Turning What You Love into What You Do
By Patrick O’Connor
“The road to success is always under construction.” ~Lily Tomlin
Failure is an inevitable aspect of life. There is no way around it, though some people go to great lengths to avoid it and the inferior feelings that accompany it. The reality is, failure is part of life and the best response is to find a positive way to handle and learn from it. This is one of the characteristics of the subjects featured in the Road Less Traveled series.
Dealing with failure is difficult, as we all prefer things to go smoothly rather than stumbling and fumbling around. This may be especially important for people who have been sheltered or raised in an environment where things came easily and people cleared the way for them. The results can be people unwilling to take a risk, learn something new or try something different. Fear of failure can keep people sheltered, isolated and insulated.
Why is this important? Failure is unpleasant, especially in American society/culture that is heavily focused on success and winning. As such, many people overlook the value of learning from mistakes, including the maturity and discipline they foster.
“Don’t be afraid to make mistakes; they are just the stepping-stones to success.” ~Louis Zamperini, Unbroken
It is best to learn as much as possible from failure. Two examples of this are from sports and inventor Thomas Edison. Whenever a team loses (and sometimes even win), the players and coaches testify to learning from the experience. Many will talk about how the loss will motivate them to work harder and improve their performance. They see failure as an opportunity to grow and learn. Thomas Edison (over 1,000 patents) is another good example of learning from failure. He tried thousands of times to invent a filament that would make the lightbulb work. He viewed each “failure” as eliminating one more possible solution to the problem. It took him years of testing to find the solution, commenting on the process, “I was never myself discouraged.”
Everyone has a Road Less Traveled and they are all filled with twists and turns, bumps and obstacles, starts and restarts. The RLT series is filled with examples of how subjects view failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. Two subjects, Gwen Rosenberg, and George Miller III are featured in this blog segment. They are excellent examples of how failure can be turned into an opportunity for turning what you love into what you do.
Gwen Rosenberg (Volume 10), owner of Popped! (shoppopped.com) in Kent and Ravenna, has been through a ton of failure on her RLT. As an entrepreneur who creates popcorn, candy and ice cream from scratch, she has made “endless little failures that propelled me in one direction or another.” She has had dozens of jobs over the years, including probation officer, beekeeper, car sales representative, dog trainer, cake baker and candlestick maker. She is willing to tackle just about anything that comes her way, as she believes there “is no failure; only opportunities to learn.” She has a “full steam ahead” mindset, which is evident in her mantra: “Nobody is keeping track, so who cares if I stumble?”
Another example of seeing failure as opportunity is artist George Miller, III of Jacksonville, FL (Volume 12). He thought he had a pretty good thing going as a professional artist focusing on the importance of literacy where he displayed his artwork at numerous educator conferences. Then the economic crash of 2008 hit and the conferences stopped. He no longer had lines of people waiting to purchase his artwork and found himself alone at his display table. Rather than get discouraged, George looked for the upside to the situation. The disappointment led him to rethink where his artwork could have additional impact. In effect, the failure prompted him to expand his artistic range and seek new markets. He added artwork for professionals in counseling and mental health to literacy educators. The downturn essentially jumpstarted him to redefine himself and morph into a one-of-a-kind child advocacy artist (gemartstudio.com). He now enjoys a level of success he never imagined. He reflects on the downturn that almost led to bankruptcy as an “opportunity to survive.”
We learn to accept and deal with failure by experiencing it. We need to be prepared for it as we would anything else in life. Rather than hide failure from children, parents and grandparents are better off to guide their children through it. Part of that guidance is to assist them in learning from it. There is always an upside to everything. It may take some time to find it, but it is always worth the effort when the goal is to turn what you love into what you. The next segment of this blog will address the importance of lifelong learning.
“The best education is from the University of Adversity. It’s the only institute of learning that rewards us when we fail.” ~Jason Versey, A Walk with Prudence
Image courtesy pexels.com
Matt Keffer
Great article Pat! I’ve never failed at anything but I get what you’re saying:) Ok, many fails. I especially like the comment about guiding your children through your failures. Wow, few things are harder than that but such sage advice. You’ve proven yourself over and over with your children and their great accomplishments! From one OEO to another. I’m fortunate…we’ve talked so many times that when I read your articles, It’s always with your voice in my mind. It’s in Pat-O-Vision.
patrick oconnor
great comments Matt. Glad the info helps as you and your family march along your RLT. This is indeed a tough time and I like your Pat-O-Vision take….goes both ways. Check out George’s approach to dealing with the tense times—-maybe George-O-Vision!?
Child Advocacy Artist George E. Miller
Good looking out, my friend,
No doubt there are literally thousands of people going through difficult transitions right now in this new covid19 world including myself. Once again, my business and life are challenged by forces completely outside of my control. Here are a few things I do when my world is seemingly turned upside down?
1.) Memorize and constantly repeat a quote or other positive words that help you realize the transition you are experiencing won’t last and that you can come out on the other side better than you’ve ever been. “Just when the caterpillar thought its life was over, it became a butterfly”
2.) Move, every day! Get out and walk, jog, or ride a bicycle some part of everyday. Exercise does wonders for your state of mind. It improves self-esteem, mood, and sleep quality while reducing stress and anxiety. I walked 3 miles today!
3.) Stay as positive as you possibly can. Steer clear of negative people, especially right now. Focus on anything positive you can find no matter how seemingly trivial it may be. I like to spend time laughing and playing with my grand kids.
4.) Above all keep your head and antennas up, be on the lookout for that positive opportunity. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and you don’t want to miss your opportunity to survive!
patrick oconnor
Your insight is great as always George. Also, your action steps remind me of how important it is to keep busy and positive. George-O-Vision?
Thanks George
Gwen Rosenberg
Great article Patrick!
If anything this pandemic has taught me is that at any moment life can get upended and turned around- what you thought you couldn’t change or alter suddenly shifted. We can only control so much in life but our ability to adapt, pivot and learn can lead to success in challenging times. Failure is opportunity to reimagine and redirect ourselves and can lead to greater successes.
patrick oconnor
Thanks for providing additional insight Gwen. “To reimagine and redirect”…words to live by. Stay safe! Hope things are going well at the new Ravenna location.
Pat
Marilyn Sessions
Good stuff Pat – excellent role models and examples!
Patrick
Great stuff! We can all learn from failure, no matter what age you are!
patrick oconnor
thanks to all for feedback. I hope we can share with family, friends, students and co-workers. This is one good example I think of how we need to change the conversation. We need to talk more about life events and how to address them. I think some people are actually so reluctant to do so they almost pretend everything is always just fine rather than deal with failure head on.
Mark Dailey
I wish I had this kind of direction when I was in school. This premise helps kids in ways that can literally be life-saving. Failing WILL happen to everyone, but the attitude behind it can be the catalyst toward success. I live in Kent and am proud to be a contributing patron to a small business like Popped…what a great success story. I frequently tell my students how important it is to always work on yourself. “Honoring your own healing is a big deal.” -Ram Dass. Great article, thank you!
patrick oconnor
Thanks so much Mark for sharing your wisdom here and with your students. As you mention, most young folks need to hear this. I wonder though …. how is it we can truly get this message across? I tried for years and maybe it landed a few times but to be honest I have no idea if it really registered. Maybe we need some new ways of teaching this so it is really learned.
Mark Dailey
I totally agree, and will always keep trying.
Connie Patton
I loved reading your perspective on this. I have failed many times over the years in things I have tried as a child and even as an adult. Yes, I would feel defeated but I would turn around and try again. I saw a t shirt recently that said “I did not lose, I learned a lesson” How powerful!. Who is keeping track anyway lol.
Thank you. Very good article.
patrick oconnor
Thanks Connie for your comments. Haven’t seen that t-shirt but would like to find it. Powerful indeed.
Scott
There is so much truth in your words. Failure is indeed inevitable and is crucial to success. Many years ago there was a parental mindset that we would/must allow our children to fail so that they could taste defeat and rise again stronger because of it. I have seen a marked shift in mindset in recent years, especially in children’s sports, where we don’t want to see our children fail because we are afraid it will hurt them. I believe that protecting our children from failure cripples them for life in the real world. We have such an important job as parents and part of that is preparing them for all of life, both failures and successes. The temporary pain of failure is nothing compared to the regret of lessons never learned. Thank you for sharing such great thoughts on the importance of short-term failures and their role in lifelong success.
patrick oconnor
Scott. You could have written this Blog segment!! Next Blog segment is on Life-Long Learning. I learned a lot from your comments. So many great quotable comments…..”temporary pain….”.Love it. Thanks
Sacha N. Parson
I must say, I agree that failure is an opportunity to find a positive to any negative. Personally, failure taught me just how strong I really am. Had I never failed at something, I would have never been forced to rethink my plan, to dust myself off, and try harder next time. Failure taught me that I won’t be successful every 1st attempt, but what I can do is rethink the attempt and make it better. Failure builds character and once you find success after perhaps failing at something the first time around, the reward seems soo much greater. Because you did it. You overcame the difficulties and look at you now.
patrick oconnor
Sacha:
Thanks times two for sharing your thoughts and experience. What a great way to look at life and its challenges. I’m sure you inspire those around you…. you have me.
P
Charles Davis
I love the perspective this article brings on failure. I too wish I would have had this type of direction back in high school. Over the years I have learned that if I fail at something, it is indeed another opportunity to learn from it. Thank you for the insight!
patrick oconnor
I appreciate you sharing your view Charles. The tough question I think is how can we really teach this or are we just stuck with letting life do it?
Leah Prescott
This is a wonderful article. Failure is sometimes the best teacher. Learning from it is a wonderful way to grow. However, sometimes failing is a godsend, sometimes we think succeeding at a specific thing will be the best road. When we fail many times we realize it wasn’t the best way.
patrick oconnor
A “godsend”. Great thought!
Nathan Berry
I was blessed that, while growing up, my grandfather lived right down the street from us. I found myself by his side working often and occasionally I would witness a mistake or unfortunate accident. When that happened he would turn to look me in the eye and smile and say, “See Nate, that’s why your grandpap is so smart, he makes a lot of mistakes!” I would laugh and we would both go back to learning and fixing. I cherish those moments. It certainly taught me to think through problems for a solution, but more importantly it taught me to stick with a problem to the end and not to give up so easily because a solution is there if you persevere. Great article. We all need to learn from failure, but we also need to be reminded to allow others, especially children, to lean from their failures and to not be so quick to criticize.
patrick oconnor
Your Grandpap was indeed wise Nathan. Learning from failure and problem solving seemed related as you indicate.
Thanks for sharing your experience and your Grandpap’s wisdom.
PJOC
Mason Heatherington
Wow! wow! wow! I love this article, tons of people today do not realize how much we learn from failure. Thomas Edison as you mentioned tried to create the lightbulb thousands of times and I tell my students that all the time. One of my favorite quotes is a sports quote that can be translated easily into life and it goes “You learn little from winning, you learn a lot from defeat” although I do not know the author of the quote I use it almost everyday. Other great examples of people who failed multiple times and are now successful are Sylvester Stallone and Dewayne “the rock” Johnson, two guys I grew up watching on tv that hit rock bottom and now are on top.
patrick oconnor
Thanks for adding to the conversation Mason. Interesting examples of people who never quit.
Best
PJOC
Chelsea Shar
This is especially true in teaching Career Tech. Students we are training today will have a much different career path than what exists now. New jobs may be created that do not even exist yet. I teach media and the media job landscape right now is completely different then it was a ten or fifteen years ago. There are no longer many of the jobs we used to train for, and are now many new kinds of jobs. Being adaptable is a part of being ok with failure. As you mentioned the man from Jacksonville, his job became no longer lucrative, so he had to re-invent what he was doing. That may be looked at as failure, or just the changing of the times. His adaptability to see the gaps in the market he was in allowed him to pivot and turn it into new success.
patrick oconnor
Thank you Chelsea for your observations. Of the 16 subjects I wrote about I think the quality with the most traction is adaptability. Very true for sure in your and critical that your students learn it. Let me know if you have shared these observations. They are welcome to read the blog and offer comments too!
Best Regards
PJOC
patrick oconnor
Thanks so much to all who provided feedback on this segment. March 20 is the debut of the next segment which focuses on lifelong learning….another critical quality to success….especially when it comes to learning from failure. Hope you will check it out.
Best
PJOConnor
Megan Mauceri
This was an amazing article. As a mom I worry constantly about the first time my daughter feels the pain of failure. Although a part of me never wants this to happen, I know it will. However, I also know the growth and strength that will come from these failures. It is ingrained in humans at a very young age that failure is bad. At the time failure occurs it feels like the end of the world, but when you look back at what happened it is important to learn from the situation and grow from it.
As an educator, I hate to see my students fail. At first I took it personally, like could I have done something better or taught something differently. But now I look at it as an opportunity to offer help and assistance to a student that is struggling.
Gabrielle Keyser
I appreciate this article as it validates the importance of failure in our growth as individuals. While the immediate response to failure might be disappointment, frustration, or even sadness – the advantage of a failure is the opportunity to learn, grow, and help others. I hope to guide my students through their failures into growth and to understand and embrace the learning a disappointing failure can provide.
Emma
Patrick,
Thank you for a nice blog post. I continually am reminded of my failures and focusing on learning from them. This is a huge mantra at my school and something that is naturally uncomfortable for many. It would be beneficial to all if the negative connotation of “failure” could go away and the positive of the situation could be highlighted.
Thanks again,
Janice Sprankle
Dr. O’Connor: Thank you for sharing such profound insight with failure. Although failure does not feel good, we can use our inner strength to make changes and find success in every failure! The old adage that says, “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” has been something I have carried with me through the years. In other words, failure does not own us or define us, rather we own it and continue to show growth as we go through this amazing journey. As we continue to experience failure, we must also continue to embrace the other direction of failure, and that is finding the upside to every downside!
Angela Ramsay
Dr. O’Conner,
I have enjoyed your knowledge and expertise being a student at Kent State University. I believe we learn more from failure then we do from success right away. We learn how to do better when we fail. I have enjoyed your article along with reading many others. Thank you! I hope you are doing well.
A. Ramsay
Benjamin Ake
Dr. O’Connor
I enjoyed your blog post. I have been through many transitions and failures and although they were painful at the time, they did help me to grow as an individual. I see this in my students as well. They may experience failure early on in a course but the failures help them to grow and solidify their performance, confidence and character.
Mary Ann
Hello Dr. O’Connor,
Thank you for sharing some thought-provoking insight into failure. I had a junior high coach tell me something I have always remembered (40 years later!). The statement was, “If you haven’t failed, you haven’t really tried”. It took me a long time to understand that statement, but once I did, it took the fear out of failure.
Mary Ann
Erin Bradley
Good evening, Dr. O’Connor,
I have been reading recently on the topic of failure and student success. I agree that we should not shelter our students from failure, but guide them through it. But I would like to emphasize the word “guide”. We often want to hold a student’s hand and quickly make things better for them. But how do they learn from us correcting their mistakes? As instructors, our students benefit from our insight into a topic they have failed in, perhaps shedding a different light on the subject to help them see their failure from a different perspective. They will not benefit if we give them answers to help them move on to new concepts with their peers. Students, however, have difficulty seeing the positive side of failure, especially when we use traditional grading systems. The struggle for instructors is to encourage students that failure helps them grow personally and academically.
Tonya Underwood
Dr. Oconnor,
What a well written piece! A wonderful reminder of “if at first you don’t succeed try, try gain” by William Edward Hickson (1803-1870).It is a frightening concept to accept at times, but your positive spin helps!
Tonya
Britany Hickey
Dr. O’Conner, I really enjoyed reading your thoughts on letting students fail. I think we should reward students for failing in all classrooms, but CTE classrooms are the perfect environment for students to have the opportunity to fail – so long as they learn from their failure. Our school uses a mastery scale to assess our students’ learning and it is set up to grade students who might ‘fail’ or not master a skill on the first or second time. We can give students a Not Yet Mastered or Developing Mastery on an assessment if they attempted the skill, but to a certain extent did not master the skill. Students also know that they will have multiple opportunities to attempt their mastery LOs, so in theory, they understand it may take a couple attempts at Developing Mastery before they truly earn Mastery on an assessment.
Jackie Davis
Dr. O’Conner,
I do love the fact that education is starting to understand that mastery is never automatic. Failure is a part of learning, and we should celebrate it! I teach programming and with this subject, learning about iterations is crucial! If a student completely bombs an assignment or a test, they should be able to try it again to see if they have figured it out the second, third and even fourth time! This is how we truly learn and become lifelong learners! Thanks so much for your article – it was so very refreshing!
Harold
Dr. O’Conner,
Thank you for this article. I do agree that failure is part of life, but reward failing is a hard pill to swallow. But I haven’t tried it yet. I am afraid that rewarding failing don’t help students develop internal motivation, self-reliance, or responsibility.
Harold