On Success and Failure

You’re riding high in April, shot down in May.
~ Kelly L. Gordon / Dean Kay, That’s Life

…life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.
~ Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

Then…

If you would have asked me 10 years ago if I thought I was successful, I would have given a resounding affirmative, the reasons being:

• Almost qualified accountant (those exams are damned difficult, huge investment etc.)
• Head of finance-y job (the “good” kind with lots of responsibility and zero authority)
• International company with good internal relationships based on competency and trust and sensitivity to cultural differences (I’m different from everyone else, so how hard can that be?)
• Busting my balls every month end to meet the close deadline (surely a completely underrated USP of the accountancy profession)
• Earning comfortably for a person with minimal commitments.
• Gym membership
• Nice apartment
• Fully insured

I’m sure if I had posted that on social media with a photo of me looking determinedly into the middle-distance, saying how f*cking happy I was, people would have loved it. It’s simple, unambiguous.

But, like saying yes is the same as saying no to other stuff, success is married to failure, always. Everybody fails, everybody talks about success, nobody talks about failure; they’re lying.

In a knowledge society, however, we expect everyone to be a success. This is clearly an impossibility. For a great many people, there is at best an absence of failure. Wherever there is success, there has to be failure.
~ Peter F. Drucker, Harvard Business Review (January 2005)

So what’s the flip side of the above success?

• Venting my spleen for ages every evening at home.
• Overtime. Lots of overtime.¹
• Being nice aka. letting the bastards get away with it.

It’s a big misunderstanding that strengths are what one is good at and weaknesses are what one does badly. I’m incredibly good at badmouthing, getting stressed unnecessarily and avoiding conflict! True weaknesses of mine would be, for instance, playing snooker (my biggest break is, er, 11) or speaking Norwegian.

…and now

I got married and had kids—four amazing, incredible, exasperating kids. My risk profile blew up and my earnings multiplier sank without trace.² Minimax: minimal income (÷6), maximum commitments.

If there was ever a state change, it’s going from 0 to >= 1 children. Not only are the goalposts moved—the playing field is bulldozed and the bleachers are set on fire. What I (and everyone else) thought I was—laid back, easy going, a nice guy—turned out to be…half true at most. Turns out I’m impatient, irritable, selfish, argumentative, petulant, spiteful, ignorant, and just plain ol’ stupid to boot. Quite the failure then.

And all that crap bobs happily alongside any good things I manage to pull off, however well-behaved I determine to be. In raising kids, the mirror of truth is held so closely up to your face, the only viable course is gratefully accepting your broken humanity and getting on with it.³

Weights and measures

What do I do with all this failure? I invest it with both hands in my kids, my wife and myself. The more often I fail—counterintuitively, but true to the rule—the more often we succeed. And if I fail for their success, that’s fine too. Success is not better numbers than last quarter, it’s a first place in gymnastics, a stick-man drawing, a thoughtful comment, getting out for a run, or simply a day without conflict.

In life, meaningful things, memorable things, have their own weight and don’t require the embellishment of measurement. (A photo will do.)

In more formally organized domains, things have to be measured to give them meaning and comparability, but they remain abstract and forgettable. Without weight, they float away. Here, as in life, that immeasurable weight is the people, the relationships, the teams, the culture, the courage and the initiative which make performance and progress possible in the first place.

Measurement for its own sake, like talking up failure or burying it in meetings (OMG!), is a sure way to mediocrity and being mediocre, with all our power, intrinsic value, skills and potential, is a tragedy.

Work-life imbalance

People who talk about work-life balance (most don’t) are invariably being paid to do so. Whenever the topic is raised, it’s inevitably about how the balance is not being kept, which is, of course, also “failure”. Well: perfectionist, fantasy bullshit is doomed to fail anyway, so to hell with it. I’m for work-life imbalance: the visceral tug of war between family and work responsibility; the ambiguous fine line between success and failure; and experiencing both, simultaneously.