Be Fearless

by Jean Case

  After eBay, Meg embarked on a run in 2010 for governor of California and failed. Appointed as CEO of Hewlett-Packard after losing her bid for office, she took those failure lessons into her new executive role. “I put everything I had into the campaign,” she told CNBC. “But it didn’t work out the way I hoped. I learned a lot from it and I think it made me a stronger executive and I think a stronger person.”

  The question each of us must ask ourselves is whether in the face of failure we would try again. Maybe you’ve never failed and you think this advice isn’t relevant to you. But you will someday. And I want you to fail. Fail fast, fail forward, make it matter, and then go do something really, really great.

  Do I like failure? I detest failure. The point isn’t to glorify failure or to use it as an excuse, but rather to acknowledge that achievements usually follow it. So if it happens, let it teach you, and then allow the experience of overcoming it to energize you and lead to success. Failure only becomes a positive when you do something with it.

  TWELVE

  FAIL IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GIANTS

  Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “Failure is success in progress.” But many people have a hard time accepting that their failures can mean anything other than embarrassment and loss. I understand that. We’re so schooled in the language of success that mistakes can seem like life-ruining events. When something goes wrong, the first thing everyone wants to know is who’s to blame. I doubt that the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency employee who erroneously pushed a nuclear alert button in January 2018 will put that on his résumé. But his mistake led to improvements in the system that could save lives.

  Many of the people we most admire built their successes on top of failures, because those failures sparked great turnarounds. When a young Oprah Winfrey co-anchored the local news at WJZ-TV in Baltimore, viewers didn’t know what to make of her. She became used to hearing “What’s an Oprah?” Her co-anchor resented being paired with her, and the station dropped her from the desk after only seven and a half months. It was a very public failure and hard to recover from. She still remembers feeling humiliated and devastated. But then the station stuck her on a floundering talk show called People Are Talking, and Oprah learned that she had a gift she hadn’t known about. In the talk format, her personality and warmth shone through. Today Oprah is one of the most powerful business executives in the world, and she says she got that way by being true to herself. In a commencement address at Harvard University in 2013, she told the students, “Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction. Now, when you’re down there in the hole, it looks like failure. . . . And when you’re down in the hole, when that moment comes, it’s really okay to feel bad for a little while. Give yourself time to mourn what you think you may have lost, but then, here’s the key, learn from every mistake, because every experience, encounter, and particularly your mistakes are there to teach you and force you into being more who you are. And then figure out what is the next right move. And the key to life is to develop an internal moral, emotional GPS that can tell you which way to go.”

  “Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire.”

  —OPRAH WINFREY

  Rejection is painful, but it can spark creativity. Steven Spielberg was often lonely as a child. Growing up an Orthodox Jew, he has said he often felt alienated from his classmates, and was regularly bullied. He dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, and made small home movies. But he struggled in school—he suffered from dyslexia—and graduated from high school with a C average. His application to the University of Southern California film school was rejected, and he settled for California State University in Long Beach, where he got an internship at Universal Studios. There his talent blossomed, and he was given a directing contract. He dropped out of school and began his film career.

  Today Steven is heralded for hits like E.T., Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan. (E.T., which at its heart is about lost and lonely children, was inspired by his parents’ divorce.) But he’s had his share of flops as well; we just don’t hear about them. Critics unanimously panned his 1979 World War II comedy 1941, for example. But Steven says that he’s proud of every movie he’s ever made. He’s able to embrace calamity as grist for creativity. In his words, “Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make.”

  • • •

  A teacher once pronounced Thomas Edison “too stupid to learn,” and his early professional life was hardly auspicious, with a number of significant failures. He reportedly was fired from several early jobs. So how did he have the strength to keep going? He credited his mother with giving him an outsized sense of confidence. But even so, after thousands of false starts on the lightbulb, Edison was such a famous flop that, as the story is frequently told, a newspaper reporter once asked him if he was ready to give up. He replied, “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work. Success is almost in my grasp.” He didn’t give up, and the rest is history.

  Yet lest you get the idea that failure reliably precedes success, consider Steve Jobs, the revolutionary founder of Apple. Steve experienced his biggest failure after he’d already achieved success. Think about it. He started Apple in his garage with his buddy Steve Wozniak, launching the first Apple computer in 1976. In 1980 the company went public. There were some ups and downs along the way—the 1983 Apple Lisa was a notable flop. But the innovative Macintosh was introduced the next year.

  Even as Apple became corporate, Steve kept his nontraditional spirit. And so, in 1985, a new CEO orchestrated a very public ousting of Steve from the company he’d founded. Twenty years later, at a commencement speech at Stanford, Steve spoke about the terrible pain of that experience. But he went on to say, “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

  Steve would return to Apple as CEO in 1997, and he continued to be a rebel until the day he died in 2011 at the age of fifty-six. One of Apple’s most famous advertising campaigns, “Think Different,” was an ode to those who didn’t fit, who dared to be different and even outrageous. “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

  One of Steve’s most profitable investments during his years away from Apple was in a company called Pixar, which had its own history of building success from failure. Steve helped transform it into a company Disney was eager to buy. (Incidentally, Walt Disney was another failure-to-success story, getting fired from an early job with a Missouri newspaper for “not being creative enough,” and then going on to start Laugh-o-Gram Studio, which went bankrupt.) Ed Catmull, Pixar’s cofounder, once said in an interview, “We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new, and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality. And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also realize that acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.”

  Sports provide daily lessons in overcoming failure, because competing in a sport means losing at least some of the time. When our kids compete in sports, we have plenty of opportunities to help
them deal with failure. The first lesson: you will have another day. This is one of the few arenas where we are told, especially when we are first learning, that it is okay to fall, crash, trip, or drop the ball so we can improve. That is one of the elements that make sports so remarkable in our society. In sports, failure and learning from that failure are integral to success.

  That lesson doesn’t end on the playground. Many of the greatest athletes in the world continue to lose frequently—as anyone who has ever watched a Super Bowl, a World Series game, or an NBA championship knows. “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career,” Michael Jordan has said. “I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Or, as tennis great Serena Williams put it, “I really think a champion is defined not by their wins, but by how they can recover when they fall.”

  Athletes also face another, more grievous kind of failure: career-ending injuries. Kelly Clark was the most decorated Olympic snowboarder when she crashed at the 2015 X Games in Norway, tearing her hamstring from the bone and ripping the cartilage that kept her femur in her hip joint. She spent the next month in bed with her feet bound together and, after surgery, had to relearn how to walk. Others in her position might have taken their medals and retired gracefully, but Kelly refused to let the injury define her career by ending it. She made the bold decision to recover, train, and compete again—not just to win, but to give others hope.

  Kelly astounded the sports world by qualifying for the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, becoming the first snowboarder to compete in five Olympic games. And she did it at the age of thirty-four, competing against challengers half her age. Although she didn’t win a medal, she finished just below third place. Watching the PyeongChang games, I noticed how much other athletes, including Chloe Kim, who won the gold medal, look up to Clark.

  • • •

  Richard Branson’s failures are legendary. When launching his first, most high-profile venture, Virgin Atlantic Airways, he had only one plane, which was ambushed by a flock of birds on its test run. Over time, he’s started many businesses, some of them spectacular bombs—such as Virgin Cola, designed to take on Coke, and Virgin Cars, an online car-selling business. But Branson kept coming back. He epitomizes the entrepreneurial spirit of fail, regroup, and start something else. Today Branson’s Virgin Group is an umbrella for some four hundred companies. “If you fall flat on your face, at least you’re moving forward,” he has said.

  When we think about the phrase “following in the footsteps of others,” rarely do we associate those footsteps with failure. But this chapter was written specifically to demonstrate that extraordinary leaders and high achievers have failed on their own paths to success, sometimes time and time again. So the next time you fail, remember that you are failing in the footsteps of giants.

  THIRTEEN

  BEAT THE ODDS

  Throughout my life, there have been moments when I have been keenly aware of being different from those around me, whether because of my background or gender or education—the types of differences that could contribute to a sense of inferiority, or perhaps cause me to develop what’s called the impostor syndrome, a sense that I’m not worthy of my standing and am just faking it.

  In too many settings through the years, I was the only student on financial aid. Later, I was the only one without a college degree, or the only woman at the board table. You get the idea. For those who are made to feel “different” in society, the fear of failure can be particularly paralyzing, because we can fear that we’ll let our entire similar class down.

  Oddly, however, this sense of disenfranchisement can be a force multiplier. Those with “something to prove”—those whom others would count out because they don’t fit the mold—often excel to extraordinary heights. Like a woman named Oprah, like a young Thomas Edison who didn’t seem teachable, like Steven Spielberg, rejected from film school.

  At her lowest, J. K. Rowling, the phenomenal best-selling author of the Harry Potter series, was a single mother on welfare, struggling with depression. She was, she later said, the biggest failure she knew. This dark chapter of her life inspired the mysterious world of good and evil that is the basis of her novels. She began to write in longhand at night, sitting in coffee shops, and when she finally dared to submit her work to publishers, she received rejection after rejection.

  In 2016, Rowling posted some of these early rejection letters on Twitter as a way of inspiring hopeful writers to not give up. When respondents asked how she had the motivation to keep trying, she replied, “I had nothing to lose, and sometimes that makes you brave enough to try.” Many budding authors posted grateful responses on Twitter, writing that the story of her early rejections gave them the courage to go on.

  • • •

  In 1985, Sudan was caught up in a brutal civil war. Millions died and millions more were displaced. When eleven-year-old Salva Dut’s village in South Sudan was attacked, he ran for his life with the other boys, some as young as five, walking hundreds of miles to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. They and others like them became known as the Lost Boys of Sudan, but “We weren’t really lost,” Salva said in a TED talk about his experience. “We were the walking boys.” They encountered lions on land and crocodiles in the water, but their greatest fear was being found by soldiers who would kill them to prevent them from growing up to become resistance fighters.

  When the boys finally reached the camp, they found that the conditions were nearly unlivable—one scoop of food a day, little water, and no sanitation. Worst of all, there were no adult caretakers; the Lost Boys had to fend for themselves. They decided they couldn’t stay, so at age fifteen, Salva was elected to lead 1,500 boys to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, a journey of hundreds of miles across rough terrain. There, conditions improved.

  At age twenty-two, Salva came to America as a political refugee and settled with a family in Rochester, New York. He had to learn how to do everything from turning on a light switch to shopping at a grocery store. And then one day, a few years after arriving in the United States, Salva learned some stunning news: his father, whom he had been certain had died in the war, was alive. He traveled to South Sudan to reunite with a parent he hadn’t seen since he was eleven, only to find his father critically ill from drinking contaminated water. When Salva described the water in his TED talk, he pulled a plastic bottle out of his pocket and held it up so the audience could see the muddy brew.

  Salva returned to the United States and, knowing nothing about philanthropy, started a nonprofit called Water for South Sudan to commence the battle to provide safe drinking water for the community he had fled. It took him four years to raise $50,000 to drill a well in his father’s village. Since that first well in 2005, Water for South Sudan has drilled 304 wells in remote villages, serving hundreds of thousands of people. Salva’s story is memorable on many levels, but hope and perseverance are messages he continually expresses. The theme of his life is walking—a metaphor for persistence. Today, when he encounters hardship, he says, “I just keep walking, putting one foot in front of another. I learned if you keep persisting, you will accomplish many good things in your life, in any terrible circumstances.”

  Stories like Salva’s inspire us, but what of others in our midst who feel lost? We call our military veterans heroes, yet while we applaud their courage at war, we often have too little to offer them when they return home, as Barbara Van Dahlen reminds us. Many soldiers suffer traumatic injuries on the battlefield, and at least 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer from PTSD. Too many brave soldiers have trouble reintegrating, lacking the community and the sense of purpose that once defined their daily lives. Their failure to thrive can manifest in many ways, most painfully in the high rates of veteran suicide and homelessness.

  Enter Team Rubicon. When a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in January 2
010, nearly 1 million Haitians were left homeless and thousands died. Jake Wood and William McNulty, two former US Marines, jumped in to help. Along with six other veterans and friends, they gathered funds and medical supplies, flew to the Dominican Republic, loaded a truck with supplies, and drove to Haiti. In the process of providing disaster relief, Team Rubicon found it could also provide veterans with a way to regain their sense of self-worth by giving them a fresh purpose and a new community.

  At first, the members of Team Rubicon saw themselves as a disaster relief organization that was using veteran services. Then Clay Hunt, an original member of Team Rubicon, took his own life. After Hunt’s death, they began to see themselves as a veteran services organization that was using disaster relief. As Jake Wood said in a moving talk, in which he spoke of his friend and about pride and loss in the lives of military veterans: “You have an eighteen-year-old boy who graduates high school in Kansas City. He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle. They send him to Iraq. They pin a medal on his chest. He goes home to a ticker-tape parade. He takes the uniform off. He’s no longer Sergeant Jones in his community. He’s now Dave from Kansas City. He doesn’t have that same self-worth. But you send him to Joplin [Missouri] after a tornado, and somebody once again is walking up to him and shaking [his] hand and thanking [him] for [his] service, now [he has] self-worth again.”

  • • •

  It is not too often that I meet other leaders in the privileged world of philanthropy who share a background like mine—having previously been a recipient of philanthropy before taking the helm of a foundation. So when I first met Darren Walker and heard the remarkable story of how he beat the odds to become president of the Ford Foundation, one of the largest foundations in the United States, I was deeply touched. Despite the Ford Foundation’s tradition, prestige, and sheer size (with assets over $12 billion), Darren speaks openly about his challenged upbringing: “I embrace my past,” he told Jonathan Capehart in a moving interview published in the Washington Post. “I didn’t have to study the context of a low-income, rural community to know about poverty. I lived that experience.”