Striving. I am always and constantly striving. Even when my body is stil, my mind is busy. Thinking. Contemplating. Debating. Considering. Strategizing. The gears are in constant motion. What do I need to do? Where am I succeeding? Where am I falling short? What can I control? What can I influence? What does that mean for me and my goals? Are my goals realistic? Are they just? Do I need to adapt? What do I need to change? The goal or the plan?
In this manner, I am failing all the time. I fail to be the husband that I want to be. I fail to be the parent that my children most fully deserve. I fail to be as effective as I need to be for the agency to achieve a 5-star rating. I fail to maintain friendships. I fail to lose weight. I fail to stay in ideal physical fitness. I fail to get enough sleep at night. I fail to exercise adequate control of decision making that has long-term ramifications. In this manner, I am almost never successful.
But I also learn everyday. I learn about the world around me and the people in it. I learn how to be a better husband, parent, father, and administrator. I learn what strategies don’t work to maintain relationships and which ones do. I learn what not to do to lose weight, to become more fit, or improve my sleep. If I am paying attention, I end every day knowing something that I didn’t when it started.
In this way, failure is okay if I offer myself grace. I strive for goals that are difficult to achieve, and I may or may not succeed, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. Nor should I not be understanding and forgiving of myself when I err in the same manner as every other error person that walks this earth beside me. Each and every one of us is failable. It is my job to remember that every day and to extend to myself the same grace as I would to a friend or colleague.
I don’t denigrate someone for not succeeding. Rather, I praise them for trying. I help them explore where they fell short, determine what variables were under their control, and learn what could be done differently next time. Or maybe the goal was unrealistic, and that is be okay too. No matter the situation, if people are doing their best – their real and authentic best – they should be provided space for a soft and safe landing so they can get up and try again, and again, and again if necessary. In this way, there is a little Sisyphus in all of us.
That grace comes from recognizing that we are all strivers, some of us just strive more consciously than others. Striving, after all, is what differentiates biology from chemistry. Striving is what works and fights against entropy to keep us alive.
But no biological system is 100% effecient. Through millions and millions of years of life on this planet, nothing has ever achieved 100% efficieny. Ultimately, without exception, strivers fail every day. That is okay. It is what makes us biological and – most importantly – human. It makes most sense then to embrace failing as both a necesssary and beneficial aspect of our experience.
These thoughts were brought to the fore when I recently had a conversation with a dear friend the other day. They would like to lose weight, but they have elected to not actively try. To their mind, if they set a goal and it proves difficult to achieve, it stirs an anxiety in them that is intolerable. By not setting a goal, they never fail, If they never fail, they don’t have to feel bad about themselves, their anxiety is held at bay, and they feel successful.
While I can empathize with their anxiety, I couldn’t help but realize that they are still failing invisibly. You see, not failing is not success; it is destructive and fatalistic.
No doubt, we can be “successful” without establishing formal goals. For instance, we can make or win a lot of money without even trying. We can acquire professional respect and esteem just by doing what comes naturally. We can develop and support a robust network of friends by merely being ourselves. But if none of that is purposeful or intentional, it is only luck. Such “successes” are mere happy accidents, coincidentally meeting or exceeding arbitrary thresholds that someone else has set for us, but never our own.
And that isn’t to say that people can’t be happy with such successes. They can be and many are. My anxious friend is one of those people. But such people can never be proud of an accomplishment that they didn’t strive for. Their lives are less intentional and less purposeful. They are exercising less (free?) will. They are lucky fatalists. And the only difference between a fatalist who is lucky and one who is not is, well … luck.
So?
Allow me to close with this metaphor, which I think is apt: You go to the local book store and you are faced with a choice between a novel or a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) story.
The fatalist chooses the novel. They make a choice to not make more choices. They let the story unfurl as they read without any control or influence over the narrative. They read it from beginning to end and they are done. They might hate the story and regret it purchase. They might love the story, re-reading and recounting the same story over and over again. Either way, they get just one story, crafted in just one way.
Me, I’ll choose the CYOA story. No, I cannot re-write the pages, and, yes, much of the story is necessarily constrained by the author who wrote it, but there is something special about having more choices. I can read it again and again and the story can read differently. When I re-read the story, I can learn from my previous readings and choose differently the next. I can arrive at a story that is most satisfying to me as the reader. It is a story that isn’t crafted one way, but rather in my way.
The adventure, of course, is in the choosing. We get to be the most of ourselves when we are deciding, when we are striving, and (most importantly) when we are failing. So wake up every morning expecting to fail over and over and over again. And when you do, grant yourself the grace to fail happily, knowing that you are choosing your own adventure, not living someone else’s.