Embracing Failure

I watched some of the World Series this weekend. I like baseball because of the interesting mix of team and individual effort. Every single player has to go to the plate and be the focus of the game, usually multiple times in a game; many plays are handled by a single player on the field; and the pitcher is alone on the mound, hurling pitch after pitch.

What is particularly interesting to me about baseball is the high level of failure that each player must be able to endure. Even a great hitter will fail to get a hit two out of three times at bat. When I watch a man who is famous for slugging balls out of the park swing powerfully and miss, striking out, I wonder, “How can he endure failing so spectacularly and publicly? How does he manage to come to the plate his next at-bat and not have that strike-out affect his mind?”

The pitcher is even more amazing. The spotlight is on him every pitch, and after you’ve walked a runner, how do you come back from that public failure and get the next batter out?

Science is another field that also must embrace failure. Thomas Edison once famously said, “I haven’t failed, I’ve just found 1,000 ways that don’t work.” In one of my classes in molecular biology I remember the professor discussing an experiment in which an assistant looked through hundreds of petri dishes before she found the one that had the particular mutation the researcher was looking for (one of the reasons I didn’t go into research, I didn’t like the idea of being that young assistant!).

This weekend I also watched the film “Young Frankenstein,” the 1970’s Mel Brooks spoof of the Frankenstein genre. Gene Wilder, who plays Dr. Frankenstein, has attempted to bring his creature to life, and it appears he has failed. Wilder calmly says to his assistants that failure is part of science. Then he starts beating on the creature’s chest bemoaning his fate. From an online transcript:

Frankenstein: No, no. Be of good cheer. If science teaches us anything, it teaches us to accept our failures as well as our successes, with quiet dignity and grace. [Beginning to beat on the chest] Son of a bitch bastard, I'll get you for this. What did you do to me? What did you do to me?  

Inga: Doctor. Doctor, stop. You'll kill him. 

Frankenstein: I don't want to live. I do not want to live.  

Igor: Quiet dignity and grace.

This is closer to the way I often deal with failure: a temper tantrum. “It’s the end of the world, this means I’m a failure, useless, not good for anything,” etc. I eventually pick myself up, but it affects my future actions; I either give up on the idea or it takes awhile before I’m back in there slugging. Edison also said, “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

A great movie example of failure is "Apollo 13." This is one of my favorite films, and part of the reason is because it portrays people overcoming failure. After some panic and displays of anger, the people on the ground and in space start "working the problem." At one point, Flight Director Gene Kranz, played by Ed Harris, overheard two men behind him worrying about this being NASA's greatest disaster. Harris turns and says, "With all due respect, sir, I think this will be NASA'a finest hour." And it was certainly one of the finest, because no one ran from the failure. They embraced it and went forward.

I think this explains why I like baseball. I like watching people not allowing failure to influence their next moment.

Update: Recently I heard Dr. Cornel West speak in Asheville, and he ended his talk with a quote from Samuel Beckett: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." 

Quote: "Failure is the key to the kingdom within." Rumi

Footnote about the individual in sports: In other popular team sports the individual counts of course, but from my perspective the focus isn’t so intense on individual effort. In football the quarterback throws to a receiver who catches the ball and runs, but there is an enormous amount of action all around—tackling, faking—that distracts from the main action. That’s why slow-motion replay is such a big part of televised football, it’s important for understanding what just happened on the field. Basketball is very team-oriented; an individual is the one who makes the basket of course but much of a game involves the passing of the ball between players. Same with soccer.

The Sound of Success

Last weekend I tried to relax in the hammock in my front yard and enjoy the quiet of my mountain cove, but I had a difficult time screening out the noise of my neighbor’s lawnmower. This is no typical lawn. My neighbor’s house is perched high up on the mountain with 200 yards of lawn sloping to the road below. In addition, the owner seems to think that it is shameful if the grass gets any higher than an inch, so this mass of grass is shorn almost weekly in the summer. He spends hours on his rider-mower, infesting my otherwise peaceful suburban neighborhood with the droning din of a motor.

As I lay in the hammock, straining to relax, I realized that the sound of mowing has become even more irritating to me because it is a prime example of our unsustainable lifestyle. We cut down trees, plant vast monocultures of grass, prop up the artificiality with chemical fertilizers and herbicides, and then spend enormous sums of time and energy mowing…for what? For status. Lawns are an emblem of wealth. They show abundance. They show that we can afford to waste land, time, and resources. The history of lawns begins in European great estates, and Americans adopted the look as we got rich in the 1950’s.

It’s easy to condemn American culture for its equation of wealth and wasteful consumption, but it doesn’t take much investigation to realize that this is nothing unique to our country. Human societies across the globe and through time have worked this same equation—an obvious example is the Egyptian pyramids, constructed by untold thousands of laborers at unimaginable cost at no benefit to the society as a whole, created only to glorify the pharaohs. Other examples that come to mind are the long fingernails cultivated by the ancient Chinese aristocracy, which proved that they did no manual labor; and Hawaiian chiefs’ feather cloaks, which required tens of thousands of feathers and many years of other people’s labor. The equation of success with excessive consumption and leisure appears to be universal among humans.

This level of excess can’t be found among wild animals. The effort to survive is always too pressing. No wild animal has achieved a level of success over the survival imperative comparable to that of humans. Elephants, great apes, lions, sharks, dolphins, and whales may be at the top of their food chain, they may have time for leisure and play, they may not need to worry about predators, but they still work every day to eat.

It’s understandable that after the invention of agriculture, when survival became more assured through surplus food production, we would luxuriate in that abundance. This is nothing unique to humans: domestic animals become lazy and fat when given the opportunity.

As centuries passed and wealth accumulated the indicator of success became the manifestation of excess, the overconsumption of everything. Success means you own more land than you need, so waste it with lawns. It means you own more food than you need, so become fat and throw the extra away. It means you own more house than you can maintain, so hire a staff to keep it clean. It means you own more clothes than you can ever wear, so give them away so you can buy more. It means you have more vehicles to carry you in private luxury than you can use at any one time: cars, motorcycles, boats, planes. It means you have electronic gadgets to help pass the time you no longer need to fill with the effort to survive.

This equation, success equals profligacy, is leading humanity inexorably to our demise. The pursuit of excess by seven billion humans (and counting) is making the planet uninhabitable by our species.

For our survival we need to change the equation of success. But this appears to be a deeply rooted association, even an instinctual drive; are instincts impossible to change?

Humans have learned to deny the most primal animal instinct of all: self-replication. Many of us, including myself, have chosen not to have children because of our concerns about the environmental costs of human overpopulation. Many more have chosen to limit their families to one or two children.

If we can overcome such an incredibly powerful instinct as procreation, I am confident that we are capable of changing our attitude toward success. Andrew Carnegie, a fabulously wealthy industrialist of the late 1800s, gave most of his fortune away before he died. In an essay published in 1889, “The Gospel of Wealth,” Carnegie argued that great fortunes should be used for the good of society as a whole, not bequeathed to the rich man’s children and wasted in dissolute living (see Paris Hilton). He concludes with this aphorism: “The man who dies rich dies disgraced.” Carnegie gave away over 350 million dollars and established 2,500 public libraries.

Many of our modern billionaires have followed this advice, setting up foundations to use their wealth for the good of the planet. Now this “gospel” needs to spread through the population at large so that we turn our culture from one that worships the lifestyles of the rich and famous to one that defines success as the opportunity to learn and grow, to more freely express our selves, to serve others, and to help create a better world.