(I was recently asked to give the keynote address at my old high school’s National Honor Society Induction Ceremony. Below is the speech I wrote for the occasion on a topic near and dear to me that many students aren’t prepared to face once they leave school. Setbacks are as certain as death and taxes, and it’s important to develop the tools to recover from them.)
I don’t do a lot of public speaking. Actually, I try to avoid it. As a writer, I’d much rather write something for someone else to say than have to say it myself. It’s not just me; roughly 75% of the population has a fear of public speaking, which is more prevalent than fear of death, spiders, or heights.
Fear of heights is another one for me. My perfect nightmare scenario would be giving a speech while standing on a thirty-foot rickety ladder in high crosswinds. I’m rather thankful to have this podium instead.
It’s not speaking that we’re afraid of. It’s fear of making a mistake. The fear of making a fool of yourself. The fear of failure. Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” He was talking about boxing (hopefully), but for me, there’s no better analogy for failure. Nobody plans to fail. Nobody seeks failure. But despite our preparations, it can still find us.
You might think it’s odd that I want to talk about failure on a day when we’re celebrating achievement. But as someone who was in your position, one thing my education didn’t prepare me for was failure. It’s not a topic people want to talk about. We avoid it, we fear it, we don’t prepare for it, and then when it happens to us, we’re not ready to face it.
My goal today is not to scare you but to prepare you. Because as Robert Kennedy said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can achieve greatly.”
While researching for my speech, I came across the April 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review. The magazine devoted an entire issue to the topic of failure. They classify types of failure into three categories:
There are Good Failures when faced with a challenge we don’t know how to tackle, so we start trying things to see what happens. Trial and error. Think of a baby learning how to walk. They have no idea how to do it. But slowly, they learn to pull themselves up. They develop the muscles and coordination to keep their balance. Nobody walks on the first try. We stumble. We fall down. We cry. Then we get back up and try again.
There are Bad Failures when we are sabotaged by errors in judgment. It could be your own error, like putting off studying until the morning of a big exam and then sleeping through your alarm. It could be someone else’s error, like someone in the group project who doesn’t pull their weight. A teammate draws a penalty that stalls a drive or nullifies a scoring play. And sometimes, you’re just thrown into a losing situation that you’re unprepared for through no fault of your own. A sink or swim scenario, but no one taught you how to swim. This happens in every profession.
Lastly, there are Unavoidable Failures. These are failures of complex systems and are always out of your control. An economic recession that leads to job layoffs, closed businesses, and lost wages. A natural disaster that destroys a home. A global pandemic that cancels your sport’s season, your prom, your graduation.
We can’t always control when failure will find us, but we can control how we respond to it. We can choose to understand it. We can choose to learn from it. We can choose to recover from it. To be successful, you need to have a healthy relationship with the possibility of failure. The following are two people many consider the best at what they do. No one would ever call them failures, even though they’ve failed more times than most people would try.
Lebron James is arguably the greatest basketball player of this generation, perhaps all generations. 4x NBA Champion, 4x MVP, 20x all-star, Athlete of the Decade, 2x Olympic gold medalist, and all-time points leader. He has scored over forty thousand points and is the only person ever to do that.
Lebron is also very close to setting another all-time record for the most missed shots in NBA history. He’s missed fourteen thousand, four hundred and fifty shots and counting. Just as no one has scored as many points as him, pretty soon, no one will have failed to score a basket more times than Lebron James.
But would he have the same accolades and be the all-time scoring leader if he took fewer shots? Would second-guessing himself every time he touched the ball improve his performance? If he took a day to brood and beat himself up over every missed shot, it would take him nearly 40 years. Lebron doesn’t let the fear of failure hold him back. You can’t win if you don’t score. You can’t score if you don’t shoot. You can’t shoot if you’re afraid to miss.
The other person is Stephen King. He’s a personal hero of mine; I’m a writer today because I read a Stephen King book at far too young of an age. He’s written sixty-five novels that have sold over four hundred million copies.
In his book On Writing, King tells the story of hanging all of his rejection letters on a nail in his bedroom so he could see them when he wrote. He did this until the weight of the rejections became so heavy that it pulled the nail out of the wall. So what did he do? He replaced the nail with a spike and kept writing. Those were Good Failures. They helped him refine his craft. This resilience helped him later when his breakout novel Carrie was rejected by publishers thirty times. I’d also wager that the version in print today looks different from the manuscript that he originally submitted. With each rejection, he found new things to try and new ways to improve. Failure, after failure, after failure, until finally success.
Here are even more examples. Abraham Lincoln lost more elections than he won. Thomas Edison failed in over a thousand experiments before perfecting the light bulb. Babe Ruth hit 715 home runs, but he also struck out 1330 times, and both records stood for many decades. Henry Ford’s first two car companies failed. Stephen Spielberg was rejected from film school three times. After one performance, Elvis Presley was fired by the Grand Ole Opry and told to go back to truck driving.
I’m not saying you should like or be comfortable with failure, but recognize that failure is possible. It’s not only possible, but it’s part of any process. When you do that, something incredible happens. You mitigate the fear of failure. You take away its power. It’s no longer scary, no longer an unknown. What is the opposite of fear? Confidence. Self-assurance. Courage to take shots no matter how many you miss. The tenacity to weather through rejections. Success demands a willingness to fail.
So, do the scary thing and step outside of your comfort zone. Take a chance on yourself. You are who you choose to be, but if you let the fear of failure hold you back, fear will decide your choice for you. You’ll be much happier looking back on the “oh wells” of trying and failing than the “what ifs” of never taking a chance.