We have, kind of oddly, become a society that fetishizes failure.
Fail fast!
Fail quick!
Fail cheap!
Fail fail fail!
I get it. There’s reason and purpose in that – but only if you actually dig into those failures and learn from them. For this, I’ll quote Ryan Holiday, and his excellent book, The Obstacle is the Way:
“The one way to guarantee we don’t benefit from failure – to ensure it is a bad thing – is to not learn from it. To continue to try the same thing over and over (which is the definition of insanity for a reason). People fail in small ways all the time. But they don’t learn. They don’t listen. They don’t see the problems that failure exposes. It doesn’t make them better.
“Thickheaded and resistant to change, these are the types who are too self-absorbed to realize that the world doesn’t have time to plead, argue, and convince them of their errors. Soft bodied and hardheaded, they have too much armor and ego to fail well.”
This is exactly what happened to Gabe Ospina and I in the gap between Seattle and San Francisco. You look at our results, and they are the exact same: 21sts, with third-round losses to David Ryan Vander Meer, losing in eerily similar fashions.
In Seattle, we built up a 17-14 lead in set one – and proceeded to tighten up and crumble, losing 21-19.
In San Francisco, we were up 18-17 in the first set – and proceeded to tighten up and crumble, losing 21-18.
In the second, we were up 19-17 – and proceeded to tighten up and crumble, losing 21-19.
We didn’t learn from our failure in Seattle. The same issues that plagued us – not earning points without the benefit of a good serve, missing too many serves, making too many errors down the stretch – plagued us in San Francisco.
Not that we didn’t practice. We practiced plenty leading up to San Francisco – but we didn’t practice what had derailed us in Seattle. And thus, the same things derailed us in San Francisco, ensuring another third-round exit, another 21st, another close but no cigar.
Another disappointment.
Point is: It is not the failing itself that is critical to success, it is the digging into that failure, extracting that learning moment, and building upon it. We didn’t do that. I didn’t do that. Our failures were the same in each tournament, and in that respect, we failed.
Had we finished 21st but lost in a different manner, it’s not that the result would be acceptable, but it would be more palatable, because at least we knew we had improved in the aspects we knew we needed to improve upon, and now we’d have something else to improve upon, something else to make us grow and develop as players.
But we didn’t.
We failed in the same aspects, and, by definition, that’s insanity.
So now it’s time to move on. I’ll be playing with Hagen Smith in Hermosa Beach. And now it’s time to build, to dig into those failures, learn from them, and improve.
It’s time to, in the words of Jocko Willink: Get after it.
