The Fortune in Failure
Lately, I’ve been thinking about “paths to success” and how difficult it is to be successful—at anything. Life is hard. Obstacles abound. Competition thrives. Self-confidence wavers. To succeed at anything requires talent, passion, persistence, and patience. For me, as an author, the writing life is like winning the lottery. It’s about beating the odds. Why? Because supply always exceeds demand in the publishing world.
For example, I often submit stories to Chicken Soup for the Soul books. A few years ago, along with other writers, I was having dinner with Amy Newmark, owner and editor of this leading brand. She told us she receives between 2,000-5,000 articles for each book, but she only selects one hundred and one stories per title. As I said, in publishing, it’s about beating the odds.
After I wrote my first novel, The Glimpse, a story of forgiveness and reconciliation between an alcoholic father and his adult son. One-by-one, I wrote to forty-one literary agents seeking representation. Forty agents eventually turned me down. The forty-first saw the merits of the story and worked with me for a year, before shifting the focus of her business from fiction to only non-fiction books. The result? I had a better manuscript, but no agent.
So, I did what every self-respecting author does after receiving a major rejection. I moped around the house for a week—before I took Ernest Hemingway’s advice, “Work every day no matter what happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.” In the end, I self-published my first novel, The Glimpse. It got great Amazon reviews, but I had to do most of the work myself. Success is difficult, no matter how much you love what you do.
What kept me going, besides my faith that I was doing what I was made to do? In part, it was the encouragement I received from some of the forty-one agents who said, “Jim, you’re so close. Keep going.”
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize
how close they were to success when they gave up.”
Thomas Edison
When I reflect on the challenges I have faced, I believe the path to success has “steps”—and every step has struggles of its own. Yet, what puts everything in perspective for me is something unrelated to publishing. It’s watching my younger brother do something that is so easy for me—and you—but so difficult for him. WALK. At fifteen, he contracted acute transverse myelitis. It affected his central nervous system and left him paralyzed from the waist down for a month. His eventual recovery was partial at best. Yes, he could walk again—but his legs were never the same. He walks with immense difficulty. As I watched him over the years, I’ve observed two things: every single step is a struggle—but his will to fight is unflagging.
This week, I was in a hospital gift shop. While there, I noticed a woman shuffling down the hall to a seat in the lobby not far from where I stood. Her spine was twisted and bent forward. A walker kept her balanced. When she sat, she had only one view—the floor. I took a breath. Glanced at her. My stomach tightened. Compassion overwhelmed me—and I whispered to myself, “Every step is a struggle.”
So often, nothing comes easy in life and it occurs to me we all—secretly—fear failure. But we shouldn’t. For years, by watching my brother walk, I learned a lesson. While we cannot alter our health, we can alter our attitude. And our attitude influences outcome.
Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, once said, “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember, that’s where you will find success.”
And isn’t that the fortune in failure? With the right attitude, “failure can make successes of us all.”
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SOMETHING TO CHEW ON: Life is hard. Success, in any endeavor, is never easy. What is your first inclination when you fail? What obstacles did you have to overcome?
NOVEL UPDATE: My second novel, THE DESERT BETWEEN US is doing well and here is one of the most recent Five-Star Amazon reviews of this "love-after-loss, victory-over-grief" story.
Absolutely incredible. Well written with many multidimensional characters. Chase Kincaid and his son Clay navigate their new normal of living without their beloved wife, mother. Much like his father whom lost his wife as well, Chase is unsure how to navigate these waters and unsure if he is able to love again. With faith and guidance, it is possible to love after loss and this novel shows that. Absolutely beautifully written. A masterpiece.
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