Tag: Learing from failure

“The IPL is not just about cricket. There are a lot of things happening around it. The players must be smart about it. They have to respect the body, give it some time to recover because it’s not just about playing. There have been day-night matches, then parties, and then early morning flights too. All this, including the travel, takes a toll.” That’s what M.S.Dhoni said in justification, after India’s disastrous performance at the T20 World Cup in 2010.

This story is not about Team India’s failure at the T20 World Cup in West Indies. It is about learning to deal with failure, the way the real champions do.

Failure, like death, is inevitable. As J.K.Rowling told the Harvard graduating class, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.” Failure comes to all. What’s important is how you decide to deal with it.

John Wooden, the famous basketball coach says, you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you begin denying them. That’s where the problems begin. As human beings, we always find excuses for not succeeding. We often lay a blame on someone else or something that was responsible for our failure. And so do some champions. After all they are human beings, too.

The legendary tennis player John McEnroe often tried to repair his self-esteem after losing by assigning blame or making excuses. Going by his own judgment it was never his fault – it was always the outside forces. One time he lost a match because he had fever. Another time he had a backache. Sometimes he was victim of expectations, other times it was because of the tabloids. One loss was because he ate too close to the match.  He lost some games because it was cold. He lost others because he could not cope up with the heat. Sometimes he was under-trained, at other times he was over-trained. His most painful loss was to Even Lendl in the 1984 French Open. Why did he lose after leading 2 sets to nil? According to McEnroe, it wasn’t his fault. An NBC cameraman had taken off his headset and a noise started coming from the side of the court.

The problem with McEnroe was that he did not accept his failure. Worse still, he refused to learn from failures. He did not thrive on challenges; when the going got tough, he often folded. As a result, by his own admission he did not fulfill his potential. After his playing days he confessed that his on-court temper tantrums were only a cover for not playing well. Instead of finding the real reasons for losing, he made excuses. Rather than getting the basics right and practicing hard, he relied purely on natural talent. He was the number one player in the world for four years – but he was a champion who did not know how to deal with failure.

On the other hand, Michael Jordan is a great example about success through failure. In a commercial for Nike – famous for its failure-defying tagline “Just Do It” – Jordan says, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games.  26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot, and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life – and that is why I succeeded.”

Michael Jordan wasn’t a natural talent. He was cut from the high school varsity team. He worked hard to get back. He left his home at six in the morning to get in some hours of practice before school. Then at the University of North Carolina, he worked on what he thought were his weaknesses – his defensive game, his ball handling and shooting skills. Once, after his team lost the last game of the season, Jordan went back to the court and practiced his shots for hours – he had started his preparations for the next year.  He is probably one of the hardest working athletes in the history of sport. Only once did he take it easy. It was the year he returned to the Bulls after his stint in baseball. The Bulls were eliminated in the play-offs. Jordan learned his lesson, “You can’t leave and think you can come back and dominate this game. I will be physically and mentally prepared from now on.” For the next three years, the Chicago Bulls won the NBA title. With Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls won six NBA championships. “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying,” said Michael Jordan.

Tiger Woods commented in the 2006 Buick interview: “It’s just experience. I’ve put myself in so many different scenarios and have been successful and have failed, and I’ve had to learn from both. Why did I fail? Well, because of this. Why did I succeed? Well, because of this. You have to analyse, you have to be critical, and you have to understand that you have to take hard looks at yourself. Over the years I’ve done that, and I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been able to keep progressing through the years. Trust me, it’s not always easy, but my father has always harped on me, always be honest with yourself, true to yourself, look yourself in the mirror and be honest. Some days are tougher than others. When you know you’ve absolutely messed up, you have to admit it and move on and learn and apply. And I’ve done that.”

This is something which the Indian cricket team could make note of. The team didn’t train after either of the first two defeats in the Super-8’s games. “What do we gain in a day’s practice? We thought it would be better to take some time off and turn up fresh for the games,” argued Dhoni. I have a lot of respect for the man who brought us the first T20 World Cup and I wish that rather than blaming the IPL for the World Cup failure he could have analyzed the real reasons for the failure, graciously accepted the mistakes and took some lessons from it.

Sports can be a great teacher. These lessons are not just for the Indian cricket team. They are for all of us. We have to learn to deal with our failures. Failures are not always bad. A failure is a pit-stop on the journey to success. Failure is feedback. Failure shows what doesn’t work. Failure tells us that something needs to be fixed. Failure has a positive power. It teaches us that we learn, we can survive, go on, and discover talents previously hidden. Most importantly – failure humbles. It reminds us that we are not supermen but human beings who will some day fall to ground. Failure is so painful that it almost guarantees that we won’t make the same mistakes again. When we fail, we are at the bottom. We have nothing more to lose. The only place to go is up. The golfer Bobby Jones said, “I never learned anything from a match I won.” He respected defeat and he profited from it.

The only problem is that we as human beings perceive failure as an identity. That’s because, “I failed to…” is perceived as “I am a failure”.  As a result, most people fear failure. Failure is not an identity; it is only a judgment about an event. What matters is how we cope with failure.  It’s important to be able to forget the pain of failure while retaining the lessons from it.