Professional Failure
“Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die”
Okay so the quote isn’t accurate nor can I remember the source, (I think I saw it in a poker book), but the sentiment is there. We all fail at one time or another and it is a vital part of success, however how you handle failure is the crucial part – it can make or break you. There are countless stories of successful people who have lost everything before finally making their breakthrough, we don’t tend to hear about the ones who lost everything and gave up.
My own failures are many and I still wake up at night in a cold sweat thinking about a few of the bigger cock-ups. One past nightmare involves a speaking engagement with a large financial institute. I had sold in a talk on card cheating and how it applies to best practice in business, based purely on a few sketchy thoughts I had on the subject. I was going to pepper the talk with demonstrations of genuine sleight of hand and it was going to be probably the best talk these guys had ever seen or heard! It’s funny how time has a tendency to make distant events appear so close so quickly. I was hugely under prepared, very tired, and the end result was one of the most painful experiences of my professional career, (the people in attendance would probably say the same). When you are sat in front of 12, and thankfully it was only 12, very influential business people it is too late to realise that in fact the content of your talk is weak to say the least. My mouth became dry, my mind went blank and to use a theatrical expression, I died on my sorry arse! The end result was that I wasted their time and my time but the biggest loss was that of opportunity. To add to the pain I had to attend a meal with the client that evening and to their enduring credit they were “very polite”, and remarkably positive.
The key to my failure was my lack of preparation. In my previous life as a street performer I could afford to make mistakes and learn “on the job.” I could filter the material I used as I went along and I always got a second chance, it is the joy of working on the streets. Picking myself up from this particular failure however was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I was completely ashamed and demoralised, I thought that I would never be able to face a corporate crowd again. It has left me with a permanent scar – which is a good thing. Now I have a point of reference, a stake driven into the ground that I must move away from but that I will always be aware of. Now not only am I attracted towards a goal but I have the added force of being repelled from a failure. Now I can no longer be blase about my profession nor will I settle for “good enough”, I am going to be my own biggest critic and that can only be a step in the right direction.
We live and learn.