Success is Born in Failure’s Forge

Sometimes the best maps will not guide you,

You can’t see what’s round the bend,

Sometimes the road leads through dark places,

Sometimes the darkness is your friend…

Bruce Cockburn, “Pacing the Cage”, The Charity of Night, Golden Mountain Music Corp. (BMI), 1997

Several years ago, after many years of teaching, it finally dawned on me that real growth, authentic learning, begins from a place of insecure, uncomfortable unknowing.  This is a place rife with the possibility of failure.  Yet only from this place, along a path that winds out of sight through dark valleys, do we really learn, change, and grow.  I often tell my students struggling with the mathematical aspects of chemistry that “it’s hard until it’s easy”.  When they give me that confused puppy-dog head tilt look, I remind them that if what we are doing is easy, then they already knew or could recognize what was going on. It’s those students who struggle, who fail several times, and then with continued perseverance and support, “get it”, where a quantum change has occurred.  When they say “this is easy now, what was my problem before… why was I so stupid… etc…”, I point out to them that they have learned something, made connections in their brain that weren’t there before.  Instead of judging harshly, be proud of the hard work of hanging in, trying it again, not settling for failure, and as a result growing, learning , becoming more than before.  At the end of the day, it isn’t as much about calculating the theoretical yield for a reaction or describing the process by which every cell produces the proteins it needs from its DNA, but rather the ongoing discovery for each student of how they learn anything, and more importantly finding the inner resilience they didn’t necessarily know they possessed.  
So then I look in the mirror and see the person who plays it safe, who has only rarely moved outside his comfort zone, who possesses a broad base of knowledge and a keen intellect, but who has stayed in the area of strength (read comfort) most of the time.  When I did attempt to extend myself into the world of MLM selling life insurance and financial products, I never worked through that which lay outside by comfort zone.  As an intellectual exercise, it came easy, but actually being an effective seller, and more importantly believing in the recruitment process, not so much.  My blocks came from being uncomfortable with selling because my mindset about selling was flawed.  I saw it as pushing a product, even if it was one I believed had value.  I wasn’t convinced that value translated to others.  I was concerned that I might manipulate others into a purchase, that I risked betraying my morals.  Instead of doing the internal hard work of changing my mindset, I retreated from the business and let my license lapse.  But that “failure” sowed the seeds for success in losing weight several years later, and my hope is that it has provided the necessary lessons as I move forward.  Instead of looking at risk as risk of failure, let me strive to risk success.  Just like I ask my students to do.