A sports commentator was notorious for what became his catchphrase; whenever a team scored against his national team he cried out, “Disaster for Scotland!” Now, ‘disaster’ is defined as “a sudden accident or a natural catastrophe that causes great damage of loss of life”; in no shape or form can conceding a goal or a try or a wicket constitute such a label! Similarly, coaches at the side of the field submit to rage, tantrums, apoplexy and fury when their opponents score; it is as if the end of the world has come. So too conquering contestants delight in deriding their opponents as, “Loser! Loser!” No-one wants to lose; no-one wants to fail. Failure is seen as a massive failure!
Many famous people, from Nelson Mandela to Thomas Edison to Michael Jordan, have spoken about how failure is not something to be avoided. Previously we considered the statement about success made by Marcelo Bielsa, the manager of Leeds United Football Club who recently won promotion to the English Premier League, but he also referred to failure, saying, “Failure is the complete opposite [to success], it forms us, it makes us more solid, it brings us closer to our convictions, it makes us more coherent.” Let us take a time-out to consider what he might mean.
“Failure forms us”. While success makes us begin to believe that we are more than we really are, failure, and more specifically how we respond to failure, is what really determines the person that we do become. Failure forms character; character is truly formed through adversity, through hardship, through disappointment. Failure is the furnace into which we are cast to be moulded, formed, purified. When we lose at sport, we can become better and stronger people. John Wooden, the celebrated US basketball coach, developed his Pyramid of Success; we need also the Funeral Pyre of Failure so that we rise as the phoenix from the ashes of defeat, from the furnace of failure.
“Failure makes us more solid”. It makes us grounded; it may make us heavy-footed (which may slow us down a little) but it will keep us from being light- or big-headed. Failure will help us go back to basics; it will help us see things in better perspective; it will show us another thing we have learned.
“Failure brings us closer to our convictions.” Failure can serve to reinforce why we do things and the values that are most important in life, not just in sport. If we do not believe in something, we will not stay with it when things go wrong; things going wrong therefore can strengthen those beliefs and the values that are required to take us there.
“Failure makes us more coherent”. It makes us rounded; it rubs off the sharp edges and enables us to progress more freely. We do not fully understand or appreciate the value, relevance or meaning of winning until we have lost, just as we do not appreciate or understand losing until we have won. Both experiences are helpful and enable us to grow. Success and failure are two sides of the same
coin – and the value of the coin is the same, whichever side the coin lands on.
If someone came to us and said, “I can guarantee I can make you a much better person”, would we accept such an offer? Of course we would! Then we should grab and grasp failure as providing us such an opportunity. Thomas J. Watson, American businessman, the chairman and CEO of IBM, summed it up this way: “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.”
We need to encourage youngsters not to be afraid to make a mistake, to fail, so we must not shout at them when they do! We must not fall prey to the mind-set that Lance Armstrong, the celebrated but equally infamous cyclist, warned about: “The problem is we over-celebrate when we win and we over-react when we lose”. People have said failure is never final and failure is never fatal but failure is also foetal, the unborn offspring of something dynamic; bring it on! There is a Latin phrase, “Per aspera ad astra” meaning “Through hardship to the stars”; what we once saw as “disaster” we can without too much difficulty transform to “ad astra”. That is when we truly win!
