The 97.3% Failure
Hello and welcome to my May newsletter. I hope the sun is shining wherever you are.
This month’s journal entry is about failing. But in a good way. Hopefully you’ll see what I mean. I’d love to know what you think. And if you’d like this newsletter in your inbox on the last day of each month, subscribe here.
NEWSLETTER #5 | MAY 2023
When I left university in 2002, I decided I wanted to be a theatre director.
The established career path was to get experience as an Assistant Director and work your way up from there. Great, I thought, I’ll do that then; enthusiastically, I set about applying for Assistant Director jobs.
Meanwhile, 5,200 miles away, a team of scientists in Arizona were launching an ambitious and intimate study of arboreal life in which the world’s biggest biosphere was created by planting trees inside a dome.
And some 370 miles west of that dome, Kobe Bryant was lining up as the Shooting Guard for the LA Lakers*.
Over the course of the next five years, here’s what happened:
I applied for 36 Assistant Director jobs and was rejected for all of them.
Kobe Bryant missed more shots than any other NBA player, ever.
And the trees in the biosphere - well, once they reached a certain height, they fell down.
The roots, they discovered, hadn’t grown strong enough to support the trees. Because there was no wind inside the dome. Roots, it turns out, are made strong through resistance. And if there’s nothing to resist, the roots are weak and the trees fall down.
Kobe meanwhile, missed 14,481 shots in 1,421 games. The most misses of all time. But he also scored 38,652 points in those games. The fourth highest total of all time. A success rate of 44.7%.
And as for me, well I was a 97.3% failure. My success rate was a lowly 2.7%. But that was 2.7% more than 0%. Because after five years of failure, I succeeded on my 37th attempt when I got the job as Assistant Director at a small touring theatre company called Paines Plough.
So what do a struggling Assistant Director, Kobe Bryant and the bio-dome trees have in common?
It might surprise you to know that it’s not dunking ability. It’s Responsibility. Or more accurately, ‘response-ability’.
That tiny space between event and reaction. When something pushes against us. When someone scuppers our plans. When we miss. When we fail.
In that moment, response-ability is being able to choose how to respond. Choose to embrace resistance as a prerequisite for strength. Choose to accept that things haven’t turned out as we expected. Choose to try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Kobe failed a lot because he tried a lot. And because he tried a lot he also succeeded a lot.
And if I’d stopped after application no.36, I’d never have succeeded at all.
The first challenge is to accept change; to let go of the past or of our intended version of the future. This requires us to say: “so be it”.
Then we have to embrace failure as inevitable, necessary even. This requires us to believe, as the Stoics did, that the obstacle is the way.
So finally we can define ourselves not by the obstacles we face, but by how we respond to them.
More than anything, we have to keep turning up. Things are generally worse than we hoped but better than we feared.
We might miss 97.3% of the time when we shoot.
But we miss 100% of the shots we never take.
Inwards, onwards & upwards,
George
*Time-lines may have been conflated for dramatic effect.
