failure – developing dad

I owe a lot to my near perpetual failure. I mean a whole lot.

I learned to fail early. I tell everyone, eventually and probably repeatedly that I failed kindergarten. Now I know that in the context of school that means a specific thing. In my case it meant something slightly different. I cried. I cried all day. I cried every day all day. I cried terribly and persistently and if it’s like anything else I’ve ever done, I did so loudly.

Sure, I was slightly young as I was born in November and started my first year of kindergarten (a phrase that is just utterly delightful to me, my first year of Kindergarten) as a 4 year old. I clearly wasn’t ready. I went to a Catholic school those early years and I remember sitting with a nun in the big office in the southwest corner of the first floor of the school with a lollipop to end my day at least one of those days. In my memory my mom picked me up there and had a few moments chat with the nun outside the door before we left to walk home. Maybe I was in school for a week, maybe a month, maybe 3 months. I suspect I was home by Christmas, but it was 1978 and I was four or five so I don’t really know. What I do know is this early failure set me forth on a career of academic failure that lasted into my 30’s.

That’s not entirely true. To be sure, I was an academic failure throughout my formal education. That said, in my 30’s, based on my work performance and a career that was well under way I was accepted into the Masters of Social Work Program at Hunter College. I attended the orientation in the auditorium and was relatively excited to start the program. Until day one. I was miserable preparing to go, resistant to leave my apartment in time and upon arrival to the school saw a sign on the door that read ‘Class cancelled today. See you next week.’ That was enough for me. I walked out, never returned and abandoned EVER seeking to further my formal education ever again.

Back to the failure at hand. That first exposure to kindergarten soured me on the whole endeavor. Those early years in Catholic school were the worst and that was a sustained reality. I faked sick as much as possible to avoid being there. I was what kids today would call ‘bullied’, though at that time I don’t know that ‘bullying’ was all that bad. I think adults pretty much concurred that dealing with bullies was a good learning experience. Like so much so that there were very special episodes of sitcoms reinforcing the belief.

I remember telling my grandfather when he asked about all the punches I kept taking in school that I was taught to turn the other cheek. Well I had him on that one. Or so I thought. He just took it in, confirmed that it was a good lesson from my mom and from Jesus, but that sometimes a man has to punch back and it wouldn’t be the worst thing if I did. Well, I did not like that idea. So for 5 years of Catholic school, six if you count my failed year of Kindergarten (technically I dropped out) I learned to really take a punch.

I failed everything going forward. In my school, and this is amazing to me to say from this angle in 2024, but you had to FAIL THREE CLASSES to be academically ineligible for sports, so I failed 2 consistently, I’d pick them out ahead of time, and made sure to really skim by a third class. I may have actually missed a semester of basketball at one point, but never when on Varsity. I was pretty good so coaches would go to bat for me.

Ah, basketball. I miss being so young and spry and able to move so fluidly. Make no mistake, on the local level, in my town, in my schools, I was legit very good. I was obsessed and remember specifically talking to a guidance counselor in 7th or 8th grade and telling them my only objective was to play in the NBA. That was my career plan. Here’s where it gets a little unbelievable. They responded by saying it was not something they’d ever said to anyone else, but in my case it seemed like a reasonable path to pursue. Again, I was really good really young.

I lived and breathed the game. I devoured the basketball digests that arrived at my door. I spent 6-8 hours a day (this is if anything an under estimation for the years I was 12-16 years old) playing, shooting, looking for runs around town to jump in on or in my wonderful case, lying about my age to get a day pass to the college open gyms where I was a bit of a legend as I ran all but the best players on the college team out of the gym on the daily out of season. I know it doesn’t sound possible, but it was a div 3 school and I was much younger and fitter back then.

My NBA dreams lasted well into high school. Beyond my own assessment and that of my middle school guidance counselor, I think a lot of people thought I really had a chance. But like almost every other dreamer of such dreams I hit a brick wall beyond which I couldn’t see myself ever getting to. I saw it before my classmates or kids I played with did, but it was clear. I got inklings when trying out for the regional AAU team. I made the team, but I saw the guys who were moderately successful college players who had what I never would. They were taller, faster, stronger and by amounts I couldn’t fully make up for with hard work and dedication.

So I lingered. I lost the love. The last great accomplishment was making the Empire State Games team as a rising senior. It was a wonderful capstone to a project I’d undertaken with an open heart and with both feet in the water for most of a decade and I’m proud of it to this day. I played with College greats and NBA players and I knew before anyone else around me that it was stopping here. And mostly it did. But before it stopped completely, before I hung ’em up, it did one very important thing for me. It got me into college. Which was good since I had no idea if I’d graduate high school until the last minute.

I was in. I made it to college. I even made the basketball team and immediately failed off after one trimester. Yep. Basketball ran on fumes after that and a couple more things happened, but I was mostly an also ran who occasionally was asked to dress for a trip and even got to travel for the first time our school ever qualified for the NCAA tourney. It was fun, but that’s all it was at that point.

College was more failure, but I was getting more efficient at it. I learned that I could take a night class to satisfy my requirements. I could attend with adults much older than me (and a few likeminded regular students) and completely a class while only having to attend once a week instead of 2-3 times during the week. That’s right, I could skip a whole weeks worth of classes in one go! Okay, that may be sarcastic, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen quite a bit.

I failed introduction to computers (that was a real and required course for all graduates of Elmira at that time, the early 90’s) what I have to assume is a still record 7 times. Yep. I failed Intro to Computers 7 full times. When I walked across the stage after 5 full years of college (yup, took five years to fake graduate) I received a nice, purple degree holder with a piece of paper inside that had the words ‘summer completer’ typed inside. The whole family came to see the pageantry of my fake graduation. I wouldn’t graduate for 4 more years, until I made the trek once a week from my home 2 hours away to complete intro to computers on my 8th try. And it was touch and go even that time. After a ton of failure I got my degree in human services in just under (6 months under) a decade.

In one of those night classes though, in the place where I would least suspect to find a thing I wasn’t looking for, I took the first steps on the path that leads directly to where I sit now, 30 years down the road. The Executive Director of the local ARC came in to speak about the history of the ARC movement and how he worked to make society more integrated and open opportunities for people with disabilities. A fellow student, someone I frankly had a fairly low opinion of spoke up in class and asked if the ARC were in any way related to AHRC of NYC. It was. She described how she had worked the previous summer at a sleep away camp for AHRC of NYC and what it was like to do that work. I asked her about it after class and next thing I know I’m getting a call in a dorm room to interview for a summer camp counselor position. I took the job and never looked back.

So, that 4 years between fake graduating and graduating was maybe the most fortuitous failure of them all, my failed engagement. It’s a long story and a not so interesting one. It’s filled with youthful confusion and striving as well as delusion and insecurity. In any case, thank god I failed at that one. I don’t suppose I’m the only one who failed at relationships until they found the right one so I won’t ponder on it, but suffice it to say, I suspect everyone came away from that a winner. She was a lovely person and I was a lost and potentially lovely person. Thankfully we each have found the right person and, while I can only fully speak for myself, I suspect she would agree, this failure while painful was necessary.

I am a reader. I suspect it’s a large part of what has made me successful in a lot of ways. I fell in love with books at an early age and never really let go of them. I was resistant to school or even work reading, but let me loose in a bookstore or library and I’ll find a stack of books I’ll get through no matter how long it might take me. I loved novels. My first hero in the literary world was John Irving, celebrated novelist of such wonderful stories as The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meaney, The Cider House Rules, The Hotel New Hampshire… I have to stop there. I could go on and write endlessly about each. Especially Owen Meaney.

My love of novels lead me to want to be a writer. I idolized these people. I couldn’t believe all these worlds that so enraptured me as I read about them, all these characters and situations all came from a single mind was mind blowing. Mind expanding. I wanted to try. I wanted to see if I could create a world like I had fallen into so many times. I wanted to tell a story that had my thoughts and creations at its root. I wanted so badly to be a novelist.

I wrote. A lot at times, less at others, but for 3o plus years now I have been writing. I still dream of being that next great novelist. A lot of novelists don’t strike a nerve with audiences until well into their 40’s and even 50’s. I still feed this dream and while I haven’t written much in the last 4 years or so, I still dream about it. I have started reading a lot more this last 5 years of so since getting glasses. I had no idea how much the fading images had effected my reading, but as soon as I addressed the issue I was back in the books.

But here’s the thing. Despite all the writing I’ve done and despite generally feeling great about the audiences that have read and mostly liked my writing, I have failed, utterly, to write that novel that takes me out of worrying about making a living. Failed to write that script that gets into a bidding war amongst the great Hollywood Studios that makes my next deal the one I can retire from the other world and dedicate my life to stories and capturing the praise of those critics I read every week in the NYT Review of Books. Nope. In fact I’ve spent far more money on writing and developing passable pieces then I have received. I am a writer, and that was a hill to climb and I’m proud to have done it, but I’m not the writer I set out to be.

Nor am I the student I could have been. Nor the basketball player I thought I’d be. Nor the partner I tried to be so long ago. Nope. I failed to finish where I intended in each of these. But I wouldn’t change a thing.

Because the success that my life is, and there’s almost no argument against my life being a success, is largely due to the connections I made in all my failed endeavors, the lessons I learned in never quite getting to where I aimed and in the roads I couldn’t have seen that I wandered down in pursuit of things I would never find.

Failure is fuel at times, driving us to keep looking. Failure is a guide at times, gently turning us toward where we should be looking. Failure is many things, but it is rarely alone. It brings a lot with it and we shouldn’t be afraid to follow it down paths we didn’t know existed when we started out. I followed failure where it lead and like that path less traveled in that long ago New England wood, it has made all the difference.

If you want to increase your amount of success, triple your rate of failure. This is how I remember and use what I tell people is one of my favorite quotes. I believe it’s one of my favorites because its one I need to hear as it speaks to a persistence and an energy, not to mention perspective, that is hard for me to maintain. I credit the quote to Thomas Edison. While it may be paraphrased and punched up over time, I believe this was a quote of his.

I was wrong. It was Thomas J. Watson who said that. In any case I’ve always imagined Mr. Watson nee Edison, sitting in his labs creating filaments out of all conceivable items for years on end assured that this would get him to where he was going. In my telling it did. In reality it did. Of course it got there with Direct Current (DC) and would have gotten there much more efficiently, not to mention like a trillion times more safely, had he gone with Nicola Tesla’s suggestion of Alternating Current (AC), but that is not the genius’s wont. He did it his way. Failing ever forward to a destination that was wrongheaded. Turns out his quote on failure was essentially that he hadn’t yet experienced any. Each filament he’d tried that failed was not a failure, but rather a success in proving it was not worth pursuing. A brilliant spin and one I suspect he believed. How else would he go on.

There is something to be learned here from both men. In Watson’s case, a less romantic sort then the more famed fellow, he took the very straight down the middle approach. His quote, ‘If you want to increase your success rate, double your rate of failure.’ Like that. Not afraid or cowed at all at the idea of failing. He just says flat out, essentially, that failure is the road to success. To get closer to success fail more often. Being of the Midwest this type of unsentimental, practical advice resonates with me.

Edison was an inventor as it was a time that called for them and a field of endeavor that had yet to be corporatized. Essentially there was a need and he filled it. Some kid with a podcast is going to do that in some way in the future. I don’t know how yet, but when I do I’ll write about it. In any case I suspect that he’d have been an adman in the ’50’s and a pitchman in the nineties. His quote took a polar opposite approach to failure than Mr. Watson’s, rhetorically speaking, but it arrived at the same spot. Only difference? He denied failure. A thing failed, sure, but that’s not how he’s choosing to look at it. In both cases the advice is to keep trying. Each failed attempt is merely a piece of data, another step down the road to success.

I’ve been afraid of failure my whole life and have not so much avoided it as I’ve simply quit when it was an option to do so when I knew a failure would hurt too much. I salvaged some self respect by choosing failure in an attempt to control it and fail on my own terms. When I knew I wasn’t good enough at basketball, oddly enough when I made the Empire State Games team and played against guys my own age who were so superior to me that I knew, I kinda stopped caring. When math got hard in the 11th grade, I changed my goals of being a math teacher to having no goals. When I was afraid of computers (I’m old and it was a different time, don’t judge me) and was told I had to pass ‘intro to computers’, yep that was a thing for many of us matriculating in the early ’90’s, I failed it 7 times. In fact, college was too much for me so I stayed drunk and didn’t graduate until 9 years after entering when I FINALLY passed that computers course. I’ve dipped out of every relationship I could until years of therapy and the right person finally got me through that. I was so afraid of my writing ‘failing’ that I showed maybe 3 pieces of work to 3 different people over 15 years and never really spoke to them again.

How did I get past this stultifying fear you ask. I met my wife. Then I met my son Charlie and later my son Teddy. Now if you want to see a man overcome fear just take a look at how boldly I step into failure. I lean in. I have to. I have to get to the answers and there’s a clock.