Failure

Successful writers have boxes of rejection letters. Successful actors weren’t always successful. Successful baseball players get a hit three out of every ten times they bat. It may take years before creative people are considered creative. It may never happen.

If you want to succeed, you have to be willing to fail. But you can’t let that failure define you.

Unfortunately, a lot of people never end up doing what they really want to do because they give up. They quit trying and end up doing something else. Sometimes they find what they should’ve been doing all along; but, in most cases, they end up settling for something else, something that falls short of what their gut tells them to do.

It can be a curse to find a lot of success early in life if you come to believe that success comes easily or if you become content with what comes easily.

This was never an issue with me.

For the first thirty years of life or so, I failed at nearly everything I tried because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I quit job after job.

I had lunch with a friend of mine who once owned a thriving Madison Avenue advertising agency but had since retired.

I explained my plight.

“What does your gut tell you to do?” he asked.

I want to write feature stories for a newspaper. I left one newspaper where I was an editor to work at a smaller newspaper where I wrote features and then columns.

I then got laid off, which turned out to be the best bad thing that ever happened to me because what I really wanted to do was to be a college professor.

I got my Ph.D. and have been teaching college for the last 25 years or so. If you like your job so much you don’t consider it work, you’ve found what you should be doing.

This is success. This is what teaching college is like to me.

I still write for newspapers, magazines, and websites. Many of my story pitches are ignored or rejected. When that happens, I tweak the idea a bit and send it to another newspaper or magazine. Somebody usually ends up publishing the piece.

I didn’t have my first book published until I was 45. I’ve had 11 books published since then, and a 12th will be published in the spring. I’m aware that in some cases, a book editor accepted my manuscript because someone with a better idea had failed to submit theirs because they weren’t willing to put in the work.

When I was driving a cab in my 20s, I read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, where he says, “I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Author: Dr. Chris Lamb