Missing More Than Winning

There’s a famous Michael Jordan quote:?

“I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. 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 and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

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This last winter, I taught my 6-year-old daughter how to snow ski. Skiing has been a big part of my life since I was about 4 years old, I absolutely love being in the backcountry making fresh tracks or cruising a fresh groomer. I grew up in the northwest, so ski resorts and mountains were always readily accessible but living in the Midwest now, our options now are a bit more limited. So last week when we were on a family trip to Oregon/Washington, my daughter wanted to show of her skills for Grandpa (also an avid skier). Up to Mt. Hood we went, so she could catch some of the few remaining skiable days of summer up near Palmer Glacier.

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The entire drive up, Eliot was very excited, talking non-stop asking a million questions (as 6-year-old children do). One of her series of questions was fixated on validating if she was “a professional skier” or not. Eliot desires to be great at whatever she does, but still learning the virtue of patience, she tends to want to shortcut to mastery (we all know that cannot be done). After carefully dancing through those questions with her, we made it to the mountain and her first few runs were excellent (considering she hasn’t skied since March). Then she fell on the 4th run. This frustrated her, feeling like she had failed. But true to her character, she got up and made a few more runs, before calling it a morning.

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On the drive home, we talked about how falling is a part of learning. It means we are trying new things, just outside of our comfort zone. Next year, she will fall more, as she extends her experience into using poles, turning more frequently, and increasingly carving longer and longer runs. The season after that, she will fall even more, graduating to bigger mountains, more challenging runs, and on it goes.

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But just as I am obligated to remind Eliot of, we all must embrace the falls, and possibly even appreciate them. In an article by the NY Times, normalizing discussing our failures is a big part of growth also (something Eliot taught me on that drive home). “…having face-to-face conversations around failure can be especially effective in building stronger relationships among colleagues.” When we openly discuss our falls and failures, we do a few things naturally – we reflect (a superpower I’ve written about before), we leverage our support system (deepening relationships), and we lean into the miss to grow from it.

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We’ll all miss more than we win, it’s a fact of life. The way we treat those misses; however, determines how often we win going forward.