What did you learn from your greatest failure?
Today (Saturday 1 July 2023) is the first day of the second half of 2023. Perhaps now might feel like a good time for you to take stock, to consider where things have gone wrong and what you might do differently as a result.
Looking back on this year to date (or perhaps even casting the net further, to take in your life up to this moment), what do you consider to have been your greatest failure? How much do you value that particular failure, or even failure in general?
It’s OK… you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. You can just think about it and keep your thoughts to yourself. Not everyone likes to own up to having failed at anything. Yet absolutely everyone has failed and will fail multiple times throughout their life.
It’s OK to fail. It’s OK to fail frequently. But it is better if you can learn from failure.
It is no secret that failure is often, perhaps even always, the best teacher. The lesson that we should heed the lesson of failure is widely taught. But it is one that we do not always heed.
What did you learn from your greatest failure?
Failure is just the greatest thing
“Failure is just the greatest thing to ever happen to me.”
These words are from former Beastie Boy Mike D’s recent appearance on Dan Harris’s Ten Percent Happier podcast.*
I was fascinated to hear Mike D’s perspective on the commercial failure of Paul’s Boutique, the second Beastie Boys album. Paul’s Boutique was an artistic triumph, but a total dud in sales terms. Their debut LP Licensed to Ill was all shouting about beer over old Led Zeppelin records. Paul’s Boutique was something else entirely. A sprawling, intricate and psychedelic masterpiece of sampling and rhyming. A total abandonment of the idiotic, beer-spraying personae and the musical stylings the band had adopted on Licensed to Ill. It was also extremely expensive to make, their record label betting big on another huge hit.
Paul’s Boutique was not a huge hit, or even a small one.
Faced with this abrupt shift from the Beasties they had taken to their hearts, the audience stayed away in droves.
Faced with such a monumental commercial failure, the Beastie Boys thought their career was finished.
Yet looking back, Mike D tells Harris that he sees the commercial dead-on-arrival status of Paul’s Boutique as enabling a “phoenix rising from the ashes moment”:
“We go and we make Paul’s Boutique. It works for us artistically but was a total [commercial] failure, But then it was the best thing that could have happened to us in terms of the longevity and the actual quality of life of the band.”
This experience taught Mr Diamond the value of failure in ways that have informed his life over the subsequent decades. He says:.
“What I’m trying to do, Dan, is to sell failure to your audience. I’ve had a lot of epiphany moments as a parent. But one of the biggest I had was going to like parent teacher night and you’re really worried about what the teacher’s gonna say. I realised that F is the worst grade you can get and I’m only where I am in life because of multiple Fs. Failure is just the greatest thing to ever happen to me. So, why am I valuing putting my kids through a culture that’s saying that failure is a bad thing?”
Your next failure
Into every life a little failure (at the very least) will fall.
So how do you feel about failure? How will you feel about your next failure?
Whatever your next failure proves to be, I sincerely hope that you are ultimately able to take it in your stride.
That next failure may, in time, prove to be the best thing that ever happened to you.
May you be nothing but kind today, to others and to yourself.
May today be nothing but kind to you and yours.
FOOTNOTES
* It’s fair to say that I was obsessed with the Beastie Boys in the early-to-mid 1990s (I wrote about this obsession in #7songs: Beasties, beer spraying and Saṃsāra). I am no longer obsessed. But I still find it interesting to check in on them from time to time, occasionally revisiting their music or checking out present-day interviews with the remaining two Beasties, Michael Diamond and Adam Horowitz.
IMAGES
- Brighton old pier during sunset via Wikimedia Commons.
- Michael Diamond 1 via Wikimedia Commons.
- Gennaro Greco – Capriccio of ancient ruins at a Mediterranean port with boats and bystanders via Wikimedia Commons.
- Jan Both – An Italianate landscape with ruins jan-both-460555 via Wikimedia Commons.
MJCarty 
