Crashing the Teaching Party: Lessons Learned from Failure PART II

Party Crasher Definition: A metaphor and philosophy for finding a way into the spaces in your career and life that you feel you belong in but have not been invited to and probably never will.

Embracing Failure

My foray into teaching in Taiwan was not a failure. It was a necessary lesson in resilience and self-discovery. It paved the way for me to ultimately find my calling in management, consulting, and public speaking.

My teaching misadventure, reminds me of Chuck D’s quote. “Never let a win go to your head, never let a loss go to your heart. In the grand tapestry of life, failure is but a thread, weaving its way through the fabric of our experiences. It is not the end of the story but merely a chapter in our journey towards our true path in life. These positives within our failures indicate that we’re well-positioned to successfully crash the next party we try to enter. We need to learn to treat failure like jet fuel. It burns extremely hot once ignited, but then burns off quickly. We can’t control how hard that initial gut punch hits. It’s going to land how it’s going to land.

For more discussion on dealing with failure please have a look at my other blog posts on the topic:

Crashing the Teaching Party: Lessons Learned from Failure Part I

What kind of Moron Fails Home Ec?

Analyzing Failure

We’re all unfortunately prisoners of our past conditioning for that initial impact. We must process failures as though we are coaching ourselves. “Ok Al! Feel that pain today. We have to eat some cookie dough and lick our wounds. But we know that the wounds will soon subside. And we can set it down by partaking in our favorite activity to take our minds off it. Once we’ve dealt with the impact of the failure, we grab the microscope and start analyzing what happened. We need to glean out as many learnings as possible. We then ask ourselves “what went wrong that can be improved upon?” But we also must ask “what went right that can be included in our routines going forward?”

Harvesting Failure

We have to build-up our capacity for failure the way a Fax Machine sales person does. They have faith that they can convert clients back to fax machines from email. Now I’m not celebrating their lack of foresight in trying to peddle an obsolete piece of equipment. But instead I’m suggesting that we try to emulate their unshakable resolve in the face of imminent failure. We know that life’s trial and error paradox is a numbers game and failure occupies the lion’s share of the pie chart. Failure is unavoidable. We need to make peace with it. We learn from them, celebrate them, improve from them and know that with each failure, we are one step closer to a success.

For more discussion on improving performance, please have a look at my blog entitled:

My Encounters with Steve Nash and Deliberate Practice