WASHINGTON — Sometime late into this evening, many Americans will feel like losers. Some will have worked months, maybe years, to elect someone who is staring at defeat. Some will have invested a heaping helping of hope into John McCain or Barack Obama, only to face four years under the opponent. There will be tears, denial, anger.
As this epic season barrels to a resolution, there is much at stake besides ideology and leadership. Namely: winning and losing. Success will send one side into shared ecstasy. Failure will deaden the other side with lonely grief. It will hurt.
“I would argue there’s no starker dichotomy in American culture than in the idea of success and failure,” says Scott Sandage, author of “Born Losers: A History of Failure in America.” The sting of failure ripples through all aspects of life, yet we’re quick to write it off, or deflect fault, or deploy banalities to soften the blow.
“There seems to be no way in American public life to talk about failure without resorting to cliches,” continues Sandage, who teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University. “Like, ‘You’re not a failure unless you quit,’ or ‘Failure is a learning opportunity.’ They’re kind of true, but they presume failure is always shameful. They presume failure is excusable only in the context of a continued all-out quest for success.” Sandage’s book covers failed capitalist ventures from the past 200 years, a period during which Americans have broadened “failure” from a word that describes an outcome (as in, “a failed business”) to a word that describes an identity (“I am a failure”).
And it’s this redefining of failure that gives people trouble, says Edwin Locke, professor emeritus of leadership and motivation at the University of Maryland. Just because you fail doesn’t make you a failure.
“Some people may generalize a loss to dissatisfaction with themselves,” Locke says. “But that’s hugely mistaken, because not reaching a goal is limited to that goal. It’s not a condemnation of your life.” Locke has researched goal-setting theory, which says that specific, hard-to-achieve goals produce better performance. He has found through experiments that people who set higher goals accomplish more but are more likely to fail. People who are terrified of failure set their goals too low, so they “succeed” by substandard markers but fail in a broader sense. The trick is to unleash a healthy ambition, set specific goals, and remain resilient and adaptable in the face of failure, Locke says.
Sometimes hard work leads to failure, as Sandage writes in his book. It’s an un-American reality, but Katie Fox- Boyd and Farah Ahmad know all about it. They worked hard to get John Kerry elected president in 2004. We know how that turned out.
Yet there they were a couple of weeks ago on K Street, canvassing through Grassroots Campaigns, working full time to get Obama elected.
What if their guy loses again? “We say we’re moving to France, but we don’t have the money, and we love this country,” says Fox-Boyd, 24.
“It was a distressing time after the last election, but people are now working harder because of it,” says Ahmad, 23.
The drive to rebound is an indispensable part of recovering from a loss. It’s part of a simple equation for living successfully, regardless of failures, says Frank Farley, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia who studies motivation, leadership and the psychology of sports and politics. That equation: Self-knowledge plus motivation equal a successful life.
The trick is to be a constant student of your evolving strengths and weaknesses, and keep moving forward, whether or not you deserved to lose.
“If you lose in some venture, in any aspect of your life, learn from it,” Farley says. “That’s the motivation part. You learn about yourself, and you do something based on that. Some people when they lose — they blow it off, they don’t think more about it. They may be mad about it. But sensible people tend to reflect. ‘What happened there?’ Successful people get better at it. A loss, to them, is information.” Life coach Ed Modell encourages a similar plan.
“Rather than tell a client to not be upset about losing, we ask them powerful questions,” says Modell, a past president of the D.C. chapter of the International Coach Federation. “Questions like ‘What have you learned about yourself from this experience?’ and ‘What do you need to do to get closure around this situation so you don’t keep thinking of yourself as a failure?’ ” The only good way to lose is to be open to learning from it and avoid the temptation to leap to two extremes: dismissing a loss as meaningless or considering a loss the final judgment on a matter. Land somewhere in the middle, the experts say. A loss should be a source of wisdom.
Sandage offers the example of Al Gore, the man who spent his life working toward the presidency. Defeated in that arena, he rose again to become the spokesman for the issue of climate change, winning a Nobel Peace Prize.
“He reinvented himself,” Sandage says. “He found a new rationale for public service that was not about individual ambition.” Which brings us back to politics and Election Day. There should be a clear winner and a clear loser. But, for those on the loser’s side, that doesn’t mean the result should cloud Nov. 5 and 6 and 7 and all the days that follow.
Lots of successful people knew failure
The quotation “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing” is often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers coach and mass producer of aphorisms. Lombardi, though, favored a more nuanced spin on the classic line: “Winning isn’t everything; the will to win is the only thing.”
Other lines from successful people who have known failure.
“In God’s economy, nothing is wasted. Through failure, we learn a lesson in humility which is probably needed, painful though it is.”
— Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, in “As Bill Sees It” (1967)
“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. . . . Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.
“I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
— Excerpt from the June 2008 Harvard University commencement speech by J.K. Rowling, billionaire author of the Harry Potter novels, who spent her early writing life broke and jobless.
“Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”
— Writer Ralph Ellison in “Invisible Man” (1952), a novel about a young black man walking across the hot coals of racial tension in Harlem.
“Remember, if you take risks, you may still fail, but if you do not take risks, you will surely fail. The greatest risk of all is to do nothing.”
— Roberto Goizueta, a Cuban immigrant who rose from a Coke bottler to chairman and chief executive of the Coca-Cola Co.
“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
— Truman Capote, in his book of essays “The Dogs Bark” (1973), perhaps hinting at his own problems with drug use and celebrity.
“Twenty-two years ago (Stephen) Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me the race of ambition has been a failure — a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success.”
— Future President Abraham Lincoln (1856), comparing himself to an eventual opponent for the presidency and proving unwittingly that a string of failures doesn’t disqualify one from winning.
The Washington Post
