Failing to learn

I spent yesterday afternoon watching my son’s football team lose a game.

It was not pretty. Time after time the team got within yards of the end zone only to be stopped by a dominating defensive line.

I’m not sure who was more frustrated, the players, the coaches or the parents watching helplessly from the sidelines.

As painful as the experience was, one thing is certain: those players won’t forget that game or that afternoon. They won’t forget it because from now on they’ll do everything in their power never to repeat it.

Success isn’t the only thing you can learn from. You can learn from failure too. Sometimes the lessons you learn from failing stick with you more than the ones you learn from winning.

Have you failed in your freelance business?

I have. For the first time ever, I had story killed earlier this year because what I turned in didn’t match what the editor was looking for, even after two rewrites. Granted, what the editor wanted was a moving target, but when all was said and done, my efforts weren’t good enough.

I’ve had other failures along the way. The first time I ever pitched a story  to a magazine I was still in grad school. I’d been researching a well-known activist/journalist turned author and queried a progressive magazine on an update on his life timed to a movie about him that was coming out. Much to my inexperienced surprise they accepted the story – which I then proceeded to never write.

While I was working as a daily newspaper staff writer I got a call out of the blue from the Los Angeles bureau chief of a national business magazine who needed to fill an opening in his office. I was on maternity leave with a very young baby at the time and was nursing so I couldn’t leave her even for a few hours. In a fit of generosity, the bureau chief suggested bringing her along. But midway through our interview the baby got hungry and started screaming so I had to excuse myself, feed her, then resume the interview. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get the job.

I’ve had other failures, some still too fresh or painful to willingly share.

But I’d like to think I’ve learned from my mistakes. Learned how to be better at following through on queries, communications and opportunities.

After all these years doing what I do, failure still hurts just as much as it did for those football players yesterday. But I try not to let it get to me.

Because if you don’t learn from your failures, you’re failing to learn.

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