The Love of Admiring Failure

My Household 6 went away for the weekend to shop and giggle with her best friend. So, I did what every red-blooded, steely-eyed American Warrior would do. I sat around with my dog, Red, drank fake beer, and watched the Warfighter Exposition live on social media. This was the inaugural showing from AUSA. The part in particular that caught my attention was a conversation between the Sergeant Major of the Army (SMA), a few Division- and Corp-level Command Sergeants Major, and an executive leader from the University of Alabama athletic department.

The conversation was about culture in a team environment and how things have changed due to the nature of society changing. While the boomer in me wanted to remind SMA Grinston that when I was in culture was not a problem, that we lived and breathed the Army way, I understand what they were saying about the changing times. But, most of all, I noted his comments about how we “admire failure.” This isn’t what you think. He didn’t mean that we support failure. He meant that we stand around looking at it and don’t do anything about it.

Failure is part of life. It is inevitable that at some point, or many points, we will fail at something. In our spectrum of Family, Fun, Faith, Friends, Future, and Employment, we are bound to fail. If we are the typical Warrior, we will likely get divorced. We may not succeed at the first job in Chapter 3 of our life, post-Service. We may lose family and friends as we struggle with leaving Chapter 2, our time in uniform, and move into Chapter 3; a strange new world. It is what we do with that failure that defines our character and what the future holds for us.

If we fail and then just sit there and do nothing, admiring it from afar, then we are doomed to stay where we are or regress even further. It is ok to fail. It is not okay to not learn from that failure and execute change management to do better next time. For example, many of our brethren have an issue with alcohol addiction. It was part of an accepted, or expected, culture in Chapter 2, but runs afoul of longevity, and sometimes the law, in Chapter 3. So, many of us, like me, trying to improve ourselves and keep our spectrum of Family, Fun, Faith, Friends, Future, and Employment working properly, decide to abstain from drinking. Awesome! For more on that, please check out my article My Two Best Friends Want to Kill Me. Sometimes, during this process we relapse and use again. And that is ok. Many in the addiction world would treat this as catastrophic, start your clock over, reset you back to the beginning, and focus on the failure.

This is a bad time to admire failure. Instead, we look at the people, places, or things which may have triggered us into relapsing and make a change. Maybe you thought you could hang out with your old drinking buddies again and not cave into their peer pressure. Or maybe it was the stress of something that made you go back to your old ways of coping, drowning those voices in Mr. Jack Daniel’s Magical Elixir. Here, here is where our character is called to be firm and resolute. Here is where, instead of simply admiring our failure, we look to professionals to help us find other ways to cope with stress or pain or PTSD. Here is where we decide we can no longer hang out with those friends in an alcohol-driven environment. Here is where we learn from failure and do something to not make the same mistake again.

During our time training, or executing the training, we had After Action Reviews to learn from our mistakes so we didn’t do them again. We never admired our failures. Good leadership didn’t allow it and peers let you know it wasn’t acceptable. So, we need to make sure we act as our own good leadership, our own peer-pressure, and fix things when we fail. As I paraphrase the great Admiral McRaven in his famous speech to the University of Texas, “you will fail, you will likely fail often. It will test you to your very core.” But, you must learn from it and do better next time, starting now.

We can all fail. But we can all, also, do better because of that failure. Just don’t admire your failure. Be safe, do good, and then do better! Our Nation needs you to lead the way to Victory, at all costs!

—SGM DTB—