Flops are part of life’s menu and I’ve never been one to miss out on any of the courses.--Rosalind Russell
There is no getting around it, is there? Failure is a definite drag. It’s hard. It hurts. It isn’t an experience that we happily invite into our lives.
But there are a heckuva lot more failures in life than there are successes. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t flopped numerous times--some minor failures, many major. In these challenging times, this economic downturn, you may be living through what you consider failure right now.
But the value of any failure lies in what we do with it. If we deny it or diminish it, we can’t learn from it. When I flop (as I do, often!), I have to face it squarely and ask myself why I failed--and be willing to learn from the answer. Then I can take another try. Having had a couple of practice runs (failures provide some really stunning practice), my chances for success are much greater. From this point of view, failure is just a practice run at success, a necessary step toward a glory. A grace, in other words.
It doesn't matter how many talents and gifts we have, or how often we succeed. it’s a rare glory that isn’t graced with at last one failure--likely, more than one. I wonder how many times Ginger Rogers fell on her fanny, or Merrill Streep missed a director’s cue. And I don’t dare tell you how many rejection letters I received for my China Bayles mystery series before an astute editor at Scribner’s read the first book and liked it.
So here is the bottom line, my dears. I’ve been telling you that it’s important for women to share our success stories. Now I’m telling you that it is much more important to share our failures. When we discover that our flops and fiascos look and sound a lot alike, we may discover that our lack of success isn’t an individual failure, but arises from something that is common to all of us: that it grows from our shared history as women, from our culture, and (perhaps especially) from male expectations of us.
Or maybe we learn that what we or others define as failure isn’t failure at all. That was what I discovered when I began to probe my reasons for abandoning my career as a university administrator and tenured professor--an abandonment that my colleagues viewed as either a failure of nerve or as stupendous stupidity. But when I began to collect the stories of other successful women who had left their careers, I discovered that we had not failed, but had redefined our ideas of success. My book, Work of Her Own, grew out of these conversations. The book is testimony to the importance of sharing what some might consider failure--and discovering that "failure" may be far more glorious than the little success we aimed for.
Which is why I’d like you to spend a few minutes writing about some of the flops in your life. Yes, I know. It’s embarrassing. Maybe it’s painful. Some fiascos are funny, but some may be almost too devastating to think about. But chin up, dears. Take heart, be brave, and write.
- Start by jotting down a half dozen of the failures you have experienced--the first ones that come to mind. Don't dig around for the best of the worst, just jot down the first that occur to you.
- Choose one. What flopped? What happened? When did it happen? Where? Who else was involved besides you?
- Why did it flop?
- What did you learn?
- Where did you go from there? (Hint: from the bottom, the only way out is up. Right?)
Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to “jump at de sun.” We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.--Zora Neale Hurston
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