With exam season looming, most of my clients are concerned to achieve success and worried about failure. It is probably a sign of my aberrant nature, but this week my brain has gone on a loop of pondering the benefits of failure. While I would consider myself – broadly speaking – to be a successful person, I have experienced numerous failures in my life. Some of them, on reflection, have been the making of me. In this post, I plan to outline one of my failures in life and argue that it has turned out to be an outstandingly good thing in the long-run.
Before I begin, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that the failure I plan to discuss is my only failure, or even the biggest failure in my repertoire. I’ve had failures galore. I’ve also had successes galore. It is important, I believe, to be able to reflect upon and celebrate both. While celebrating failure might seem a strange thing to do, I believe that it is part of life’s rich and glorious tapestry. As Confucius famously said, our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. Getting things wrong and learning how to deal with that inevitability is an essential life-skill. None of this will come as a revelation to anyone with an iota of sense and maturity, but what I want to reflect upon today is how failure – while it can be painful at the time – may turn out to have surprising and unpredictable benefits for us as an individual. So, here goes.
At the age of 18, I failed my driving test. When I tried again, I failed again. I knew I’d failed the second test at the point when the examiner said – with notable tension in his voice – “you need to be careful at this point, as you’re actually on the wrong side of the road.” The whole experience was humiliating and dismal. I was – to be frank – an absolute liability on the road. After a great deal of reflection, I decided that driving was not for me and gave up on the idea of ever trying again. I never wavered from this decision and it has been a life-limiting decision in all sorts of ways that both the drivers and the non-drivers among you will immediately understand.
With maturity and hindsight, in recent years I have become confident and secure enough to admit that this was a deep and profound personal failure on my part. It was a failure of courage on every level. I failed to persist, failed to try again and worst of all I failed to face up to the fact that some of my physical disabilities (a spinal condition and my eyesight) were getting in the way of my learning. Had I been able and willing to face up to this simple fact, I could have explored opportunities for adaptations: lots of disabled people drive! At that age, however, I was not willing to face up to the fact that I was, in fact, disabled. I wasn’t comfortable with the word or the very idea that I belonged in that category. So, I let it get the better of me. I gave up. So, why on earth might this profound personal failure be something to celebrate? Well, as it turns out, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that my inability to drive has quite literally saved my life.
There is ever-increasing and undeniable evidence that a sedentary lifestyle is rapidly becoming the biggest killer since the advent of cigarettes, and as someone who has eschewed all forms of sport and exercise for most of my life, I would have been at enormous risk of this silent killer. Yet, according to the data on my Smart watch, I am in the 95th percentile for cardiovascular fitness. My V02 max, currently considered to be one of the best predictors of longevity that we have, is very high for my age group. My resting heart rate is excellent, as is my recovery time. And get this. I still don’t run and I still don’t play sport. Instead, I walk and I walk fast, a habit embedded because most of the time I have used the process of walking as my transport to get myself somewhere: to work, to meet someone, to get home and out of the cold. Walking fast is a habit, something I do daily, often multiple times a day. As I write this post, it is a lunchtime and I have already walked just over 5 kilometres, pushing my heart rate into the zone that counts for moderate to vigorous exercise. I plan to go out again before I start tutoring later today.
Because I cannot drive, walking is something that I will have to do for as long as I live – and that is a good thing. Walking is my superpower, and that superpower has arisen purely from the fact that I made the weak and potentially self-sabotaging decision to give up on the idea of driving.
So, there we have it. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?
