WE’RE ALL FAILURES

Who of us hasn’t failed at something sometime in our lives? In fact, if we are honest with ourselves, we have failed many, many times. No one is perfect. Even the best of the best failed regularly. Ty Cobb was the best hitter of all time in baseball. His career batting average was .367. That is almost unheard of these days. And yet, as great a hitter as Cobb was, he still failed to get a hit more the six out of every ten times he came to bat. If you fail only seven out of every ten times over a career, you’re Hall of Fame material.

Imagine that: being considered the best in baseball when you fail that often! Get only three out of ten questions on an exam and you fail miserably. Getting six of them correct just might get you a D. Granted I am comparing apples with street cars, but the point still holds: we all fail and we fail much of the time. What we fail at is living up to our potential, whatever that potential is.

That means two realities. First, we can allow ourselves to be satisfied with not doing our best because no one does his or her best all of the time. What’s a little failure here now and then, we may ask ourselves. We all come up short, so what’s the big deal? It’s easy to fall into that trap of allowing ourselves to settle for something that is less than our best. My guess is that if you are like me, you’ve done that settling on occasion, maybe on too many occasions.

On the other hand, always giving it our best shot even though we might come up a little short is what we should expect, even demand, of ourselves. The great athletes always get angry with themselves when they fail to get a hit. What they do not do is either shrug their shoulders and not care or allow that failure to so consume them that they get stuck in their tracks and, thus, continue to fail.

To be sure, failure is good for the soul and the psyche. First of all, it reminds us that we just might not be as good as we think we are. That can and should keep us humble. Second, it allows us to learn from our mistakes, our failures. Good hitters, when they fail to get a hit, go back to the dugout to reflect about why they did not. Sometimes it was indeed their fault. And sometimes the other guy, the pitcher or his teammates, just happened to be a little better on that occasion.

It happens. We fail because we are not good enough at that moment. We fail because others are better at that moment. We fail because we did not give our best. We succeed because we were good enough and because we gave it our best. What we need to do, at least every once in a while, both after failures and after successes, is to take a moment to reflect on why we failed or why we succeeded.

If and when we do that, what we will discover over time is that our failures become less and our successes become more. But we will still continue to fail and continue to learn.