Messages emblazoned across Tshirts can be silly, funny, sometimes quite stupid – and sometimes they can carry a profound message. Recently I found one that declared: “Fail again. Fail better. ” This is actually part of a quote from playwright Samuel Beckett that goes: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron has a book called Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better offering sage advice that is clearly needed since failing is what we don’t usually get a lot of preparation for. Most striking is a personal story about her very first one-on-one interview with her spiritual teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, which took place at a time when she felt her life was completely falling apart. But when she sat down in front of him, he said, “How is your meditation?” She replied “Fine.” She made small talk till he indicated the session was over, and realising the interview was over, she blurted out: “My life is over. I have hit the bottom. I don’t know what to do. Please help me.” Trungpa Rinpoche only said, “Well, it’s a lot like walking into the ocean, and a big wave comes and knocks you over. And you find yourself lying on the bottom with sand in your nose and in your mouth. And you are lying there, and you have a choice. You can either lie there, or you can stand up and start walking out. ” The waves keep coming, Trungpa told her, and she needed to keep cultivating her courage and bravery and sense of humour to relate to this situation of the waves, and keep getting up and going forward. “…After a while, it will begin to seem to you that the waves are getting smaller and smaller.
And they won’t knock you over anymore.” I often wonder – whatever happened to saying a simple “I made a mistake.” More often than not, I hear people, specially younger ones, say “I am/she is a failure.” Failure or things not working out as you’d hoped doesn’t feel good; that’s for sure. In no way am I saying failure should be ignored. In fact, failure can leave an open wound that is unwise to ignore. Without recognising it, acknowledging it, your wound will continue to hurt, and even take longer to heal. You don’t want to completely block out the mistakes you’ve made – you won’t learn that way – but you also don’t want to dwell on them either. Failure teaches you that a certain approach may not be ideal for a specific situation and that there are better approaches.
Making mistakes is not a big deal as long as you learn from them and avoid repeating them. Each time you fail, your fear of failure becomes smaller, which allows you to take on even bigger challenges. A good idea is to listen attentively to the stories you tell yourself when you think you have failed; you will notice they will fall into one of the two broad categories. In one scenario, it’s always someone else’s fault – your friend, your partner, your organisation; in the other, you see yourself as inadequate, stupid, ‘always’wrong, and oh yes, ‘a failure’.