Success and Failure: Partners in Crime

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Beautiful, aren’t they? If you want to buy one though, you will probably need $100,000 or so. Maybe he was a success then? If so, he died not knowing it.  He didn’t know his art would be featured on a US postage stamp and his life reported in books and on Wikipedia. None of his works sold in his life time. He wasn’t making them to sell. If asked about his success or failure, he probably wouldn’t have understood the question.

I’m not citing Ramirez as a shining role model, but as a stark illustration of how meaningless the concepts of success and failure can be. Most of us would be much better off without them.

My neighbor Marsha would be better off without those concepts. She has a beautiful presence. She always has a smile and a hug for people; she listens to you even when you’re not making much sense. She looks great. She works hard at two jobs and gives stuff away that she could barely afford to buy herself.

Everyone loves Marsha, but she thinks she’s a failure. At 32, she’s not in a serious relationship. She doesn’t have a college degree; she’s not tech-savvy.  She’s not going to be an executive or a city Supervisor in the foreseeable future.  She scrambles to pay the bills, which this culture sees as the mark of failure.

How wrong, what an inversion of the truth that evaluation is! We need more people like Marsha, and fewer successful people. Most of the troubles in this world come from the messes successful people make. Think Donald Trump; think Dick Cheney. The more of a mess you make, the more successful you are.  Successful people are people who get things done, which is to say they screw things up.

I’m not saying successful people are evil. Some successes actually help. The Internet seems a good thing, and many successful people have had a hand in building that. Others accomplish things that seem beneficial at the time but later turn into disasters like the internal combustion engine. Great way to get around town.  Only a century later do we find out it’s destroying the planet through the greenhouse effect. It’s not the inventors’ fault; it’s just the price of success.

I’m not saying that success is bad and failure is good.  What I’m saying is that success and failure are not the right way to measure a culture, an activity, or a life. The terms are just empty judgments that motivate selfish behavior and make people feel bad about themselves.

Why are success and failure useless metrics? For one thing, they’re completely relative.  One person’s success is another person’s failure. Once at a conference in Omaha, I rode in a courtesy van driven by a 40 year old African-American father. We stopped outside the hotel, and he told me he was struggling to pay off credit card debt while raising two children by working two jobs.  He seemed really intelligent and caring.  He told me he hoped to be a success one day, and I said, “You’re already a success.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I’m a bus driver.”
Like there’s something wrong with that.  “How high do you want to set the bar?” I asked.  “You’re good at what you do; you’re responsible for your kids. You’re doing great.”

I had a similar conversation with Marsha. She told me she was lonely and was drawn to the idea of dying young.  She wasn’t considering suicide, but she felt like she might not last long. I hoped she was wrong, because a lot of people would miss her. She looked shocked, like she had no idea that people cared about her. She didn’t know that as a neighbor she was as successful as it is possible to be.

Another problem: we measure success by fame and fortune.  Looked at that way, Genghis Khan was an all-time great. He killed tens of thousands of people and brought back a lot of treasure. He is still the national hero of Mongolia. It’s hard to say what good that did anybody, though, even the Mongols.

These days some media are starting to promote the value of failure. “Failure is the new success.” In this thinking, failure’s value is that it sets you up for future success if you keep trying. This sounds like a step forward over “Failure makes you a loser,” but I wonder. Keep trying for what? Why bring success and failure into it at all? What does that help?

Basketball star Michael Jordan is a guy most would consider successful. Many experts consider him the greatest player of all time. He said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 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.”

I think this quote really say that success and failure are not the way Jordan thinks of himself on the basketball court. He’s not afraid of failing. He just goes out and plays the best he can. He tries his hardest to win, because he loves competition, and success can follow if it wants to.

Jordan’s view speaks to me. It’s not about failure or success. To the degree that I seek success, I block my own creativity. I’m only now realizing how the concept of success often makes me miserable and ineffective. My success metrics involve having people listen to me and change their lives because of what I write. Not because of my social standing, position of authority or academic degrees – things I’ve avoided – but because of my ideas and how well I express them.

Of course these metrics are not only unrealistic; they are ridiculous. People rarely change so easily. Not to say it never happens, but that’s setting an insanely high bar for success. Better to forget success and failure completely and just write from the heart. I’m trying to do that now, but I backslide often.

I should have learned by now. I used to play synthesizer, write songs and co-lead a Bay Area “World Beat” band.  My partner and I were trying to become famous and change the world with our lyrics at the same time.  (The rest of the band wasn’t that deluded, but did want the band to be “successful.”)  As a result, I never enjoyed the experience.  It was stressful; it was exhausting.  It became an obsession until I burned out and stopped.

I hadn’t looked at that part of my life for years, until yesterday at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, I saw two local groups called Cambalache and Tarimba, playing the Afro-Mexican music called Son Jarocho.  It was great, super rhythms and beautiful voices. People of all ages were dancing and singing along.

Cambalache

45 minutes after the show, members of both bands and others from the audience were still gathered under some trees, playing and dancing their music for free. They aren’t trying to succeed, although they clearly work at getting better. They are just creating, giving their art to their community and enjoying the experience. How much better my years in the band would have been with their attitude!

That is one of the metrics I think we should be using to replace success. Are you creating, are you pleasing yourself, are you helping, are you coming from the heart and connecting with others? Those metrics don’t lie, while fame and fortune often do.

Can we do without success or failure?  Some cultures do. In Japan, there is an esthetic called wabi-sabi.  According to Robyn Griggs Lawrence, writing in Natural Home Magazine, “wabi-sabi is the art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in earthiness, of revering authenticity above all.”

Wabi-sabi apparently started in the 15^th Century as a reaction to the prevailing culture of lavish wealth and ornamentation. It’s the opposite of luxury: it features the beauty of impermanence, of imperfection, of birth, aging, and death. According to Lawrence, through frayed edges, rust, cracks or liver spots wabi-sabi embodies “nature’s cycles of growth, decay, and erosion. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace both the glory and the melancholy found in these marks of passing time… It’s the subtle art of being at peace with yourself and your surroundings.”

Martin Ramirez would have understood. We won’t build any Trump Towers with wabi-sabi. We won’t make billions of dollars or be featured on TMZ. Just those three things alone are reason enough to embrace this path. We might also have a better chance of being happy and at peace, and our world might have a better chance of surviving.

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