Reframing failure as an opportunity to learn is a concept widely preached. Sarah Lewis takes this reframing of failure to a new depth. This book is packed with stories and anecdotes of accomplished athletes, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs whose moments of despair, absolute unknown and seeming “failure” were in fact their greatest and most important.
Settling Into Places of Unknown & Uncertainty
Beyond the stories and examples, Lewis offers what I find to be great wisdom in how we as individuals and institutions setting out to innovate and solve the challenges of our world can learn to withstand and settle into places of unknown and uncertainty because those places, while often quite uncomfortable, are indeed the places where true growth, innovation and discovery happen.
“People driven by a pursuit that puts them on the edges are often not on the periphery but on the frontier testing the limits of what it is possible to withstand.”
According to Lewis, a few tools we have for navigating our own personal or organizational “edges” are playfulness, curiosity and surrender. I was particularly drawn to these thoughts as my own journey along some personal edges this past year has required gobs of playfulness towards myself as well as a decent amount of curiosity and surrender. I also often observe clients drawing on these same tools to move through and past their own edges to where (and who) they really want to be.
On Surrender
“In an age where we can skip from idea to idea with countless things to divert us. Absconding from painful places is easy. How do we stand in a place where we would rather not and expand in ways we never knew we could? “
So often it takes standing still or moving through (versus escaping) the uncomfortable places to learn and experience what we need to move forward. In my experience, what happens here is the development of deeper trust. Lewis refers to it as surrender.
“There is too a force that comes from Surrender - a supportive, benevolent current. We come to our own edge, the precipice where we threaten to fall into what feels like an abyss. Yet, we often find a way to trust the wind. There’s no way to measure surrender’s impact. We know its efficacy when we see it. After the deep pain of coming close, of failures of all kinds, we break open enough to contain, invite and triumph over more.”
In these places a kind, non-judgemental and playful spirit towards oneself and others becomes quite useful.
Playfulness & Creativity
Another arena where playfulness and curiosity (the opposite of judgement) are quite useful and necessary are in the realms of creative process and scientific discovery.
As Lewis highlights, “Children are born natural scientists.” That is to say, we are all born completely playful and curious but often in our growing up these natural tendencies cease to be nurtured and are replaced with the need to be the expert and have the right answers. I couldn’t agree more that we must nurture playfulness and creativity to solve the world’s biggest challenges and not just in theory but in practice, habit and example for those we lead. We’ve got to develop the capacity to get comfortable in the above mentioned “unknown and uncomfortable” places where it feels we ‘have failed” or “come to the end”. It’s a playful and lighthearted spirit that will help us stay in these places.
Shifting Our Perceptions of Playfulness
It’s unfortunate as Lewis notes that “play is considered the opposite of much that we value – heft and thoroughness.” And, “The perspective altering gift of play remains associated with children. People see it as the opposite of work as something childlike.”
What if we embraced it and valued it the same way we value science, discovery and strategy? Lewis makes the case for a “conceptual blending between what we see as science, discovery and play and what constitutes innovation in a field.” That is to say, what if we reframed our expectations that along the path to innovation playfulness would be a mandatory and ingrained piece of the process?
On Mastery
I’ve long resisted the infamous quote, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” I am one who prefers completion or “getting to the destination.” But the longer I’m alive the more it seems that life is indeed a journey and Lewis would agree as she captures one of the main points of her book in this quote: “Masters are not masters because they take something to its conceptual end. They are masters because they realize that there isn’t one. On utterly smooth ground the path from aim to attainment is in the permanent future.”
A 1982 Iron(wo)man Triathlon Moment
I can’t end this write up without mentioning Julie Moss, if only because I had never heard her story and I’m a sucker for a good athlete story. Lewis highlights the ‘almost victory’ as one of many examples of how a seeming failure can in fact connect us to our deepest strength. After being in the lead for most of the race Julie’s body shut down as she approached the finish line, she fell to the ground, losing bodily function and ended up crawling to the finish line to come in second place. Second place by 28 seconds after hours of being in the lead, can you imagine!
According to Lewis, “(Moss) Still thinks about what it would have been like to win, but credits her near win for leaving her irrevocably changed. ‘It was a pivotable moment in my life. That voice that I hadn’t ever called upon that just said 'keep moving forward.’ It didn’t say, ‘you can’t.’ It said the exact opposite. I would have thought it would have said, ‘stop, lie down.’”
Isn’t it incredible what that deep inner voice says sometimes? And how important that we learn to hear it no matter what it is that we are pursuing.
Here’s a link to a video of Julie Moss’s 1982 2nd place triathlon finish, if you’re curious like I was.