Resiliency in our work life and careers is a characteristic best learned in youth. Picking yourself up after a full-face flop may not build character, but it teaches you how to get going again after failure. There is a great reason why I say this – failure hurts so much more when you first experience it as an adult. It’s worse for the driven – the cocky grad student, the executive who never fails, the athlete who glides from win to win – life is a succession of success – until it isn’t. Suddenly, you must learn skills many learned early – how to nurse yourself back to emotional health, absorb the lessons of failure, and start over.
My professional life has been a continual, unimpeded tale of victory. OK. I lie. I’ve been knocked down, dragged around, and kicked in the face. Events disrupted the thread of my life so often that some original goals are no longer recognizable. It’s important to realize that we sometimes must shift directions and goals after failure. And after success. Stubbornness can be a valuable trait or a sign of stupidity. It’s a tough call occasionally. But a complete and successful life is not necessarily winding up at the destination we picked at age seventeen.
In my case, that would mean I’d still be looking for my next gig as a folksinger. It’s a nice place to be from—but not where I want to end up.
Failure and success are part of the cycle of a complete life. It’s not so much that we have or lack one or the other, but that we learn the lessons of both.
