that were swallowed up in what I believed was an insurmountable sea of darkness. I thought coming to Michigan was yet another mistake. In California, at least there were people who wanted to take care of me and who told me I could be something. So, without any vision or hope for a better future, I withdrew more and more. That first semester of high school, I missed something like 49 days of school.

I ended up moving back in with my grandparents. Neither party was 100% happy about the situation. My grandfather had already raised six children and my step-grandmother never had (and didn’t want) kids.

My basics were taken care of, though, and I started going back to school. I made a few friends. I got accepted into a class, Meta-Cognitive Thinking, that was normally reserved for juniors and seniors. My mind was alit with desire to understand more about how our brains work and how we make decisions.

I was connected with a counselor to help me process and talk through some of the things I had seen and experienced, and those new experiences made me want to learn more about helping others, too. To this day, there are words of hope and compassion gifted to me in both my class and in counselling sessions – “You made the best decision you could with the information you had at the time.”

Those are words I share with others as often as I can.

My life wasn’t all roses and rainbows during and after high school. But I was slowly learning that inhabiting my moments of success and having compassion toward myself and others when I experienced failure or setbacks was a better, happier way of living. 

Because I have witnessed the reality of how quickly things can spiral downward, it still takes effort sometimes to practice hope and compassion. But see, there is also a freedom in understanding that something will inevitably go wrong or not according to plan. When you understand that sometimes “failure” is just a new road, a different avenue to an opportunity you couldn’t see previously, that can be exhilarating!

So, here is the moral of my little story. None of us can see the whole road ahead, but that doesn’t mean we have to live our lives searching the shadows behind us. We can fear the future or we can inhabit our successes and seek joy. We can fear failure or we can see it as a something that occurs as we grow, learn, and live – and recognize it as something to pass through as we move, full of hope, in the direction of our dreams. We can let fear of our mistakes and the mistakes of others seize us and shake us, or we can have the compassion to see and hope for the best in ourselves and others and we can practice that compassion through forgiveness.

In a way, isn’t that really what this holiday season is about? Moreover, isn’t the real measure of success not how often we escape the pangs of failure or how cautiously we live our lives, but instead how much joy and comfort we experience and share?

If you’d like, in the spirit of inhabiting and celebrating our successes and moments of joy, I’d invite you to share any of yours. I’m always happy celebrate in someone’s success or the trials they’ve arisen through. You never know how your bright moment might inspire someone else with hope.