Bill Cammack

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Let’s talk about failure.

I think there are two kinds of failures. There’s the kind where you could have done something about it and didn’t, and then there’s the kind where there was never anything you could have done about it at all.

It would seem like the failure involving a chance that you could have dealt with it would be the worse one. I think the other one is actually worse, because not only is it disappointing or depressing, but it comes with the knowledge that you have a limitation. At least with the first one, you could play it off to yourself that had you done something, the outcome would have been different. That sucks WAY LESS than admitting that no matter what you have in your arsenal or bag of tricks, you couldn’t have done JACK to stop the train from a-rollin’.

I’m thinking about this now, because I got a call earlier this evening from someone close to me who had/has a problem. As I was listening, my mind was calculating what I could do about it. How I could help. How I could be of assistance. As I kept drawing blanks, the odds started to stack up in the favor that I was NEVER going to figure out something I could do/say to help.

Once that understanding hit me, I started to project the future of my being of no assistance whatsoever. I knew that I was receiving….. I *HOPED* that I was receiving the call just so the person could vent. I didn’t LIKE the idea of the conversation ending without my having some sort of positive and changing effect. I didn’t like the idea of a potential negative outcome of the situation, regardless of what went on in this conversation I was having. Yes. I know that “being me” was of assistance. I know that “listening” was of assistance. I know that my past track record of my way of being was of assistance. I’m just not built to have ZERO EFFECT. I haven’t been groomed and trained and educated to be some hump on the subway that doesn’t have a life now, never did and never will. Ultimately, it’s not even the potential for failure that sparked this post. It’s more about how failures shed light on one’s personal limitations…. or perhaps how recognition of limitations sheds light on one’s self-image.

I used to edit a show for The History Channel called “Guts & Bolts”. One of my episodes was about aircraft carriers and how their catapult systems worked. The supervisor being interviewed mentioned that the catapults had to have a high 99% success rate, ESSENTIALLY that the failure rate rounded off to ZERO PERCENT. I thought that that was unreasonable for anything mechanical, but then he went on to mention how what they’re sending on every single launch is a plane that’s worth MILLIONS of dollars. If their success rate is closer to 99% than 100%, that means that out of every 100 launches, one of those million-dollar planes goes right in the water instead of flying away to handle the business. When you think about it that way, they literally can’t AFFORD to fail.

Can YOU afford to fail?

What happens if you fail? Do you really lose anything, or do you just take a hit to your self-esteem and self-image? Does you company fold? Does your family dissolve? Do you lose face amongst colleagues? Does your girl leave you? What exactly happens if the worst-case scenario you’ve been envisioning actually comes true?

I started out talking about failure in a conversation, but there was actually no way I could fail *myself*, because *I* wasn’t a central figure in the situation. I would have been failing the person who called me, but what did they expect from me to begin with? What did I expect from myself? I wouldn’t actually have been failing them eiher. I would have been failing myself, in my own consideration of how I would respond or deal with a situation if it was ever presented to me. I would have liked to believe I would have had the right thing to say. I would have liked to believe that I could turn whatever was a negative into a positive….

The fact of the matter is, there.are.some.things.I.can’t.do, and I need to get used to that and get over it. However, “getting over it” is a failure within itself, because I’m insulating myself against other people’s problems instead of learning how to help them out. I actually don’t even have to “get over it”, because this entire post is all about BEING over it… naturally. Unfortunately, Being Over It is a selfish insulation against other people’s issues, but I’m built that way, and that’s that. The LIMITATION, in this instance, is my own personal inability to suspend the restrictive state of “being over it” in order to be potentially more effective in the rare cases that something like this is brought to my attention. I’d like to be able to believe that I can dive deep inside their issue, figure out a positive outcome and present it to them, but it’s just not the truth.

This also happens in business. You want to help everyone, but you just.plain.CAN’T. There isn’t enough time in the day. You want to look at people’s websites that they send you links to and ask you to critique them. You want to consider people’s video project proposals, even though their budges completely SUCK and it’s not really even worth it to you to spend time and mental processing cycles considering what they’re telling you, because everything you’re thinking of doing for them costs more than they’re willing to spend on it.

Where do you draw the line? What does it mean to you when you draw that line? How does it feel to you as a person when you accept that project that you really hate, as a favor to someone else? How does it feel when you put someone’s business interests ahead of your own business, fun and personal interests? How much pressure do you put on yourself to avoid failure at all costs? How important IS IT to your business or to your self-esteem that you’re approaching 100% effectiveness/success rate?

Personally, I pride myself on being the best at everything and anything that I do. Even if I don’t succeed in that goal, that’s what I’m striving for and aiming at. Tonight, I wasn’t “the best” in this conversation, because I couldn’t find a win. I couldn’t find the thing to say to make it better. I couldn’t ROCK the situation. I won’t go to sleep tonight knowing that I made an incredible difference and everything’s going to be better tomorrow for them than it was tonight.

I suppose the moral of the story is that “I can’t do that” is a valid and healthy response to something that someone asks you for. Similarly, “I can’t help you” is valid as well. You might not like it, recognizing your own limitations, but ultimately, you’re better off. There’s no need to waste time, energy and resources on things that aren’t properly beneficial to you. It’s similarly fruitless to try to help people with things you can’t help them with.

I haven’t thought about this in a really long time. The first time it came to my attention was when a friend of mine criticized my response to a mutual friend telling me she got dumped after disclosing to her then-current boyfriend how many guys she had hooked up with before him. SHE was thinking that it was a necessary thing to say, in order to get things out in the open and have a completely honest relationship with him. He dumped her practically immediately. While I felt sorry for her that she was out of a relationship and would need to hit the bricks and cultivate a new one from scratch, my mentality and demeanor was “What did you expect?”. Even though what I was saying was sympathetic… like… the words themselves… my demeanor was completely nonchalant and matter-of-fact. I was stuck between the facts of the situation and wanting to make her feel better.

I guess the bottom line is that a person can listen to and understand another person’s situation and care about them and hope and pray for the best for them without actually empathizing with or being able to internalize or the situation and come up with fantastic solutions. There’s value in listening. There’s value in fellowship. Sometimes, however, the way the cards are dealt or the way the chips fall or the way the cookie crumbles, there isn’t much for you to do in a given situation other than recognize your own limitations and teach yourself to live with them.

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