Everybody fails at some point, but there’s always a way forward.
Welcome to Couldn’t Be Me, a weekly advice column where I solicit your personal dilemmas and help out as best as I can. Have something I can help you with? Find me @_Zeets.
Failure is a natural and inescapable part of human life. We’re always failing in so many ways small and large — from leaving the oven light on to missing a game-winning tip-in that would have sealed a monumental upset.
To attempt anything, to have any ambition, guarantees that you will inevitably fail in some form. And yet, we tend to cling to disappointing moments, which can lead lead to low self-esteem or harsh indictments of ourselves. But there’s always a way forward from failure, and this week, we’ll look at different types of personal failures and how to engage with them.
Engineer: I manage risk for our family of four. Our house is catastrophically flooded right now and we/I didn’t think we needed flood insurance. I’m an engineer and manage risk for a living. I’m deeply disappointed in myself. ... My husband is beating himself up [because he feels he failed] his family because he couldn’t get more of our belongings out. I, of course, think that’s ludicrous (we have other housing and our kids are too young to really understand much).
CBM: I’m so sorry that happened to you. I can only imagine the pain and disappointment of such an event, especially for someone who sees themselves as responsible for managing risk for their family. But tragedies happen, and even the smartest and most careful of us still make mistakes when assessing how susceptible we are.
But as disappointed as you feel about the financial coverage of your house, it seems to me that you managed to mitigate the biggest risk, which is that you, your husband, and your children are all unharmed, and that you also have another place to go. A house is only as valuable as the people who live in it.
The same way that you forgive your husband for his own disappointment — which you know is ludicrous, even though it’s real and burdening for him — is how you should also forgive yourself. Focusing on smaller failures can often make it hard to take solace in how you avoided bigger and irreversible mistakes. You still have life and relative comfort. You’ve done well there.
The fact that you have the space to be disappointed about financial coverage after such an event is a small blessing. I think being disappointed is fine — sometimes mistakes have costly consequences — but you also have to forgive yourself at some point. I’m glad that your family is fine, and I hope that your recovery from the flood is quick.
Tacko: My basketball team played against one of the best teams in the country. We matched them well, and I particularly played great. Towards the end of the game, it seemed like it was a sure victory for us. But somehow we fucked it up at the last second. After such a good collective performance, our team lost, and our opponents are moving on in the tournament. Even though we played well, it’s still hard not to be disappointed by the outcome.
CBM: As Jean-Luc Picard said in Star Trek: Next Generation, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”
One of the most interesting things about sports is that the plight of athletes can serve as an elevated version of our own daily struggle to make sense from the world. Endless training and optimization of the mind and body is one way to inject some order into an otherwise chaotic existence. By mastering yourself, you master your external conditions. If you have trained to become good, then you should play well and your team should win.
But that’s not how sports always work. Sometimes events go wrong. Sometimes you play as well as you can, so well that you should win, but you still lose because of, say, a missed tip-in.
An big-time athlete’s state of mind of mind isn’t that different from ours. We are aware of the limits of our power to affect the world and our own lives within it, but such knowledge can oftentimes turn us to despair. We need to believe fantasies about our ability and about the world in order to keep going.
With that in mind — yes, your team came up short. You trained and played well, and it still didn’t matter. But that’s only an end to one chapter. You still have your full story. This failure isn’t fatal. You can use this as a motivating event to train harder and get better. Get angry, cry, and throw things, then tell yourself that you never want to experience disappointment like that again.
You will inevitably be disappointed again, of course, because the world is much bigger than you and your powers. Just know that failure isn’t an indictment of your talent. You shouldn’t dwell and wallow in it. But you do have to keep living within a paradox if you want to be a great athlete: knowing that you will fail but believing, training, and playing like you won’t. It’s how most of us get through life, actually.
Justin: Recently went in for a job. In my preliminary interview it seemed like my dream job. Went so well, they asked me to come back in for a presentation. I worked on the project for a week straight, every day. [I] edited, tweaked, [and] practiced presenting to a mirror and to my wife. Flew to London for 24 hours to present it. At the end of the presentation they go, “That’s really interesting. It’s not at all what we’re looking for in this position, but we really like how your mind works.” I didn’t get the job.
CBM: I think that this type of rejection — that your work is good, just not what the company is looking for — can be one of the most devastating. Even though there’s supposed to be relief in the assurance that your work is good, all you can see is a missed opportunity. What good is being talented and having interesting ideas if it doesn’t lead to tangible success?
One solution should be to ask the company what it was looking for. It seemed like you were doing a presentation of your own passions, while they wanted something different. In that case, you need to be honest about whether you can do what they want. Our dreams can sometimes lead us astray into thinking that because we really want something, that it must be perfect for us.
Beyond that, you must accept that success is often out of your hands. The company might have shied away from you for any number of reasons. Maybe they found someone more experienced, or someone they’re more familiar with. While we tend to blame ourselves for failures like missed “dream” jobs, there are a host of external reasons to consider. Being aware of those reasons won’t erase the disappointment, but it may alleviate the pain somewhat to know that your personal talent isn’t always the deciding factor in your success.
We happen to know each other in real life, and I know that you’re a talented, creative, and intelligent person. The fact that you got so far in the hiring process, and they acknowledged your ideas, is proof of how good you are. It’s tough to put so much effort into a hope and come out empty-handed. And it’s really tiresome to go through that process several times. But everyone around you knows how capable you are.
My advice is to keep going — and because I know you really want to succeed in that field, I don’t think you were thinking of doing anything else. Keep refining your work, and keep communicating with the places you apply to make sure that you are a good fit. You have people who believe in you, and I’m hoping for the best.
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