Photo by Betsy Wuebker

“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.” – May Sarton

With all the emphasis lately on poor performance and financial rescue packages, I’ve been thinking about the different ways people react to failure in themselves and others.  Why do some people respond to a setback with even more determination to succeed the next time?  Why are others unprepared to fail?

What makes us keep trying? What triggers resignation and hopelessness?  If “you’ve failed” is a terrible message to receive, does it stand to reason that “you’ve failed at everything” would be a catalyst for depression?  What does “you will fail no matter what” do to a psyche?  What about people who seem unbowed by repetitive failure?  What’s different about their experience that creates a tenacious spirit?

I’m no psychologist, but I’ve had ample opportunity to observe humans.  Our earliest years are filled with tenacity. It combines with instinct to achieve developmental milestones.  Think of how many times a baby will pull himself up only to fall back, again and again.  None of us would be walking if we weren’t tenacious enough to keep trying.  But what makes the baby keep at it?  Simple.  Babies see older children and adults walking, and they believe they can, too.

Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com has said that the market for something to believe in is infinite.  People want to believe.  They crave the absolute certainty that inspires confidence.  Babies see us walking, and nothing tells them they can’t either.  The innate instinct combines with observation to create intense desire, and tenacity arises out of belief.

People only want what might be for a little while. They really want what unquestionably is, and this want propels to progress.  To babies who are almost ready to walk, walking is unquestionably what people do.  They envision themselves walking, and they continue to try and fail, try and fail, and try again.  Thomas Edison set out to make a light bulb, and failed spectacularly over 1500 times before he got a working prototype.  He had a vision of an outcome, and was doggedly tenacious until it transpired.  What messages are transmitted and received when failure occurs?

“My reputation grows with every failure.” – George Bernard Shaw

Failure has long been associated with a sense of shamed responsibility. Failures were whispered about in small communities, and sensationalized in larger ones.  Society ensured you took responsibility for your failures be enacting consequences, and there was very little wiggle room once they were assigned.  The specter of failure drove repeated attempts toward success.  If at first you didn’t succeed, you tried, again and again.  You either basked in the glory of your achievements, or you owned up to your part in a disappointment.

What changed? Brad Feld recently discussed the shift away from the natural cause and effect of bearing consequences that leads to solutions.  Instead, he noted that an “ethos of ‘lack of responsibility’ is finding its way into every nook and cranny of the discussion.  The connotation of ‘bailout’ is ‘it’s not my fault – please bail me out.’ “  Where does this come from?

Winners and losers. Anyone who has raised children within the last 20 years is familiar with the movement that allowed self-esteem to trump common sense.  Everyone had to be a winner; there were no losers.  Outcomes were manipulated to protect fragile egos in kindergartners all the way through Ph.D’s.  The only problem I could ever see with “everyone’s a winner” is that it’s a lie. If you have never failed, how are you going to know what to do when you do?

It’s important to fail sooner rather than later. If you’ve messed up and gotten yourself back on track, aren’t you far ahead of the person to whom everything has come so easy?  What happens when you, the straight A high school student, go to college and get your first F?  What terrible bewilderment befalls the superstar who is suddenly fired when lackluster effort doesn’t deliver?

What about responsibility? By protecting from loss, we’ve removed more than one common sense principle from our lexicon.  The need to develop a tenacious approach for success in the face of failure is critical for progress.  Instead, by denying failure exists, we’ve created a propensity for collective denial so great that it has spawned conditions that created the most catastrophic economic meltdown in memory.  Yet, amazingly, no one seems to be responsible!

Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, an expose of Wall Street excess written in the late 1980′s, writes that he still to this day can’t believe he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars as an inexperienced 24-year-old to guess which stocks would rise and fall.  He reiterates that he hadn’t the first clue, but it was of no matter.  Enormous capital allocations were made by people who couldn’t explain what they were buying or selling.  And still, during this colossal fail, we see executives who can’t bring themselves to admit their culpability in the matter, who don’t see the irony of traveling to Washington in their private jets to ask for billions of dollars in handouts, and who expect a bailout as a matter of course because they’re “too big to fail.”

What happens when things are too easy? When the road is smooth and straight, we travel under the false perception that the world can be ours with very little effort.  We get because we’re entitled, because we deserve, because we are.

Lewis describes a memorable lunch with his former CEO where he realizes the man was pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for a series of disastrous decisions.  Wall Street and General Motors executives are so far removed from personal vesting in their corporate outcomes that a total disconnect from the consequences of decision-making is evident.  If this propensity exists in the highest echelons of business and government, what can we expect to occur in our neighborhoods?

Seth Godin famously congratulates the newly fired by saying, “You are free now to be who you are meant to be.”  I heard early in my career that if you weren’t fired at least once in your life, you must not be doing your job well.  You fail, you fall down, you get slapped around a little bit, swallow your pride, and then you must get up again.  Howard Lindzon advises, “The rest of you car people, slap together a resume, get it up on indeed.com, and go build something somebody wants.”

If you don’t believe in yourself and feel responsible for your ideas and your actions, all the money in the world won’t compensate you with a meaningful pay-off. If you can’t articulate a zeal for your vision or your work, you won’t accomplish anything worthwhile.  If you can convey your belief, you may still fail.  However, faith in the rightness of your doing will propel you.  From passion and belief, tenacity is born.

TENACITY is a post from: Passing Thru