Failure Is A Skill

My basement flooded. Two days of water coming back up, no washing your hands, no shower, me trying everything and still fixing it.

And my kids started working. Hauling buckets of nasty water out of the house, all of them, together, on a Saturday they would otherwise have spent on a screen.

I could have stood in that water and said, damn it, why me. I said something else. This is the only week my children will ever learn they are not entitled to a house where everything works and somebody else fixes it.

Nothing sweet in my life ever made me better. Every hard thing did. That is not a comforting idea, it is the math, and the job hunt is where you will either have it or not.

Think about where your ideas came from. Almost everything you believe you learned either from your parents or at school, and the school was built during the industrial age to produce a person who shows up at nine and leaves at five, Monday through Friday, and does what the manager says.

People hear that and picture a factory floor, then look at their own office and decide they escaped. You did not escape. Whether it is a factory floor or a fancier factory floor in a business building, you are still factory. You sit in a chair, you produce something for somebody else's company, and the only difference is that what comes off the line is a spreadsheet instead of a shoe.

That shape ran for twenty years. Show up, go home, Monday to Friday, and it continues until you graduate college. It is a kind of very capitalistic, very industrial education, and I am describing it rather than attacking it. Does it make sense to you? It is simply the way we grew up, and nobody in it was being malicious.

Then there is how it measured you. Fail the exam and you are a bad student. Don't fail the exam. Don't miss the exam. Don't fail the homework. Don't fail the project. Every adult you trusted organized your childhood around a single instruction.

Twenty years of being told not to fail. What was that system actually trying to produce?

Not a successful person. An employee. It was never designed to develop successful individuals, because a person who starts things fails constantly and a school has no column for that. It was designed to produce one reliable individual who turns up in front of a manager, follows the order, does the homework. I am not anti-education and I am not telling you to resent your teachers. I am telling you what I have observed it do. The thing it did most efficiently was teach you that failing is painful, which is the least useful belief a person can carry into a job search.

I go to a restaurant and ask for spicy, and then I have to stop the waiter and say it again properly, because spicy here does not mean what I mean. Hey, listen. Look at me. Not for white people, okay? Like Asian spicy, right?

I am stereotyping and I do it on purpose, because I need him to understand the size of the gap. Give my level of pepper to a man who has never eaten anything spicy in his life and you will not teach him about pepper. He might end up in hospital. His body has no tolerance built, not because he is weak, but because nothing ever asked him to build one.

That is what twenty years of do-not-fail did to your failure tolerance. The problem is not that you are fragile. It is that you have never had a big failure. They have never failed. They did not have big failures in life, so the skill set was never developed, and failing itself is a skill set.

Think about a bicycle. Somebody falls off ten times learning to ride. You could stay home instead and never fall at all. You will not fail from the bicycle if you do not ride the bicycle. But only the person who fell off it ten times ever becomes any good on it.

Two people get rejected from the same job. One is fine by Thursday, the other stops applying. What separates them?

Reps. Not talent, not confidence, not how badly either of them wanted it. The one who is fine by Thursday has been rejected before and lived through the afternoon, so this rejection arrives as information about a company. The one who stops has nothing to compare it to, so it arrives as a verdict about a person. Same envelope, two different readings, and the only thing that produced the difference was prior exposure.

In 1957 a biologist ran an experiment I keep coming back to. I do not know his name, the man is long dead, and there are a lot of rumors about the details, so take the numbers as the shape and not the measurement.

He put domesticated rats into a deep glass jar of water. They swam, they kept their heads up, they fought to breathe, and at about fifteen minutes they drowned.

Stay with that for a second, because the number means nothing until you do. Imagine you are the one in the water. God forbid, and I hope neither of us is ever there, but imagine it. You are drowning. You are pushing your head up, trying to get some oxygen, trying to survive, trying to breathe. Fifteen minutes of that, and then you are gone.

Then he did it again with a second group, and this is the brutal part. He watched each rat until it was about to go under, and at that moment he lifted it out. Dried it with a towel, let it rest, gave it a little food. Then he put it back in the water.

The second group did not last fifteen minutes. The lowest figure I have read is sixty hours, and some accounts say eighty, so I will take sixty. Sixty hours against fifteen minutes, out of the same animal in the same jar.

Same jar, same water, same animal. What did the second group have that the first did not?

Hope, and nothing else. That's the hope that kept them alive. Not conditioning, not muscle, not a training program. One group had been pulled out once, so it carried evidence that being pulled out was a thing that happened in this world, and that single piece of evidence bought it two and a half days of endurance. Over and over I see that it is not the smartest people who win this. There are plenty of smart people who are not successful, and plenty of people with doctorates living miserable lives. It's not about what you know it's about what you believe, and belief is built out of evidence somebody actually handed you. And when you see it that way, life is not about getting a job and it is not about getting a salary. It is a long journey, and sixty hours of it runs on one rescue.

I want to talk about my own life, and I am leaving my family and my kids out of it, because that is a different kind of good.

Take every sweet memory I have, the comfortable stretches, when I was making lots of money and everything was wonderful. When my life is comfortable, when I was making lots of money, when everything is wonderful, I gain nothing from it. I liked those years. But as a person they did not make me better, they did not increase my wisdom or my knowledge, and the one thing they grew reliably was my ego. In the best time of my life financially, and in every other materialistic way, I was worse than I am right now.

The hard things did the opposite, and each one paid in something specific rather than in general wisdom. When I was a kid my parents divorced. My mother had to leave my father, and I grew up independent. That is a bad thing that happened to a child, and it is also exactly where my independence came from.

Then my father remarried. She was a strange Central Asian mix, her father Russian, her mother not, and when she walked through the streets of Urumchi everybody turned to look. My father loved her. And every single day at dinner, only at dinner, never any other time, she found something to say that would hurt me. I felt like I was chewing glasses. Like the food I was eating was cutting my throat on the way down.

What I learned from her is empathy. A sentence can make somebody's day or make their life miserable, and the difference costs the person speaking nothing at all.

Years of that at dinner, and what I took out of it was empathy. Where does a skill like that actually show up?

On the phone with strangers whose job is to tell me no. A ticket of mine got canceled and I called the airline. Most people call customer service and vent, because they are angry and the person answering is the only human available. It is not their father's company. They lose nothing if you walk away. So I asked how her day was going, and where she was working from, and she told me, and I said I had heard beautiful things about her country, and then I explained what had happened. She fixed it properly, better than the policy required. Every time I catch myself opening a call that way, I am using something I was taught by somebody who did the opposite to me at dinner for years: showing empathy, and being kind.