Why Your Failures Are Your Most Valuable Currency

“The master has failed more time than the apprentice has even attempted.” ~Proverb

There’s no prize for coming last. But that doesn’t mean it holds no value at all.

We’re so obsessed with not measuring up to expectations that we can deny ourselves the permission to take chances. So many of us are risk averse. Paralyzed by the fear of failure. It robs us of our creativity and moments of spontaneity that are often the source of our greatest triumphs.

And although some may view failure as the end of the road, it’s far from being an absolute.

You’re meant to fail!

The key difference between those who allow their experiences to define them and those who view it as a challenge is attitude. You have a choice. What direction are your missteps going to take you? The only way is forward. “You fail your way to success.”

Letting Go of Everything You Ever Dreamed About…

When I was young, I was never the best at anything. I worked hard, and I always managed to reach the next milestone that was placed in front of me. But that’s about it.

However, I did have a talent for music that surfaced in my early teens. Again, I was never the best or most technical player. But I was creative, and I pursued it relentlessly. Like many others before and after me, I thought I was going to set the world on fire with a guitar in hand, wearing my heart of my sleeve.

It didn’t work out. Not even close…

My idea of success was all about me. It was an ego-centric vision. And through a combination of unfortunate injuries and just plain running out of career options in my mid-twenties, I admitted defeat. At the time, it crushed me… I’d invested more than ten years into learning multiple instruments, and to lean on the old cliché—it was my entire world.

But I had to make a change.

It was the first time in my life I’d ever had to step away from something and say, “Okay, this isn’t working. What else is there for me?”

Looking back now, in many ways, it was a very grounding experience. I was perhaps guilty of being a little too cocksure and overly ambitious. I can see how it was necessary, that it was a failure which came as an intervention of sorts, allowing me to steer my life in a new direction – one that would ultimately hold far more meaning…

At twenty-six, I decided to reskill myself. So I went back into full-time education to study creative writing. I’m a self-confessed right-brainer. And if one creative avenue was now closed to me, I was at least going to make sure I could still lead an interesting life.

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” ~Denis Waitley

Now, instead of the egocentricity of being a musician, I wanted to be a fantasy novelist!

Different setting, same mindset.

But all that changed during my third and final year of university. As part of a work-based module, I had to create and deliver a writing-based project that would benefit the local community. At the time, homelessness was becoming an increasing issue, so I chose to offer poetry writing workshops at a local YMCA shelter.

And that’s where the switch flipped for me. It was a paradigm-shifting experience.

Up until that point, I had a fixed idea of what my success would—and should—look like. It was about me and myattainment. It had never really included what I could for others. But over the course of six weeks working with a disadvantaged social group that changed very quickly.

Poetry is a hard sell, even to a many writers. But here I was trying to get people engaged who were the furthest thing from an ideal audience. Many of those who attended suffered from mental health issues. They weren’t always thatinterested and sometimes didn’t show up at all

But they did respect me and gave the exercises their best effort. They didn’t always ‘get it.’ But they were willing, and I was grateful. Around half the attendees were illiterate/dyslexic, and as far as they were concerned, I was exposing their flaws. Except I wasn’t. I was trying to empower them. And slowly, this came off as the weeks progressed.

There were more than a few ‘aha moments’ in those workshops. But my biggest success was taking a young guy in his mid-twenties, who we’ll call Mike, from a place of zero confidence to complete elation at creating his own original piece, despite suffering from severe dyslexia.

I don’t have the superlatives to describe the moment other than to phrase it like this…

When Mike read his poem out loud, you could see him grasping something that wasn’t there before. You could see a change in his demeanor. He’d let go of his self-imposed limits. He ‘got it,’ and I got it, too. I could see the value of giving belief back to those who’d long-since written themselves out of the game.

It was a transformative experience for me and a real watershed moment.

I got a huge kick from having such an impact on someone’s well-being. I was completely enthused by a passion to help facilitate positive change.

“You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.” ~John Bunyan

By that point, I was close to graduation, and let’s just say you don’t look for openings as a novelist in the classified columns. But here was something that I could do now. I could make a difference in people’s lives, whether through writing or some other means. I resolved that I would become a support worker and be of service in whatever way I could.

My vision of success was no longer about me. It was no longer about financial gain, status, or any other material trappings. The ‘thing’ I now sought was more intangible but was so much more valuable from a spiritual perspective.

From this vantage point, not making it as a musician didn’t feel like such wasted potential, anymore. That chapter of my life now appeared more akin to a stepping stone. I’d simply been redirected by synchronicity. It was confirmation and affirmation that as one door closes, another one is always opening.

No longer did I fear failure, because here was a path that could only have been taken if there was room freed up in my life to do so. Sometimes, you need to let go in order to move on. And here was a prime example of that.

Discovering What Could Not Have Been Found Otherwise

After I graduated, I volunteered at a breakfast club for the homeless on weekends. I then used that experience to gain a full-time position supporting young adults with autism, profound learning disabilities, and challenging behaviors at the beginning of 2016.

It was an incredibly enriching experience. And here, the theme of failure presented itself once more. I was employed to support people who lacked the capacity to effectively manage their own lives. But more importantly, I was there to promote their independence.

The mandate I had was to try, try, and try again with those in my care. It was my job to improve their quality of life and assist these people in the basic tasks we take for granted, such as brushing our teeth, getting dressed, and other ‘mundane’ activities.

There was no such concept as failure in that environment. It was completely redundant. How can you call someone a failure who’s willing to apply themselves day after day? You daren’t. Although that’s not to say there weren’t challenges.

In fact, it took months of hard work and positive reinforcement to make the breakthroughs we did. But once a skill was mastered, it stuck—and it’s moments like that drove you on to achieve more.

“Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.” ~Jim Rohn

It was during this time that I again started to consider the merits of so-called “failure.”

I wondered, “Is the most effective way to learn really to get things right first time?” Obviously, within a care setting, you want to make progress as quickly as possible. But what about when you’re trying to gain mastery over a more complex skill?

Let me phrase it another way…

Who would you rather have as your teacher, the prodigious talent who’s been a natural since birth and was born to do [insert skill], or would rather have the other person?

The one who’s had to fight tooth and nail for every inch of their ability? The one who’s made every mistake possible and can pass on nuanced insights about what not to do?

I know who my choice would be.

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” ~Napoleon Hill

Failure, for all its negative connotations, has a definite and unquantifiable value. It’s a catalyst for growth. The more mistakes you make, the more complete your understanding becomes of a given craft. But not only that, it encourages you to self-reflect and self-analyze.

It creates a sense of accountability, forcing you to ask deep and challenging questions of yourself.

When you’re stuck at a hurdle, it can be deflating. But the ability to problem-solve and think your way out of dead-ends is a true life skill you can’t put a price on.

Think about how many times you’ve experienced the same frustrating setback time and again. But then one day, you crack the code. How did it feel when you eventually made that breakthrough? It was undoubtedly a feeling like no other, right?

And that’s because you know what you’ve achieved has been earned.

It has an integrative effect, and it holds far more in the way of value than simply being given the right way to do something. From adversity comes the ability to learn and create experiences that can then be called on as wisdom in later life.

The path of the most successful people in recent history speaks loud and clear about what failure truly means…

Stephen King had his manuscript for Carrie rejected by thirty different publishers before it was accepted, Walt Disney was fired by the Kansas Post for a “lack of imagination,” and Thomas Edison famously took 10,000 attempts to create the first lightbulb.

All of their successes were rooted in what must have appeared to be unending failure to the casual onlooker. But in their minds, they were always “failing forward.” They’d simply explored an avenue that didn’t yield a positive outcome. They reset and got back to work.

Your failures represent the greatest opportunity for learning and growth that you have at your disposal. Don’t take them to heart. Take them to the bank. Remember them. Analyze them. Etch them into your mind and vow never to make the same mistake again.

It’s a foolish person who laughs at those who’re willing apply themselves to a task in which they’re clearly out of depth. We should celebrate this kind of effort, not mock people for trying. We all have to start somewhere. Progress was never made without facing at least some form of hardship or setback.

That’s what I’ve come to learn through my own life, working with the homeless and those with profound learning disabilities. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down; it’s about how you pick yourself back up.

It’s about how you respond.

Failure is an option.

There is no shame in it. For me, it represents a learning curve rather than an absolute. Failure is a label that we give ourselves based on our expectations. Again, these too, can also be changed. Your success is relative to where you’re standing right now.

You have a choice as to whether you drag the past around like a ball and chain, or whether you take ownership and start working with yourself instead of reinforcing your limitations.

Your failures aren’t the thing that’s holding you back… It’s you.

There’s an Epidemic That’s a Bigger Threat Than the Coronavirus

ou are, probably, worrying about coronavirus. For most of us, the anxious questions are: Am I going to get the coronavirus? Is someone I love going to get it? If we do, is it going to kill us?

For starters, let’s be clear that no one ever gets a health guarantee. You might still have a heart attack even if you do everything advisable to avoid one. If you eat optimally, exercise, don’t smoke, and so on- you make heart disease or cancer vastly less probable, but you don’t get a guarantee. Human health simply does not come with those. And, of course, you can do everything right to be fit and healthy and keep your coronaries pristine, reliably avoid heart disease, and still get hit by a bus, or a falling tree, or lightning. Or get a brain tumor, for reasons we don’t know.

One thing you learn in medicine is that we control ship and sail, but never wind and wave. We don’t control everything, ever. Bad things happen to good people doing everything right all the time. But they do happen much less often to those doing everything right than to everyone else, so what we do matters enormously. It shifts probability.

So, the questions about coronavirus revert to questions about probability. And those we can answer, or at least establish the basis for answers.

The ultimate questions — will I get this disease, and will it kill me if I do? — can be broken into component parts.

What is my risk of exposure?

Right now, unless you are in one of the rarefied populations around the world where the disease is concentrated, the answer is: probably very, very, very low. There are, as I write this (2/28/20) just under 84,000 global cases out of a population of nearly 8 billion humans. That is one case per 100,000. For comparison, the lifetime risk of being struck by lightning in the United States is roughly one in 3,000. The coronavirus numbers could change, of course, and likely will, but for now- total cases are of a “one in many, many thousands” magnitude, making exposure for any one of us highly improbable.

Being exposed is necessary, but not sufficient, to get infected.

If I am exposed, how probable is it I get the disease?

This is the infection rate. If we use the most concentrated outbreak in Wuhan, China, as our model, with the assumption (obviously not entirely true) that everyone there was “exposed,” then the answer at the moment is just under 79,000 cases in a population of 11 million. That is an infection rate of roughly 7 per thousand, or 0.7 percent.

If I get infected, how probable is it the disease will kill me?

UPDATE 3/09: Only South Korea is doing testing extensively enough to give us a realistic view of the fatality rate of COVID-19. It is much LOWER in South Korea than anywhere else, 0.6% — due to more extensive testing.

This is the fatality rate. Once again, the most dire numbers come from Wuhan, where there have been just under 2,800 deaths among the just under 79,000 infected. That ratio yields a fatality rate of less than 4 per hundred, or just under 4 percent.

I hasten to apologize for any semblance here that these numbers are adequate messengers. Every number in this mix is a real person just like you and me, with a family just like yours or mine. One of the great liabilities of public health is the capacity to lose the human reality of it in a sea of anonymizing statistics. As I use numbers to make my point, I point to the people behind the veil of those numbers, those families, and invite us both to direct the full measure of our condolence, our compassion, and the solidarity of our human kinship there. Among the messages of this, and any, pandemic is that however good we may be at accentuating our superficial differences, we are one, great, global human family- the same kind of animal, with just the same vulnerabilities. COVID-19 does not care at all who issued our passport.

OK, back to numbers. Here’s an important reality check: We are much, much more likely to overlook the mildest cases of any disease than death from that disease. Death is hard to miss.

What would it mean if this common scenario pertains to COVID-19? It means many more people than we know are getting the infection, but with mild symptoms passing for a cold, or maybe even no symptoms at all. The “bad news” here is that the infection rate might be much higher than we think. But does that increase your risk of getting the disease (yes!), and dying from it (no!)? I’ll illustrate.

Let’s say you are a member of a hypothetical population of 2,000 people. We believe this population was exposed to coronavirus, that 200 people got infected, and that 8 died.

The infection rate here is (200/2000) or 10 percent (much higher than the reality in Wuhan), and the fatality rate is (8/200), or 4 percent (about what has been seen to date in Wuhan). If you are a typical member of this population, your risk of both getting the infection and dying from it is {(200/2000) X (8/200)}, or 0.4 percent. We can see this directly from the total population numbers: 8 deaths out of 2000 is, just as our calculations showed, 4 deaths per thousand, or 0.4 percent. And to flip this around, it means your chances of dodging the coronavirus bullet are 99.6 percent. Those are good odds!

But what if we were wrong — not a little, but a lot — about the number of infections, because we had overlooked many that were too mild to attract anyone’s attention? Well, then, maybe 4 times as many actually got infected- 800, rather than 200. This does mean you are much more likely to get the virus yourself, but does that make it more likely you will die from it? Not at all. The simple math shows why.

We now have an infection rate of (800/2000), or a very alarming 40 percent. But we now also have a fatality rate of only (8/800), or 1 percent. If we repeat the prior calculation for your personal risk of getting the virus and dying from it, we have: {(800/2000) X (8/800)}, or…the exact same 0.4 percent as before.

This is true of coronavirus in the real world. If we are finding every case, then your risk of getting infected is, for now at least, very low, and your risk of dying if you do is also very low. If we are missing a lot of cases, your risk of infection may be much higher, but your risk of dying if infected is commensurately lower. It’s a zero-sum game, and each sum, for now, means a very low probability indeed that you or someone you love will die from this disease.

Before we wrap up, let’s examine our propensity for risk distortion whenever confronting the new, the seemingly exotic, and the uncertain — and let’s consider how epidemiologic familiarity clearly does breed contemptuous disregard.

Worries over the exotic coronavirus are roiling the world now in every way imaginable. Those not anxious about life, limb, and loved ones are fretting over their stock portfolios.

To date, there are a total of 60 cases in the United States — and zero deaths. In contrast, humble influenza thus far this year has infected as many as 40 million of us (about 1 in 9) and caused as many as 40,000 deaths (a fatality rate of 1 per thousand). We breathlessly await the rushed development of a vaccine for COVID-19, even as we balk ever more routinely at a flu vaccine which is in fact very safe, effective at reducing infection and transmission, and directed at a disease so far many orders of magnitude more dire than the coronavirus.

Nor is our penchant for risk distortion limited to infectious diseases. As I write this, I am mere days away from the release of my new book, co-authored with Mark Bittman, “How to Eat.” We wrote the book together not because we weren’t already busy enough, but because infusing the conversation about diet and health in America with science filtered through a generally missing lens of sense is that important.

Poor overall diet quality is the single leading cause of premature death in the United States today, causing an estimated 500,000 or so deaths each year. That is more than ten times worse than a fairly bad strain of influenza, monumentally worse than coronavirus thus far, and happens every year.

Diet — what should be a source of nourishment, sustenance, and vitality — is the reason for one death in six here. And that is just the tip of the epidemiologic iceberg, since diet causes much more morbidity than premature death. To borrow directly from Dariush Mozaffarian and Dan Glickman in The New York Times:

More than 100 million adults — almost half the entire adult population — have pre-diabetes or diabetes. Cardiovascular disease afflicts about 122 million people and causes roughly 840,000 deaths each year, or about 2,300 deaths each day. Three in four adults are overweight or obese. More Americans are sick, in other words, than are healthy.

The exposure risk for diet is 100 percent; everyone eats. So for coronavirus to rival diet, every last one of us would need to be exposed.

Poor overall diet quality is the single leading cause of premature death in the United States today, causing an estimated 500,000 or so deaths each year. That is more than ten times worse than a fairly bad strain of influenza, monumentally worse than coronavirus thus far, and happens every year.

Let’s say that the ‘infection rate’ for diet is the probability of it harming you. Since less than 10 percent of Americans meet recommendations for fruits and vegetables, and since overall diet quality is poor on average, we can say that diet is harming — to one degree or another — at least 90 percent of us. So, for coronavirus to rival that, 90 out of 100 people exposed — almost everyone — would need to get infected.

What about mortality? The deaths attributed directly to diet don’t really tell the whole tale. Diet is the major contributor to diabetes, heart disease and stroke, and an important contributor to cancer, liver disease, dementia and more. At least 50 percent of all premature death can be traced to effects of diet in whole or part, so let’s call the fatality rate 50 percent. For coronavirus to match that, the virus would need to kill one out of every two of us infected.

Admittedly, coronavirus kills quickly when it kills, and diet tends to kill more slowly. This matters, but less than first meets the eye. Dying prematurely and abruptly is bad, but dying prematurely after a long chronic disease — losing life from years before losing years from life — is no bargain either. We have a native blind spot for any risk that plays out slowly rather than immediately — but climate change shows how calamitously costly that can prove to be. So, OK, coronavirus “wins” for speed, but really deserves far less preferential respect than it gets. Flu warrants far more. Diet, willfully engineered to put profit ahead of public health while evoking no apparent outrage, warrants far more still.

Back to COVID-19, sure it is scary, mostly because of the attendant uncertainties. The relatively unknown threat is always the scariest. But for the coronavirus to rival mundane but massively greater risks that hide in plain sight and go routinely neglected, it would need to be literal orders of magnitude worse than it has thus far shown itself to be. That might happen — but we might also be struck by a large asteroid while worrying about it.

I am not saying “don’t worry, be happy.” I am saying, if your worries relate to you or those you love getting sick and dying, that they could be far more productively directed than at COVID-19. I am saying get some perspective, get a grip, get a flu shot, drive a hybrid, go for a walk, and…eat a salad.