This month I’m celebrating a 10 year anniversary. Ten years ago I was fired for the second time in 18 months. Oddly enough, I didn’t receive a single greeting card. Some people might think that getting fired twice in 18 months is no cause for celebration. Those people are wrong. I’m grateful for the opportunities it presented me. I was given the opportunity, for example, to prove just how determined I was to provide for my family. At the time, I had a 2-1/2 year-old daughter, and we had recently moved into a big new house that came along with a big new mortgage. Failure was one option that I refused to accept.
An ancient Greek philosopher named Epictetus once said that circumstances don’t make the man, they reveal him to himself. I learned the hard way that I was tougher than I thought. I wouldn’t wish what I went through on anyone but when your back is against the wall, you find out just how much fight you have in you.
Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor who died last year of pancreatic cancer, said in his last lecture entitled “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” that he once tried to get a job at Disney and he received the “damn nicest go-to-hell letters” that he’s ever gotten. He hit a brick wall but he never gave up. Years later he realized his dream when he worked on the Aladdin project with Walt Disney Imagineering. What he learned, he said, is that “the brick walls are there to there to let us prove how badly we want something.”
Two days after Apollo 13 was launched in 1970, there was an explosion onboard. The craft lost power and oxygen in the main cabin, and the crew was forced into the tiny lunar landing module, to abandon their moon landing and to return to earth on limited battery power and the small amount of oxygen in the lunar lander. For four long days, mission control in Houston worked to preserve the resources and lives in the spacecraft.
One of the flight controllers at mission control was Jerry Bostick. He served as technical advisor to the movie Apollo 13. According to Bostick, when the script was being written, one of the writers asked him the question: “Weren’t there times when everybody, or at least a few people, just panicked?” Bostick’s response was, “No. When bad things happened, we just calmly laid down the options and failure was not one of them.
They succeeded in bringing home the astronauts safely, despite the slim odds. They called it a “successful failure.” The truth is, failure is always an option, but not until you give up. As long as you’re fighting for success, then you have not failed.
I’ve had the good fortune to teach some training seminars geared towards the ETCP entertainment electrician’s certification. What I’ve learned is that one of the biggest obstacles for a lot of people is overcoming the fear of failing the test. After all, how would it look if you were to take the test and not pass it, particularly for those who have been a production electrician or technician for years and years?
The answer to that question is, that depends. It depends on how you respond after you don’t pass the test on the first try. If you simply give up and never give it a second try, then, yes, it might look bad. On the other hand, if you use it as an opportunity to show your mettle, learn from your mistakes and then go back to take the test again and again until you pass, then that’s the very essence of success.
There’s no shame in failing to pass the test on the first try. The real shame is allowing fear to limit your options.
