Reframing Success

While we are reframing, what about reframing success?  

Most of the time when I want to have a stellar cup of coffee I pop into one of my two favorite local coffee shops - Roastology or Perk.  Occasionally I find myself in need of coffee but with a grandchild in tow so I go through a Starbucks in our neighborhood that has a drive thru window. (Have you tried out these new car seats? I have a daily limit as to how many times I will strap one of these kiddos in and haul them out.)  Fortunately, I am a lucky duck and often have a kiddo buckled up in the backseat, go through the window often and am familiar with the tricky maneuvers required to navigate the long lines. Last week I circled the building and was about to make the final turn to align myself with the long line of drive thru coffee guzzlers when a lady entered the Starbucks lot.  I motioned her forward. She hopped in line in front of me. Happens all the time. No big deal.

But evidently to her it was a big deal.  She thought I was exiting the area; when she realized I was behind her in line she was mortified.  At least that’s what the barista told me when she handed me my free coffee, paid for with apologies from the lady in the car in front of me.

I had no complaints or awareness of perceived offense.  I showed no displeasure at her entry into the line because I wasn’t displeased.  But it really got me thinking about success in a world that craves it so much.

This gal made an amends for what she perceived as her personal failure to be courteous.  I found it to be an act of great kindness on a day when I was experiencing the world as mean and cold and hard.  The coffee is immaterial; her act of contrition (albeit unnecessary) was a balm on a heavy heart.

Need a bit more success and a little less failure in your life?  Be kind. Just be kind.

Can you think of some opportunities to be kind in a small, quiet way that might make a huge difference to someone else?  You never know who is having a horrible day; your one small act might just turn the day around.

Reframing Failure

I have not failed.  I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.  

~ Thomas A. Edison

Words matter.  How we think about ourselves, our perceived successes and our perceived failures is interesting to me.  I have friends with boundless enthusiasm and an almost limitless capacity for turning any situation into a success.  These folks are masters of reframing.

If Edison lacked the capacity to think of 10,000 “ways that won’t work” and instead had angsted over his “failures” - could he have tried that 10,001st time?  I think not. People who cannot handle failure may lack the resilience needed to innovate or even stay with meaningful but mostly doomed endeavors simply because they are meaningful and the right thing to do.

Reframing can be mostly good, and I’d rather have the capacity to reframe than not.  It allows us to adjust our expectations along the way. Edison is a great example of a guy who appreciated the value of a decent reframe.  Instead of considering every experiment a failure, he looked at each one as eliminating a option that was never going to bring him success.

What situations would benefit from some reframing in your life?

"Failure is not an option"

In the movie Apollo 13, Ed Harris (playing the part of Gene Kranz, flight director of Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle missions for NASA) says, “Failure is not an option.”  And then by ding dongy those magicians at NASA SUCCEED! It turns out that Kranz did not actually say this in real life but he loved the fiction so much he used it as a title for his memoir.  It is also the title of a presentation on the History Channel documenting the United States’ space program. If your want to watch this inspiring clip, sure to warm your heart, go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tid44iy6Rjs.  

But the truth is, failure is absolutely an option; it happens every day.  I fail every day to notice a moment when I could have been kinder, gentler, more loving and more helpful.  Don’t talk to me about failure as if it is not an option; don’t tell Kate Bowler who counts the days she will have with her child as opposed to the decades she anticipated that failure is not an option.  Failure is not only an option, it is a guarantee.

Why do we set these standards for success without respecting the reality of failure?  Who got the bright idea that if we double-down on demonizing failure that somehow we would end up with more success?  As far as I can tell, it just increases the likelihood that we will develop nervous tics or a propensity to self-medicate.

In my world acceptance of reality can be the difference between life and death.  I suspect it is a better predictor of someone’s longevity than unbridled optimism.  Acceptance requires that we ALWAYS respect the possibility that failure is an option.

This is hard, but it is also true.  

Is there any relationship or situation in your life that is challenging you to step out of denial and into the world of reality?  Failure is an option. What do you need to accept?

Are you afraid to "fail"?

'When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.'  

~ Augusten Burroughs

How can we speak of success without looking at its counterpart - failure?  Burroughs seems to imply that health in and of itself is success. Does this then mean that sickness is failure?

Silly, right?  We would never explicitly accuse a sick person of being a failure because they are sick…...would we?  Certainly this is not what Burroughs is suggesting - he’s saying what we all know - it is very hard to be sick, and when we are well we often take our health for granted.  He’s asking us to wake up and be grateful.

Kate Bowler has written a lovely book called “Everything Happens For A Reason And Other Lies I’ve Loved” that challenges us to REALLY look at our perspective on sickness and health.  Kate is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School, a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Duke University. Unless you are a Tarheels fan, Kate’s school resume alone reeks of success.  She has published a book on “the prosperity gospel” called “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel”. Again, success.

In case the term “prosperity gospel” doesn’t mean much to you, here is how Kate describes it, “The prosperity gospel is a theodicy, an explanation for the problem of evil…[it] looks at the world as it is and promises a solution.  It guarantees that faith will always make a way.” (xiii, Everything Happens For A Reason)

And in the midst of living her big dream life - great job, married to her high school sweetheart, and mother of a toddler - her life was nothing BUT possibility.  Until the day she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Is Kate Bowler a failure?  By all objective standards, she is not.  But man, you should hear some of the crazy things people said to her about her cancer.  All well-intended but it seemed like EVERYONE wanted to offer her an explanation, a promise of hope, a potential beat-the-odds-miracle if only she drank this kind of juice or prayed this kind of prayer or believed with all her heart.  

Truth be told, in our world, failure is verboten.  Failure, when it happens, is a reason to blame, judge, hide and run from - which I think it is why we “explain”.  If we are going to wrangle with the meaning of success, we might want to start with dismantling our fear of failure.  

Are you afraid of failure?  Why or why not? What would be the worst failure you could imagine?

Funerals

I attend a lot of funerals.  It is the rare funeral when at least one person in the crowd of mourners is not interested in finding a success story in the life of the dearly departed.  Rarely do I attend a funeral of someone who has lived to a ripe old age and then slipped peacefully off into the next life while surrounded by beloved relatives.  Regardless the circumstances, funerals are often a time when folks try to make sense of a life that in some cases was a mess. Funerals for folks who have led complicated lives and often passed way too soon are hard to navigate.   

At some of these events there are conflicts among the remaining relatives and friends who are trying in various ways to “manage the story”.  I am often pulled into broom closets or bathrooms to be filled in on who “knows” and who “doesn’t know” all the nitty gritty details of this life and loss.  Other times we have competing ex’s or family feuds that make getting the family seated in the reserved pews an act of diplomacy. Many, many times we are surrounded by sadness and regret, guilt and frustration.

Over the years I have developed a policy about funerals.  Someone might say, “Hey, I want you to do my funeral.” And I reply, “Sure, but you need to know that I don’t lie at funerals.”

Lately I’m changing my tune.  I am coming to realize that finding the truth in life or death is not as easy as granting the pastor permission to tell the truth.  Humans are complicated, so why wouldn’t the wrestling through with the mourning of one’s passing and/or the celebration of their life be less so? Who is to say how to interpret the actions, intentions, and various ways we all interact with the world?  The older I get the less confidence I have that I can find the “truth” much less speak coherently of it during the stress of a funeral gathering.

Today, I pray for each of us that when our time comes, we will have lived in such a way, within a tribe of people, that stories can be told that reflect the often-complicated circumstances of our authentic albeit imperfect lives with tenderness.  To do so, we have to continue to tease out what it means to live successfully. In the days ahead I will continue to unpack and reframe success - with the end in mind. (What if you wrote your obituary, how would you want to be remembered?)