Failure. Loss. Hardship. Humiliation. When it hits you, and it will, it’s going to bring you to your knees. Whether it’s your mistake or forces greater than yourself or just dumb luck—something will knock you sideways and it’s going to burn and ache and rip into you.
What’s done will be done. You won’t be able to change what happened or even how you feel about it. Accept these things for what they are: painful facts, as hard as granite, as prickly as a raspberry thicket, but free of meaning except what you yourself give them. Adversity must be faced, dealt with and learned from. How you frame the experience is more important than what happened.
When you’ve been knocked down, there is one question above all else to ask yourself: what can I learn?
Early in his career, Abraham Lincoln was invited to help on a celebrated patent infringement case. Lincoln threw himself into the work and prepared a lengthy brief, but when he showed up for the trial in Cincinnati, hundreds of miles away from his home in Springfield, Illinois, he discovered that a hotshot lawyer Edwin Stanton had been hired instead.
Having made the long trip, Lincoln gamely offered to assist the team at court. Stanton responded by pulling the client aside and whispering, “Why did you bring that damned long armed Ape here … he does not know anything and can do you no good.” Ouch.
Lincoln didn’t pack it in. He stayed for a week to hear the arguments and learn what he could from this legal phenom. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lincoln who was self-educated, was so rapt by Stanton’s lawyering that he determined to immerse himself in further study. He reportedly told Emerson, “For any rough-and-tumble case (and a pretty good one, too), I am enough for any man we have out in that country; but these college-trained men are coming West. They had all the advantages of a life-long training in the law, plenty of time to study and everything, perhaps, to fit them. Soon they will be in Illinois … and when they appear I will be ready.”
While Lincoln found lessons in the experience, it was profoundly humiliating. He stayed at the same hotel as Stanton and the other lawyers, who brushed him off, never inviting him to join them for a meal or the walk to and from court. He expressed to a friend that it was so painful that he hoped never to return to Cincinnati.
It’s a testament to Lincoln’s great resilience and ability to transcend personal humiliation that six years later, as President of the United States during the early days of the Civil War, he offered Stanton the post of war secretary: “the most powerful civilian post within his gift.” For his part, Stanton not only accepted the offer, but came “to respect and love Lincoln more than any person outside his immediate family.” [Source: Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin].
The best leaders aren’t infallible; they are resilient. Resilience isn’t an innate quality that some people have and others don’t. It’s a muscle that needs to be worked and strengthened.
It depends on having a mindset that says I am the bamboo tree that bends and adapts to the wind. I am a bird that rides the wind to new vistas. I am the wolf that reads the wind to find my next meal. The tree, bird or wolf may fall or fail, but they—like you—are never failures.
If you have a little voice that is dismissing this idea, listen up. The single most important perspective you can cultivate is that you are a being of growth, always able to learn and repair failure.
The great shackle of the masses is the belief that a person can be a failure. It’s not only untrue, it imprisons you with a need to look successful, deflect blame and hide the truth instead of learning. It interferes with growth and breeds fear rather than safety.
Freedom begins with the belief that you will fail, but you will never be a failure.