LET FAILURE BE YOUR FUEL
JOHN O’ SULLIVAN Founder of Change the Game Project
In May 2018, retired U. S. Women’ s National Soccer team star Abby Wambach gave the commencement address to 600 women from Barnard College in New York City. Wambach-- the all-time leading scorer for Team USA, an Olympic and World Cup champion, and an inspirational athlete known for playing with passion and giving her all every time she stepped on the field-- gave an incredible talk to the graduates, sharing stories from her career, and lessons she learned.
One of those lessons she learned over decades at the top of her sport:
Make Failure Your Fuel! As Wambach stated to the graduates:
“ Here’ s something the best athletes understand, but seems like a harder concept for non-athletes to grasp. Non-athletes don’ t know what to do with the gift of failure. So, they hide it, pretend it never happened, reject it outright, and they end up wasting it.
“ Listen: Failure is not something to be ashamed of; it’ s something to be powered by. Failure is the highest octane fuel your life can run on. You gotta learn to make failure your fuel.
“ When I was on the youth national team, only dreaming of playing alongside Mia Hamm … I had the opportunity to visit the national team’ s locker room. The thing that struck me most wasn’ t my heroes’ grass-stained cleats, or their names and numbers hanging above their lockers. It was a picture. It was a picture that someone had taped next to the door, so that it would be the last thing every player saw before she headed out to the training pitch. You might guess it was a picture of their last big win, or of them standing on a podium accepting gold medals. But it wasn’ t. It was a picture of their longtime rival, the Norwegian national team, celebrating after having just beaten the USA in the 1995 World Cup.
“ In that locker room I learned that in order to become my very best— on the pitch and off— I’ d need to spend my life letting the feelings and lessons of failure transform into my power. Failure is fuel. Fuel is power.
“ Women: listen to me. We must embrace failure as our fuel instead of accepting it as our destruction.”
Yes, Abby, yes! We must embrace failure, and not let it destroy us, but use it as fuel to get better. As fuel to get moving again. As fuel not to let anyone tell us our dreams are not worthy of pursuing. As fuel to put aside the disappointments that come along with pursuing something worthy and great.
Failure is oxygen. Like a fire uses oxygen to grow, we use failure as our fuel. It is a natural part of pursuing excellence. It is supposed to happen.
We have written about adversity here before. In their research on elite and near-elite performers, or what they call“ Super-Champs” and“ Champs,” Dave Collins and his colleague Áine MacNamara have found that those who make it to the very top, who play internationally and have the greatest success, have a path filled with struggle. They are presented with both on-field and real-life struggle, disappointment, and at times pain, yet they persevere.“ The talent pathway,” they conclude,“ should not be a comfortable place to be.”
It is a rocky road to the top.
Collins and MacNamara have also found that well-timed character and psychologically based interventions from coaches and supportive adults help these athletes develop coping skills, grit and resilience. In other words, it is not our job to smooth the pathway of our athletes, to give them plush fields, carry their gear for them and remove all obstacles from their supposed path to greatness. In fact, it’ s quite the opposite. It is our job to help them learn from struggle, and see that the path to the top is not supposed to be easy.
If we really want to help our athletes, students, musicians and entrepreneurs achieve something great, we need them to understand the path is filled with potholes. And we need to be sure not to pave them, but to ensure each one of those potholes is an opportunity to learn. continued on page 34
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