Tragic hero of the here and now

I’ve been dwelling on the idea of failure so much lately, I’ve thought about taking my name off this blog and just calling it #FAIL. While failure has been a thing I’ve been coming back to time and again this past week, I know I can’t obsess over it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about failure, it’s that living in one’s own mind is the greatest failure of all.

Steven Pressfield calls this the Resistance, an invisible force that stands in the way of turning the inner creative energy of your mind into something tangible and real. It’s the Resistance that tells us we need to be inspired in order to start something. It’s the Resistance that tells us to fear the outcome of what we create.

It’s the Resistance that puts us in danger of becoming a true failure.

F. Scott Fitzgerald created the character Gatsby to show us that money and wealth does not protect us from becoming a failure in the love department. Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman characterized the failure of a destined common man obsessed with greatness. Both are the tragic heroes of their generation and are still relevant today.

If I had to add one more tragic hero to the list, it would be the person who succumbed to the Resistance and refused to fail. It’s the person who never acts on behalf of himself or others to achieve the incredible potential that he has. It’s the person who stays confined in his own mind, fearing that an obstacle in his path means the end of his road. It’s the person who has great intentions but never does anything to make them happen.

That’s the greatest failure I can imagine and the greatest tragedy that’s being written every day.

A frugal failure

When it rains, of course it pours. This week, however, it’s is raining failure and I love every bit of it.

OK, not literally dancing on top of the people that fail but you get what I mean. Right?

Yesterday, I wrote about failure as a required step for success. Just hours after posting my thoughts, Google Reader fired up another new post by Penelope Trunk that continues the failure streak.

And, Just a couple days after writing about time being the necessary factor in becoming an expert at something, Trunk writes yesterday about the need to be frugal in order to achieve success:

So I guess what I’m saying is that being an expert in something requires frugality. It’s not just a spending frugality. It’s a focus frugality. It’s the recognition that spending money is actually a distraction from the passion at hand. So the less you spend, the less you’re distracted.

Even though she stops short of calling it out by name, the bigger point for me is sacrifice. Filling in “sacrifice” for “frugality” you can see what Trunk is getting at: getting what you are after requires risky choices that may or may not pay off in the end.

Read also: In order to win something, you will probably have to lose something.

So, yes, it really does point back to failure. Andre Agassi gave up his childhood to swing a tennis racquet two million times before he won his first slam. Wilco had to give up their recording contract to release the album that made them famous. The list goes on and on.

Yesterday, I asked myself what I want so much that I would be willing to fail before getting it. Well, today I’m asking a similar question: What do I want so much that I would sacrifice nearly anything to get it?

Still no answer.

Agassi, Baldwin and why failure is an option

Over the last few days, I’ve been pushing my way through Andre Agassi’s new autobiography, Open. Unlike many Gen X-ers, I was too young to follow Agassi’s rise to tennis stardom, particularly the mullet, denim and “Image is Everything” era in the early 90’s. Most of what I know about Agassi comes from watching his later years, so I am appreciating the context I’m being given up to that point.

I get a lot out of autobiographies, which is why I love reading them. The thing I get most out of a good one is that failure is a required part of success. I am certain I’ve never read (or seen, for that matter) the story of someone who rose to success without a whole heck of a lot of missteps along the way. And if I have, I certainly don’t remember it because it was probably a sleeper of a tale.

The story of Agassi is no different. The book is a little more than 300 pages and took me more than half of them to get to his first gland slam victory, Wimbledon 1992. It’s not until page 200 that he even gets ranked Number One in the world. Up until then as a trial of losses, mistakes, obstacles, near-retirements, injuries and just plain bad luck.

Not what I expected from one of history’s best.

In fact, I am taken aback by the amount of losing that is covered in the book. Several times, I’ve found myself checking how many pages I have left and wondering if he has enough space to cover the incredible amount of success he has in his career. I’m still not sure he does.

Failure plays an integral role in Agassi’s story. He retells so much detail of so many losses that it’s almost uncomfortable, but at the same time it’s a very revealing look at the secret for success. It’s the same thing that has made Penelope Trunk write about what makes an expert and why Alec Baldwin has been a hot topic for Men’s Journal and Wired Magazine in the last couple of months.

The willingness to fail is not just part of the path to succeeding, it’s required.

Which gets me thinking. What am I willing to fail at time and again in order to achieve it? What am I passionate about that would drive me from point A to Z if it meant making 24 annoying stops along the way? What drives me?

Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything. Besides family and marriage, I have not engaged myself in anything that even remotely challenges me. Looking at my easy job, easy home and easy daily routine, I can honestly say I’m not driven; I’m coasting.

Having an easy life has never felt so wrong.

In a Pit With a Lion on a Snowy Day

I recently finished a book that was lent to me by a friend about to enter law school. Once upon a time, I thought I would be doing the same as her, but wound up adjusting my goals after nearly freaking out and a sub-par score on the LSAT.

The book, In a Pit With a Lion on a Snowy Day, reads a lot shorter than its title, but is packed with a ton of encouragement and motivation that I could have used shortly after receiving my LSAT score.

Author Mark Batterson, who pastors National Community Church in Washington, D.C., covers a lot of ground in his book but the ultimate messages breaks down to this: What if the life you really want, and the future God wants for you, is hiding right now in your biggest problem, your worst failure, your greatest fear?

Using the unlikely 2 Samuel 23:20 passage as a source of inspiration, Batterson goes on to describe the day Benaiah found himself encountered with a lion on a pit snowy day. Aside from this circumstance, Batterson describes Benaiah as any other man: a typical soldier of typical height and typical strength. When faced with a 500-pound full-grown lion, Benaiah had every right to do what any of us would have done, which is run like mad.

Instead, he jumped into the pit and grabbed opportunity by the mane.

The Scripture does little to describe what happened that day, so Batterson tries to fill in the blanks, illustrating a dramatic scene of where a man takes on nature by wrestling a beast that appears to have every advantage over him.

Benaiah’s victory over the lion helps him go on to be the personal bodyguard for the king and later play a significant role as a military leader. Bottom line: if Benaiah had calculated his odds, given in to his fears, played it safe, or become worried about looking foolish on that snowy day, he never would have turned into the man he was destined to be.

Personally, my dream of going back to school has been staring me in the face like a lion for several years now. I had always wondered if I was being foolish for even thinking I have the brains and wit to go back into academia. After reading Batterson’s book, I’m fairly certainly graduate school is the dream that God has placed on my heart and an entrance exam is the lion he wants me to face in order to get there.

Sound odd, doubtful, risky or foolish? Of course it does. But then again, it sounds no more insane than throwing yourself into a pit with a lion on a snowy day.

And the greatest regrets in life will be the lions we didn’t chase.

Breaking routines

I’m starting to think a lot about routines and how they affect our lives. Specifically, I wonder if having one or more regular habits is more of a bother than a help and what consequences they have on personal opportunity.

For example, I hop on the train every morning, often at the same time as the day before. And as often as I board consistently, I encounter an entire cast of people that I’ve been accustomed to seeing day in and day out.

Like the guy who has to sit in the single seat on the left hand side of the third car.

Like the woman who has to arrange her items perfectly every time before taking a seat.

Like the man who always watches DVDs on his portable player.

You catch my drift.

I believe the act of a regular routine puts us in a dangerous position of missing rich opportunities to experience life more fully. We’re taught that practice makes perfect and that repeating the same thing over and over makes us better. However, I think the compulsion of repeating ourselves actually stunts character growth and limits the endless potential that we are all born with.

I understand that practice is an important ethic. In fact, one of the greatest pieces of advice I’ve received suggested that we anything three times. Once to fail at it. Once to understand it. And one more time to actually learn it for the next time you come across it.

Anything beyond practice, however, either amounts to compulsion or a life-long hobby. And I don’t think either of those are what most people strive for when it’s applied to something as mundane as parting hair or deciding which seat to take on the train.

So what would happen if we decided to shake things up a bit? Maybe parting your hair differently will bring an unexpected compliment. Maybe choosing a different seat creates a new friendship by placing you near a new person. The way we do the small things can have incredible consequences on the bigger picture of life. Making them habitual milks all the possibility and guesswork right out of them.

And that’s the good stuff in life.

Harder than it looks

There are a lot of ways to kill time at an airport. As I look around Denver International, I see one person eating a banana, a teenager bopping his head to a song on his iPod, others watching a portable DVD player, and several sleeping across aisles of seats.

And that’s just what’s happening around me.

One girl sitting nearby was hard at work on a school essay. It was obvious it was homework because she had her line paper out with a number two pencil as she skimmed through the pages of an American novel we were all required to read in high school.

What was interesting about her was less about what she was doing than how she was doing it: effortlessly. As she plowed through page after page, scribbled notes and made corrections I could tell this was something she was used to doing regularly. And it made me remember how easy writing an essay was for me back in high school.

Unfortunately, ask me to pen a 10 page paper today and I’ll give you a look like I think you’re out of your mind.

And I was the person who wrote his 20 page Philosophy final on the existence of being the night before it as due…and got an A.

The truth is that routine requires endurance and I’m way out of shape when it comes to regularly writing extended essays on arcane topics.

Ironocally, it takes a lot of effort to make anything look effortless.

Barry Bonds didn’t make hitting a homerun look easy overnight (even before the ‘roids).

It took Tiger Woods years before his swing looked so natural.

The Beatles had to play a ton of crummy shows before looking so graceful on Ed Sullivan.

The list goes on and the girl diligently doing her homework is no different.

Malcolm Gladwell calls this The 10,000 Hour Rule in his book Outliers. The basic (gritty) idea is that there is no such thing as the overnight success. Instead, great outcomes are often the result of the accumulation of approximately 10,000 hours.

Is there something that you make look easy? If not, what’s stopping you? There are a limited number of 10,000 hour blocks in a lifetime and now is as a good a time as any.

Not that I am the best example of putting of it into practice.

(Un)Common acts of kindness

I cut an old lady off this afternoon on my way to lunch.

And by cut off, I mean merged into her lane with 200 feet of space between the two of us and 200 more feet before the left turn lane I planned on using to get into Starbucks.

It definitely wasn’t the most death-defying act of my horseless carriage operating career, but it was enough to draw a 17 second horn blast from the lady as she joined me in the turn lane. It was 17 seconds. I counted, inserting “Mississippi” between each number.

I nearly laughed out loud when I saw this full grown women, properly dressed, dramatically flail her arms in the air and scrunch her face in a manner my eight month old niece would have a tough time mimicking.

That changed when I realized I was being followed. What scared me most was that I really believed she could kick my ass. (Hey, you weren’t there!)

I went about my business, parking the car in the nearest space, walking into Starbucks, and ordering my usual drink. I even took the time to reload my gift card for the next month. Bea Arthur (oops, I mean the woman), was noticeably determined to pack a punch as she curtly spit out fighting words right at the front counter.

I turned toward her.

I looked at her.

And with all the sincerity of heart, I apologized and let her know I was truly sorry for upsetting her. There was no need to save face in front of an elderly woman and it meant enough to her to follow me into a store.

I figured that would be the end of the matter and I could let you off with a short blog entry, but she went on. And on. (And on.) Getting near to retracting my apology altogether, I cut her off again (verbally) and abruptly reminded her I had apologized, had nothing left to offer, and asked her kindly to drop the matter unless there was anything else I could do for her today.

She blushed a bit, slightly bowed her head and could only come up with, “Thank you.”

I sometimes wonder if apologies mean anything to anyone. Oftentimes, we call other people out on the things we feel most hurtful to us with the hope that the other will concede and say you’re right. What do you do, then, when you get what you want right away? Do you accept your gift as graciously as it was given or do you go right on proving your point (ignoring you are already preaching to the choir)? As people, it seems we put so much effort into getting what we want that when we actually receive the very thing we are seeking, we almost fail to realize it.

Give it a try. Kill someone with kindness and see if it is taken away.

Steering towards nothing

Cars raced by on the Northbound 405 this past Sunday night. At the pace we were moving, Marcia and I both nearly missed the burning heap of metal that wrapped itself around the overpass rail on the South side of the Interstate. In fact, I couldn’t have even told you what it was as our car raced past the point between approaching and distancing…

…that is, until I got the snail-paced view on the way home.

Whereas we pushed past the posted speed limit on one end, my car seemed to crawl through the same spot as it attempted to weave its way back on the other end. I knew the motorcycle-turned-rubble was probably the reason for the slow-down, and in a way, it was. At least, that’s the way NPR presented the traffic report over radio airwaves.

What they failed to report was that the physical crash itself was not the cause of congested traffic, bur rather, a domino-like implosion of curious minds. Even with the flame nearly extinguished and pushed well off the boundary of danger, drivers continued to creep…painfully…slow…across…the…pavement…

…that is until ten feet past the scene of the accident.

As other (and usually larger) vehicles came within feet of sideswiping my own, I started to question myself: Are we only interested insofar as we are not actively involved in the mess?

One fire burned and thousands of cars passed by. Yet, I did not see one of the many (me included) stop to help out when the situation demanded some sort of action. There were no police, firefighters, or ambulances within sight but I am sure that several of those Mercedes SUVs with visible DVD players came pre-packaged with a cell phone somewhere in the lease.

Then again, like I said, me included.

I thought more about this as the congestion burst open within feet of passing the accident. Why was I more compelled to inch closer to home than make leaping strides to benefit another person? Surely I’m not a selfish person… am I? (Please spare me the obvious answer!)

The truth is, this happens on occasions that are both larger and smaller than a burning hunk of leather and chrome on a California Interstate. Who would we protect in the middle of a catastrophic earthquake? Similarly, how many beggars have we ignored on our walk into Starbucks? I am guilty of thinking a deaf woman asking for money was disingenuous just this past weekend. True story.

Before this turns into a long-winded Party Foul on isolated examples of selfishness (or worse yet, a self-righteous call to do “good”), the point should be made. Whether it’s fear, apathy, indifference or, in fact, selfishness, why is it so difficult to throw ourselves into a situation? Do we weigh the consequences of taking a real risk to make a personal connection?

Sometimes I think that if something doesn’t hurt anyone (see also: I look the other way), then I’m not involved (see also: personally responsible) for any of the things (see also: consequences) that happen around me. In other words, the further I turn my head, stare past, accelerate beyond, or run away from particularly involving scenarios, the more distanced (see also: less accountable) I am to do anything that involves giving myself up.

Woody Allen claims that 90% of life is just showing up. And although I hate the idea of drawing wisdom from Allen, there is a dose of merit to the fact that we are always showing up in different places and, in order for anything to happen, we have to be present. In other words, we are constantly speeding through Northbound Interstates, minding our own business…

…that is, until we get caught in the Southbound crunch.