Failing Purposefully
Happy monk statues / Rumpleteaser (flickr)
Happy as a Fat Man Doing Yoga
After three months of travel (broke my weekly record of being at airports!) I finally got back into my routine this week. Eating right. Sleeping right. And yoga. Oh hot as hell Bikram yoga, how I missed you.
The teacher who runs the 7am class on Monday, Wednesday and Friday is clearly a card carrying Bikram cultist. I call her General Bikram, because, well in the nicest way I can think of describing her style, she is a prick.
She yells at each student about an incorrect hand placement, or finger pointed in the wrong direction, or even, as she told me a few days ago, that I have “parking lot” arms. Which I think is a complement. Or not.
Today she was particularly mean. She would ask a student their name, and then harsh their mellow for like 10 minutes. Move your hand; adjust your hip; don’t go so fast!
After about an hour, I realized that she hadn’t spoken to me. Damn it, I thought. Have I gotten to the point of such horrible yoga-ing that she just isn’t even expending a breath to reprimand my foot placement in Awkward Pose?
After fuming (literally, its like 115 degrees in there!) for a bit, I realized that I had gotten so caught up in being called white trash (who else has parking lot arms?) that I forgot why I started going to yoga in the first place.
I needed to fail purposefully.
As I continue to pursue my goal of automating happiness, of finding the hidden algorithm of joy that was handed down by the Dali Llama to secret monks in Tibet, I have been self testing different herbs…ok not really, but have figured out that happiness is simple. Sustaining it is hard as hell.
If failure is a part of entrepreneurial life, shouldn’t we practice it?
We expect failure to be part of the startup ecosystem, but we never have learned or teach how to fail.
In fact, in our Participation Medal Culture, we actively avoid teaching folks how to fail. Oh you showed up? Here is a trophy.
A friend of mine’s wife, who is a clinical psychologist, explained to me how universities now how employees who spend their days talking to parents who are calling because their kids didn’t do well in class. Well, not talking. Yelling.
Somewhere in the last twenty years, we stopped celebrating the learning that a skinned knee brings.
Which makes failure of any time impossible for highly effective people to stomach.
So we must learn how to fail. We must learn that even in the midst of failing there are successes to celebrate.
We must learn that as we fail, our focus has to be on the rebound, because the rebound is everything if the failure is nothing.
For me, I am reminded of that reality every time I find my 300 pound ass sweating among flexible college students and moms. I fail as soon as I step inside the studio. I cannot win in the game of Bikram Yoga. I will fall. I will fall. I will fall.
But every time, I stretch a bit further. I hold a pose a bit longer. And every. single. time. I don’t die. I get up and spend the next 15 hours building a company.
Happy as a Tibetan monk.