On Failure

I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about writing this... but I felt it was worth sharing, so here it goes.

This isn’t a confessional or an apology, and I'm not asking for sympathy. I’ve made my amends and apologies for everything that happened that year. I'm truly thankful that it happened because it was the greatest learning experience I've ever had, and it taught me what it meant to fail.

In 2008, when I was a freshman in college, I was arrested on a non-violent felony charge, and I served two months of a three-month sentence in the county jail. I was released early for good behavior. I was 19 years old at the time. It was the first and last time I ever broke the law.

On my first day of being incarcerated, I asked for something to write with. As soon as I got hold of a paper and pencil, I began writing. The first thing I wrote was, “I fucked up. I fucked up big time.” I knew I wasn’t a criminal. I wasn’t a bad person or a delinquent or a lost cause. I was just a kid who had royally fucked up, and I was paying the price for being a selfish bastard.

I knew I had two choices: I could spend two months of my life feeling sorry for myself and wishing I had done things differently, or I could own up to what I had done, admit my mistakes, and make my time in there as valuable as I could.

I chose the latter.

I will tell you right now—two months of being in a single room for 22 hours a day isn’t short. I had 1,440 hours to think about what I had done and how to make it right. And I used every single one of those hours. What I’m sharing with you is adapted from what I wrote then. Some of it has been updated and the tense has been changed. But it was relevant then, and I still live and learn from it today.

I wrote a lot while I was serving my time. Writing, reading, and lots of push-ups. I was always surprised at the attitudes of many of the other inmates. They’d scoff at how short my sentence was. Many of these men had been in and out of incarceration their entire lives. In a twisted way, it was a sort of vacation for them, an escape from all of their responsibilities. Their attitude was defined by everything they believed “the law” had done to them, never by what they had done.

I told myself I wouldn’t see it that way. This was my harsh, inescapable lesson on the importance of attitude. Your attitude, your mental approach and regard for your life, is what will determine your successes or failures. It isn't about being negative or positive. I believe attitude truly falls into two categories—constructive or destructive. With a constructive attitude, you approach every situation as an opportunity for growth or learning. Sure, there will be times of utter bullshit, but we will all be tested by circumstance or endure hardship. Being a “positive” person doesn’t mean having a smile on your face and never saying anything negative. It means you live every moment and every day as an opportunity to be wiser/better/faster/stronger than yesterday. That’s a constructive attitude.

What’s a destructive attitude? Destructive people don’t learn. They either don’t want to or don’t care to, or they're completely ignorant of it. When bad shit happens, do you remember it as what it did for you or what it did to you? The learning should vastly outnumber the damages and setbacks. Subsequently, I promised myself that I would remember this experience for what it did for me, not what it did to me.

I believe how you fail is a reflection of how you learn. We can discuss different learning styles, but there are three forms of failure that we all experience.

1. Not being good enough.

Not strong enough or smart enough, not enough of something. You simply fell short at whatever was needed to accomplish the task. Everyone experiences this type of failure.

• The constructive approach to this is the conscientious action of “next time I will be good enough.” So long as you have the capacity and desire to improve what you are, you can learn from this failure and beat it the next time
• The destructive approach is “it's too hard.” If you find yourself saying this, you’ve acquiesced to weakness and accepted failing as being OK. Failing is never OK.

2. You got beat.

This may be direct competition or it may be indirect. Whatever it was, someone or something outdid you. This is a tier of failure that I believe will really test people. Some people will lose and settle on being average. A strong person will handle loss as a springboard to being great.

• A constructive person will handle losing as “next time I’ll be better than them.” A loss doesn’t define him. It's just something he can improve upon.
• A destructive person will handle losing as “they are just better than me.” Understandably, there will always be someone who is better than you. This doesn’t mean that you have to be OK with it.

3. You fucked up.

I don’t believe there is any other way to say this. This is failure that hurts people. This is failure for which apologizing is never going to be enough. This is failure that you can't undo, you can't make better, and you can never, ever take back. This is when you hurt family, lose friends, and literally screw with your future from that point forward. People truly only handle this two ways... It either leaves them wrecked and marks the rest of their existence, or they persevere through it and it defines the depths from which they have ascended.

• A constructive person will describe fucking up through everything that happened and embrace everything it taught him. It marks him for what he has become since, not what he turned into because of it.
• A destructive person will just be broken by this. He might recover, but he will be diminished as a person. His life will thereon be defined by what happened to him. He’ll always regret it, and he’ll always wish he could take it back.

You can never take back what you’ve done, but you can work to be greater in everything else that you do from that point on. If you truly want to be great at something, you can't ever accept failing. If you fail because you weren’t good enough, now you know what you need to improve, so learn it and be better for it. If you fail because someone was better than you, now you have a higher mark for what you're capable of reaching, so work to reach it. And if you fuck up and you’ve hit rock bottom, it's your opportunity to prove that only from the deepest depths can we reach the greatest heights.

I never knew I could fail that bad. But then I never would have known what I was truly capable of if I hadn’t. So as long as we learn, we can never regret.