galfridus

Moving on from an epic fail

I recently found out I screwed something up.

It was a freelance project, and the book went to print with a handful of pretty obvious mistakes—and I missed them in my proofreading.

Now, I could deflect and say the author had a responsibility to re-read their work before publication (which they do), or that the book was something I found of questionable quality from the outset (which I did) and should have declined the job (which I didn’t). The reality is I was hired to do a job and, even though I made over 1,200 changes to the original text, I failed at the project.

I hate screwing up—but I’m good at it.

My high school years are strewn with a fantastic group of failures that, if there were a prize for failing dramatically and spectacularly, I would have failed to get that, too. However, I got better. Mind you, my failures are not ones that blaze across the sky with magnificent aplomb. They don’t make headlines. Moreover, they certainly don’t end people’s lives… so that’s a good thing. They’re mostly just the personal stupid types that eat at your nerves and increase your anxiety.

So I admit—I failed recently.

There’s the one thing no one talks about, though—we all fail. I don’t care how perfect the person you’re comparing yourself against is—we all fail.

The guy in the cubicle near the window who always puts on that “failure is not an option” shtick in project meetings? You know he’s good at it.

The one woman? The one who looks at you with the judgmental smirk and you’re pretty sure she’s closely related to that other judgmental woman who caught you picking your nose when you were 8? Yeah, you know her childhood was all sorts of failure-fueled nasty.

We all fail, and we’re all good at failing. All of us. I mean, there’s even an Association for the Study of Failure in Japan. It is a natural part of life, so why don’t we admit it? Why are we so averse to accepting we fail and acknowledging when we do so?

Let’s take my example. As I write this, I am sheepish, I am embarrassed, I am recollecting an editing crash-and-burn from a couple of decades ago, and I am feeling a major case of imposter syndrome. I’ve apologized multiple times and refunded the author all of the fees I charged them. I have kept working with my other clients and am paying much more attention to detail.

But I keep wondering how could I have screwed this up so massively?

I think to understand that, we need to step back and define what “failure” actually is. Its Wikipedia entry lists three types of failures:

1. Failure to anticipate.
2. Failure to perceive.
3. Failure to complete.

All of us can point to examples of each type of these failures in our lives.

In this case, I failed in all three ways.

1. I failed to anticipate how much I was going to dislike the project in question. I also failed to anticipate how much work it was going to be and I undercharged (thus leading to me not wanting to spend more time than necessary on it).
2. I failed to perceive the lingering issues in the text. Yes, the author did, too—but I was the one hired to get them out.
3. Because of those failures, I failed to complete the job to my standards.

So why bring this up? Am I using you as my online psychotherapist? No—I’m illustrating a point.

My oldest son hates to admit when he failed at something. He’s told me as much. It eats him up to find out that he messed something up. I think that’s partially human nature—admitting to our faults, our mistakes, our failures is embarrassing, and we want to save ourselves that embarrassment. It’s also somewhat societal—we don’t want our leaders and heroes to admit failure because we think it makes them weak (see the criticism of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi for an example of that). It’s also something I, as his father, want to help him overcome.

We screw up. We screw up many things. We say something we shouldn’t to our kids, we fail a test, we do something stupid in front of the boss, we over-promise and under-deliver, we click the phishing link in the email, we keep rolling over that part of the neighbor’s lawn next to our driveway, we can’t budget well, we don’t control the amount of time we spend on social media, we stay up way too late, get up way too early, and we definitely are eating too many snacks.

The question is, when we’re called-out (whether it’s by someone else or ourselves), how do we handle it? Deflect it? We recently saw the president refer to Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, as “Tim Apple.” It’s a gaffe, and a simple, harmless one at that—but it’s illustrative of someone who can’t admit a simple mistake and then deflects it as something they meant to do. When our leaders will not admit to the simple mistakes, how do we expect them to admit to the big ones? Deflecting is a failure compounded upon the initial failure. I’ve no issue addressing the cause of a failure, but if you can’t admit to your culpability when something fails, then you’re just failing to learn from the consequences and what you can do with it to teach others.

We must accept our failures. We apologize for them. We admit our faults and mistakes and we move on. For example, as I was drafting this piece, this tweet came across my timeline:

[Note: Original tweet from James Gunn about being reinstated as director of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3]

The controversy surrounding James Gunn was massive on Twitter in 2018, primarily from the political aspect. Gunn had taken to being vocal in his opposition to the “alt-right” that emerged in social media during the 2016 presidential campaign and thus became their target. A well-known conspiracy theorist dug up old tweets of Gunn’s where he was making tasteless and rude jokes about rape and pedophilia. Disney acted quickly and removed Gunn from his role as director of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 (he had also directed the other two movies), which brought a wild backlash from people who had worked with him. Gunn, however, handled the dismissal with dignity and accepted the consequences for his actions:

Regardless of how much time has passed, I understand and accept the business decisions taken today. Even these many years later, I take full responsibility for the way I conducted myself… All I can do now, beyond offering my sincere and heartfelt regret, is to be the best human being I can be: accepting, understanding, committed to equality, and far more thoughtful about my public statements and my obligations to our public discourse. To everyone inside my industry and beyond, I again offer my deepest apologies. Love to all.

He lost the director’s chair on a movie that is part of the most profitable franchise ever, but he didn’t bemoan the loss. He didn’t point any fingers. He wasn’t bitter (at least in public) about the fact that he was targeted using jokes from almost a decade prior. Moreover, he apologized and made it clear he would do better. And, many months later, Disney is bringing him back. However, Gunn’s failure to perceive and anticipate (I won’t get into Disney’s failures in this situation) is clear—those tweets were irresponsible and disgusting, and he should have known better when he wrote them—but he knew that when the situation exploded. He only blamed himself, accepted the consequences, and then worked to make the situation better.

We can’t run from our failures and we can’t cover them up. Not accepting them, and not learning from them, makes things so much more difficult. A favorite saying on the original iteration of the TV show MythBusters was “failure is always an option,” and we need to embrace that idea as a society. No, failure is never the desired outcome—I would never suggest anyone wants to fail all the time (though, when it comes to various tests, failures are sometimes just as important as successes)—but it helps us define our success. Failure helps us learn where we are weak and where we can do better. It’s a question of what we do in the aftermath. Our lives, be them the professional or personal ones, are full of thousands of choices daily. We simply cannot always make the right choice, but we can learn from the wrong one.

It’s a matter of remembering most times it will not be the failures that define who we are—it will be how we deal with the consequences.