Let’s Connect
From the
President
JAMES Patrick Murphy, MD, MMM
GLMS President
[email protected]
Failure Becomes Me
Failure is not an option.
This was spoken at a critical moment in
the movie Apollo 13 by the actor Ed Harris,
portraying NASA’s Mission Control Flight
Director Gene Kranz. Motivating, for sure.
But though they each shared the goal of
eliminating failure, not everyone at NASA
described their relationship with failure in
this manner. In fact, NASA’s very first Flight
Director, Christopher Kraft, said of failure:
I think the thing that we learned and the
thing that made us strong was that we
knew about failure. We recognized failure,
we knew it was there, we always looked
for it.
And everything we did was based on decisions on failure rather than success.
Failure clearly has its fans. Automobile
pioneer Henry Ford said: Failure is simply
the opportunity to begin again, this time more
intelligently. And playwright Samuel Beckett
thought one could actually improve at failing: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try
again. Fail again. Fail better.
Regardless of how adept you are at failure,
it’s still unpleasant. Alexander Pope, circa
1711, penned the phrase, To err is human;
to forgive, divine. But forgiving oneself for
failure is challenging, especially when failure
is personal. Many times I have accepted
praise for a “success,” when in truth I knew
I had either not lived up to the task or had
just been lucky. Failure is subjective. I know
when I have failed. You know when you
have, too. You feel it.
So what’s to make of this?
Not long ago I was driving my son to
school, and we began talking about why bad
things happen. Resisting the cliché, “Whenever one door closes, another one opens,” I
turned to nature for enlightenment. I told
him I believe everything in nature happens
for a reason - even if we can’t see it. And
since we are a component of nature, there’s a
logical reason for what happens to us - even
if it means failure.
Humans are unique in nature. Unlike
other creatures, we can contemplate what
it means to live, die, succeed, and fail.
Therefore we believe we are, as described
by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, …the beauty of the
world, the paragon of animals. And, according to Thornton Wilder: Every child born
into the world is nature’s attempt to make
a perfect human being. That we all fail in
reaching that mark does not diminish the
fact that failure allows us to edge closer to
that sublime state.
If you follow the healthcare industry,
you may have heard of Dr. Don Berwick,
a former Administrator of the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services. A quote
attributed to him is, “Every system is perfe