Successful Failure
We are the product of our failures much more than our successes. Success breeds self-assurance that ends in repetition. Failure breeds self-awareness that ends in re-creation. Only one of these is growth.
That sounds like a bumper sticker or, for the kids in the audience, a meme. So let's mess that up a bit. If you reflect only on what you've done well, you kinda suck. That nostalgia for your own history blinds you to the ways you need to be better. It keeps you from realizing that the measures of success aren't at all what you're holding onto.
Now, I'm not advocating a pathological fixation on all the ways we don’t get it right. For more on this, refer to my note on grace and realize that the same dirty, costly grace we need to show others can and should also be shown ourselves. It already has been. But this is reality: failures are who we are. Successes are the blessings we were fortunate enough to be standing next to when they happened.
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I firmly believe that we are as much or more the result of what I call intrapersonal barriers as we are our willful constructions of who we want to be. Put another way, we perceive these barriers as the shadows we must grow out of to be seen as individuals by the world around us.
These shadows are so often the chimeras (no disrespect to Baudelaire) we carry through adolescence and into the rest of our lives; a powerful force in the shaping of who we are as a person, both in our own estimation and that of the people around us. To be sure, we make many defining choices. But it’s at least as important to note the choices we didn’t make that set up so many of those we had to.
Here are my three most prominent, in no particular order:
Growing up in a place where I was not a local and could never afford to appear to be.
Primary example: We were never poor, but we didn’t have all that much. In junior high, I transferred to a private school on scholarship. In the summer, my dad and I painted the bathrooms to hold onto that financial aid. Many of my classmates went on resort vacations or stayed in their “other houses.” In this case, it’s not about equating what I didn’t have with what people in poverty don’t. It’s about how comparing myself to everyone else established my “normal” for a long time.
Being the son of a pastor with no designs on being one myself.
Primary example: While trying out some adult phrasing in third grade, I told my friend Jason to shut his damned mouth. My first grade teacher overheard me and, with literal hands on equally literal cheeks, said, “Michael Clark! What would your pastor father say if he heard you say that?” Repeat that scenario for the next fifteen years.
Playing basketball in the same place as my brother (a MUCH better player).
Primary example: A referee stopped me during one of my first varsity games as a freshman. “Clark? Are you related to Paul Clark?” “Yeah, he’s my brother.” “Huh. I expected you’d be better.” For the record, my brother is eight years older than me and had to keep me from quitting the sport I love most just before my senior year.