Failure is an acceptable option

Do or do not…there is no try. – Yoda

If the Star Wars movies don’t feature prominently in your cultural landscape, it’s possible that this is the first time you’ve seen this particular quote. I’m sure there are myriad variations of it attributed to speakers of varying degrees of credibility. Regardless, I have for most of my life hated this quote: it always read and felt to me like an implicit call to perfection which is not only impossible to achieve for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that there is no agreed upon definition of what constitutes “perfect,” but also because perfection something it is unreasonable to expect out of anyone just beginning anything.

Basically, it seemed to me like this idea closed out the idea of learning anything new. After all, if there’s no room for mistakes, no room for just trying something, and failing, then how the hell does anyone build new skills, step out of the role to which she has been consigned by society, or learn anything new? Recently, though, I’ve come see this quote in a slightly different light.

One of the dominant memes in certain segments of American culture is that kids should play sports. Playing sports encourages teamwork, it’s a great way to build gross, and sometimes fine, motor skills, and it builds that competitive spirit that this same world view says is oh so necessary to succeed. Sports, allegedly, also build confidence. It’s this last one that I’ve always found to be such a ripoff.

How sports build motor skills, encourage competitiveness, and help someone learn teamwork is pretty self evident; if you have the coordination to run down the field kicking and receiving a ball or to swing a piece of wood at a white ball and make contact, you’ve got pretty good motor skills. Sometimes, a team lives or dies by its weakest member and sometimes the stronger members can lift the whole team up. And who doesn’t like to win better than they like to lose, particularly given that when you win your coach takes you to A&W and you get hot dogs and root beer floats. But if you’re trying to build skills, you’re going to make mistakes and, manifestly, you won’t be able to “do” if you interpret do as meaning “achieve every time a stated goal based on skills.”

Here’s the thing, though: sometimes “do” means “do your best even if you don’t achieve the stated goal.” And how I learned this was by sucking massively at curling.

As the least experienced person on the team I played with in the first half of the season I was assigned the lead position. Lead means you throw first and as a lead you’re usually asked to, in order of frequency, 1) place a guard stone, 2) place what’s called a biter (a stone that is just barely in scoring position), or 3) to knock out the rock your opposite number just placed in scoring position. These are not shots that require a lot of control over weight which is one of, if not the, hardest aspects of making a curling shot a player must master. That said, in order to make these shots consistently, you still have to have a certain amount of skill. Like every other task that requires skill, sometimes you miss. My first few games, I missed a lot.

I’ve played team sports enough to feel the pressure not to let down my teammates so when I miss a shot my reflex is to apologize. After the first couple of games my teammates let me know that there really wasn’t any need to apologize; the league we play in isn’t hugely competitive and generally the assumption is that you’re doing your best and if you missed it wasn’t malicious. Learning that, learning that my skip had confidence that I could make the shots she called for even if I missed something earlier in the game flipped a switch I didn’t know I had.

It flipped my confidence switch from “I’ll try,” which gives at least the same weight to the possibility of failure as it does to the possibility of success “I’ll do that.” Knowing that my team believed that I was aiming for my best gave me the confidence to do again even if my previous attempt failed.

When framed by the ideas you are capable of completing a task, that you’re giving the task the best you are capable of at that moment, and that you want to succeed, failure becomes an acceptable option. And when failure is an acceptable option there’s no need to hedge your response to a request with “I’ll try.”

The hard thing, of course, is to know yourself well enough to know if you have the ability to successfully complete what’s being asked of you. But that’s where the “do not” part comes in.