How to Be a Badass Failure

When I was a teenager, my goal in life was to be a professional basketball player.  I failed.  Not that I didn’t try very hard to reach it—I practiced basketball more than I did anything else.

I woke up at 5:30 a.m. to shoot jumpshots in my driveway before school, then practiced there until dark in the evenings when I got home.  I went to basketball camps.  I watched games and made charts about the things players did, to emulate their styles.

I put in a ton of hard work for the goal, and by the time I was a senior, I was a starter on my high school varsity team.

But the goal was kind of delusional.  I was a good shooter, but I was only a little over 6 feet tall, I wasn’t extraordinarily fast and could dunk only on an occasional miracle .

My parents, my friends, lots of other adults I knew—it is to all their great credit that people didn’t point any of this out.  However obvious it might’ve been that I wasn’t the kind of player that people would pay money to watch, they let me go for it.

They allowed me to fail.

And I did. I was a specialist at three-point shooting, and in my first game of our senior year, my first shot missed everything, not even touching the rim.  I put too much pressure on myself for that one goal of having a career in basketball, and I slowly choked all confidence out of myself.

Mid-way through the season, I lost my spot and was replaced by a freshman who was faster, could jump higher, and could shoot as well as me.  I ended the season riding the bench.

But I don’t think that’s why I failed.

I failed because I focused on the wrong goal.

I failed because every thing I did with basketball had to be perfect.

I failed because I didn’t allow myself to have fun.  To play.

Having a goal is fine.  If it gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning, then have one.  Two, three, even.  But goals can sometimes be false—how many people get college degrees for something they love, then hate the job they get with it?  How many people have a goal of owning  big ticket items—a second house, a boat, a Ferrari—and then don’t feel fulfilled by them?

When we focus on a goal, we lose sight of other opportunities.  And the truth is, we don’t often know what the real goal even is.

So I failed at my goal with basketball.  I was so focused that I almost missed learning what I really got out of that experience.

I learned so much about diligence because of basketball.  I learned about race relations in the South in a way I never could have otherwise.  I learned how to lose and how to win.

I learned how awesome it is to put yourself in a position where losing and failing is a possibility.  It’s easy to play it safe and sit on the couch and eat Pringles and watch Seinfeld reruns.  It’s hard to work like a dog and then willingly go someplace where it’s very possible things won’t go the way you’d like.

Playing it safe isn’t playing.

I was just a 17 year old kid when I learned that.  It was over half my life ago now, and it is still one of the best things I’ve ever done.  Giving it a try, playing, failing.  It’s awesome.

For creative types, whatever your goals are, I think this story holds true.  Substitute poetry for basketball in this story, or music or entrepreneurship.

Whatever your goal is, if you’re too focused on avoiding failure, you’re already failing.  Because you aren’t playing.

By “play,” I mean taking part in something, goofing off, experimenting, taking a chance, risking, not caring about the outcome, not having a specific watermark to achieve.

When creatives and independent thinkers do their work, there has to be room for failure.  Failure is definitely an option.  It’s a necessary possibility.  It’s part of the creative process.

I fail all the time. I send out stories to literary magazines that I know are good, and they get rejected.  I keep the rejection slips and emails to remind me of what a failure I am.  I’m proud of them, because I could easily keep those stories safe on my computer and not play.  But I play.  I take part.

I also fail way before then.  I start stories that are horrible, so I delete them forever.  I finish stories that are lifeless and bland, and I delete those, too.  So what?  It’s just play.  I’m sure I learned something by writing them, even if I don’t consciously know what I learned.

I love stories of failure.

—I know a guy who wrote 100 pages of a novel, and on page 101, something clicked and he knew that was where the story started.  So he threw out the first hundred pages he’d written for months.

Did he fail for 100 pages?  Kind of.  But he never would’ve gotten that great first page and that great rest of the novel if he hadn’t failed his way there.

—Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime.

—Bill Gates’ first company wasn’t Microsoft.  It was Traf-o-data, a computerized tracker of road traffic, which went out of business because the software was full of bugs.

—Henry Ford’s first car company, Detroit Automobile Company, went out of business; a year later he started Ford.

—Dave Ursillo had a ton of failure trying to get his book published, and owns it beautifully on his post 16 Reasons Your Literary Agency Shouldn’t Sign Me.

—Emilie Wapnik, who inspired this post, organized the amazing Failure Celebration Week this week, and published an epic roundup of failures from well-known online figures, including Matt Gartland, Mars Dorian, Ash Ambirge, Jade Craven, herself, and other awesome people who fail.

–Even successful online entrepreneurs fail, running out of creative juice from time to time like Corbett Barr writes in “When You Can’t Create Any More.”

—and Greg Ruth, tired of his art feeling taken over by his need to pay his bills, pledged to allow himself to play.  He drew one drawing a week for a year, just for himself, just for play, and he’s seeking funding to publish the beautiful resulting book, The 52 Weeks Project.

Own your failure.  Fail brilliantly.

It’s fear of failure that causes writer’s block and every other kind of creative block.  It’s that fear that keeps us from trying in the first place.  How many people do you know who want to be a writer but never actually sit down and write?

Go allow yourself to fail right now in some creative endeavor you care about.

Give yourself the opportunity to fail.

Fail more.

It’s awesome.

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How about you? What did you (and DO you) fail at?  How was it awesome?  Please share them in the comments!

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