Theodore Roosevelt was once praised by another man for his prowess as a marksman. The man had heard stories of several spectacular shots the president had pulled off while hunting and gushed over the level of skill required, including hitting a pair of pronghorn at long range from the back of a moving horse. Laughing, Teddy responded that he was actually a poor shot. He explained that he had poor eyesight, a fact that was exasperated by a detached retina he suffered in a boxing match at the Whitehouse that rendered him partially blind. Rather, he explained, the handful of spectacular shots he shared in stories were a direct result of having pulled the trigger. “I don’t know how to shoot well, but I know how to shoot often!” The simple idea is that he was able to pull off so many remarkable shots was because he took so many. Though he may have missed quite a few or placed his shots poorly, by sheer volume, he produced great results.
The “Man in the Arena” speech is one of Roosevelt’s most famous, relaying the painful truth that victories and losses are secondary to expending the courage and grit necessary to shoot for greatness. However, his response about shooting will always be more inspiring to me. The reality is that the fear of failure and the habit of living a timid life for fear of making mistakes are far and away the greater obstacle to accomplishing great things than anything else. Don’t get me wrong. There is huge value in pursuing excellence through training, practice, critical self-evaluation, and the many other ingredients required to succeed. However, the willingness to pull the trigger, miss, endure teasing or criticism, then to take aim and pull the trigger again takes a level of courage many cannot muster.
I believe that part of the reason for human timidity when it comes to failure has to do with our utter misunderstanding of failure and mistakes. It is easy to see it as the worst possible outcome or a sign of personal inadequacy. We build up the potential to blunder through a situation so that it is the worst possible outcome. It takes a great deal of mental effort to realize that inaction out of fear of failure is a far worse outcome than failure itself.
In reality, though success is sweet, failure is useful. Mistakes provide us the opportunity to learn lessons that would otherwise be inaccessible to us. Whether those lessons are about the mechanics of our craft, the value of training, the need to focus deeper as we try, or whatever else, there is no teacher like failure. It provides us insight attained through action and gives us just enough sting to make us strive to do better next time. Mistakes are the ultimate teacher, but we often see them as monsters to hide from. I think one of the main reasons for this tendency is that we can often fall into the trap of seeing our value as a person in what we do and accomplish rather than in the fact that God created us as we are for the purpose we were meant to fulfill.
Once we realize that is where our value springs from, it is a short step to recognize that messing up is a lesson in the journey to becoming what we are made to be rather than a confirmation that we are less than we should be. In those moments, we discover that everything is an opportunity to learn and grow. Our critics can only harm us if our value is found in our performance. If our goal is improvement, their words provide opportunities to get better.
