I am Grateful that I am a Failure

I Am Grateful That I Am a Failure

I am grateful that I am a failure.

I’m writing this from my two-person kitchen table in a flat across the world from my family, jobless and without prospects. I failed out of a school programme that I dragged my wife and dog out here to pursue, where I need to retake a whole course before I can even receive the degree. Money is getting tight to the point that I wonder whether I should even pay the $5 to submit this.

Yet, I am grateful that I am a failure.

I always admired people who talked about their struggles on the way up the ladder of success. I found it heartening the way they would talk about failures as the very things that shaped them into the successes they’d become. I often wonder if they were only grateful for their failures in hindsight. It’s much easier to enjoy telling a story about being in a tornado than it is to actually be in the tornado with bathtubs and cows flying around your head. Hardships are always better enjoyed in the past than in the present.

Up until recently, I always thought of failure as a dead end in the path—a point at which you need to turn around and try again. I’ve come to realize, though, that that’s not quite right. On the path of life, you never really stop moving forward. That’s the thing about time, isn’t it? A failure, it turns out, is just a part of the path you’ve already been walking. It might make the pathway ahead of you branch out in a different direction than you anticipated, but you’re still on the path.

I am grateful that I am a failure.

I am grateful because I believe that success would have forced me onto a path I hated. You see, I have spent years trying to convince myself that I was something I am not: a businessman.

In my undergrad, I spent the first two years preparing for the business programme. Despite my best efforts, it wasn’t going well. The classes were extraordinarily difficult for me no matter how much I studied (I am not friends with numbers, and they are not friends with me), not to mention the fact that I felt like a square peg among a peer group of triangle pegs. I sometimes wonder if I would have kept going for a business degree had I not overheard this conversation outside of class:

“Oh, you’re going to be a dentist? What a stupid thing to do. I’m going to make five times more money than you. I’m going into finance.”

I actually shuddered as I walked past. For lack of a better word, it made me feel yucky.

Now, I realize that this frat boy finance bro was not representative of the entire businessperson populace. But I realized that he represented enough of said populace for me to want to turn around and run away from it. I ended up compromising with myself and getting a business minor. A major in communications seemed more up my alley.

By the time graduation came and I needed to get a grown-up job, though, I started feeling the pressure of bills to pay and decided to disregard what I’d learned about my career likes and dislikes. I applied for a project manager position. They asked me what my greatest weakness was. Looking back, I should have told them it was honesty. Instead, I told them it was organization, but I guess they didn’t think that would be important to the job because they hired me anyway.

I spent two years at that job and dreaded going to work every day. Sure, it was stable. It didn’t seem to pay enough, but at least I had enough money coming in to pay the bills. With my wife in law school, student loans helped subsidize what my work couldn’t cover. You can only hate your life for so long, though. After a while, I stopped taking care of myself. My hair and beard got long (making me look more Unabomber than Jason Momoa), I gained over 20 kg (a bulking that, similarly, in no way enhanced my resemblance to Jason Momoa), and my relationships started to struggle. I needed a change.

At that time, I was not grateful to be a failure.

Now, I’m grateful that I was a failure because it changed the course of my life. I would not be where I am today without that failure pushing me this way.

What is, “this way,” you ask? You see, the genius that I was, I decided that the problem was not with me being a businessman. No, clearly the problem was that I had simply not dived into business far enough. The obvious next step was for me to go to business school to then become a consultant.

After months of study, applications, acceptance offers, and working through the logistics of moving, I started classes. My excitement soon turned to dread as I realized how ill-equipped I was to handle the subject matter. I studied and studied but continued to fall behind.

Eventually, it was microeconomics that got me. I failed the test, and I failed the retake. My only options were to retake the course the next year or forfeit my degree. Realizing how little I wanted to go into business, I probably should have considered it a sunk cost and quit. At least I think I should have—I learned about sunk costs in microeconomics and obviously didn’t manage a great handle on that material.

As my peers’ graduation loomed, we all talked about our career trajectories. None of them knew that I would not be graduating with them. Instead of being grateful for my failure, I lied and told them that I didn’t like graduation ceremonies, so therefore wouldn’t be there.

At this point, I had already been rejected by two consulting firms for lacking the analytical know-how to do the job, and I didn’t know what I would do. I didn’t even want to be a consultant in the first place. So, I talked to the smartest person I knew—my wife.

My wife, funnily enough, had also been a failure fairly recently. After three years of law school, she realized she had no interest in pursuing the law any further. We moved for my school programme with the hope that she would find a job near our new home. Instead, she floundered around for months, desperately searching for a job outside the law (not outside the law like a bank robber, but outside the law like a job that didn’t require her to keep track of billable hours). After months of uncertainty, she ended up in the perfect position for her. She is valued where she works, and she gets to be excellent at her natural talents rather than trying to make herself half-decent at things that were never her strong points to begin with. My hope was that I could find something like that. I wanted to be on the top rung of my success ladder looking backwards at failure like her.

My wife knew that I loved writing, so she convinced me to take a break from my job hunt and just write for a time. So, that’s what I’ve done for the past month. I haven’t gotten anywhere with it, but I’ve enjoyed doing it. In a sense, I could say that I’ve wasted my time, but in the words of John Lennon, “If you enjoyed the time you wasted, then it wasn’t wasted time.”

I still sit here at my kitchen table as a failure.          

I restarted my job hunt and have even started including entry-level retail jobs. I have become desperate.

Yet, I am glad that I took the time to be a failure because it helped me find what I really enjoyed.

I tried to convince myself in college to go into business, I convinced myself after graduation to go into business, I convinced myself to go into a business master’s programme, and I tried to convince myself to become a business consultant. Maybe other people learn quicker than I do.

I’ve failed time after time, yet I kept pushing. I didn’t even want to get into business, not really. Yet, I had always been taught about the importance of perseverance. So, I persevered instead of changing course to something I would actually enjoy. I’ve now come to a point where I’ve realized that I just need to accept that failing at something I hated is actually in my best interest. It turns out that perseverance is a lot like consistency in that it’s only a virtue if you’re aiming at the right target.

I’m grateful that I’m a failure because it gives me hope for the future in thinking of what I might be successful at. No, I won’t ever be a CFO, and no, I won’t ever run an accounting firm, but maybe, just maybe, that’s okay. Maybe, I will be successful at something I actually find worthwhile. I am grateful to be a failure because how else would I know that I was in the wrong place?

I am grateful that I am a failure because there’s no getting to the right place without learning where the wrong place is.