Become the kind of person who fails
Or, how I became an expert at sucking
In April, I stepped down from a job I’d held for just shy of two years.
Out of respect for the many good people who work there, I’m not publicly discussing the reasons I left. That’s not the point of this post.
Instead, today will be about how we talk—and don’t talk—about failure.
What we communicate when we don’t talk about failure.
Some backstory:
I’d been hired into that job to accomplish a few things—exciting things, hard things, things I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into. I took the post believing I could engage in consequential work, in a field I love, with people who themselves were up to their elbows in world-changing activities.
Twenty-two months later, I boarded a westbound plane and left the job behind.
When I talk about these last two years to my friends, I often use the word failure. “I failed to accomplish things I wanted. Heck, I couldn’t even work out the entire length of my contract,” I’ll say.
Invariably, they bristle. “Wait, wait, wait,” they’ll retort, “the whole thing was an unwinnable situation from Day 1.”
