a bull by the tail once has learned sixty or seventy times as much
as a person who hasn’t.”
If your decision to grab opportunity flings you into the dirt
and pain of Roosevelt’s “sweaty arena,” remember that president’s
own attitude toward failure; “It is hard to fail,” said Theodore Roo-
sevelt, “but it IS worse never to have tried to succeed.” And he
said what we all realize, even at those moments when we are
wondering if we should grab that tail or not: “He who makes no
mistakes makes no progress.”Turn Even Unthinkable Failure into Gold
We’ve all watched leaders who once enjoyed high success and
sterling reputations brought low and humiliated. We see spiritual
leaders who violated their trust or exploited their constituencies
led off to prison. We see CEOs handcuffed, tried, convicted, their
careers destroyed, their families devastated.
There are many levels of failures. All of us dread the ones that
go beyond mere mistakes, which can be viewed as building blocks
of experience. It’s inconceivable to most of us that we could expe-
rience deep humiliation, but—as the Elephant Man said in the
play of that name, “Life is chancy.”
Failures come in many ways, some our fault, others not. Tak-
ing risks opens us to consequences, and as we lead and take those
risks, it doesn’t hurt to ask, “What if the very worst happens to
me? What if my decisions and bold action result in catastrophes—
for me, my family, and those I lead?”
Obviously, the answer starts with how the decision to take
action was made, and the hopefully good process and good coun-
sel that led to it. But beyond that, in the “furnace of affliction,” the
reality is that out of the worst can come remarkable things.
If we think the worst that can happen is either false or true
accusation and then imprisonment, we might consider those who
experienced profound growth in prison. Solzhenitsyn, who wrote
some of his great novels in brutal work camps, once declared
“Thank God for prison.” Chuck Colson’s life was revolutionized
by his time in prison and subsequent experience with Christ. John
Learning from Failure