The Secret of My Failure

Wanting to write the next great American novel is terribly cliché—so it should come as no surprise that I would like to. Well more of an essay than a novel and it doesn't have to be great, preferably just good enough. In the throes of writing my grad school applications, I feel inept, unexpressive, and just plain boring as I try to turn the humdrum disappointments of my life into stunning accomplishments. And if I can’t convince them that I am accomplished, then at least I can write about my mediocrity cogently and thoughtfully enough that they will be impressed. I have to—it is my last bastion of potential excellence. My recommendations will likely be laudatory, but not gushing. My grades are adequate, but not outstanding. My resume is serviceable, but not exceptional. My test scores are above average, but in the Lake Wobegone sense of the expression.

My essays have to take this proletarian record and in true propaganda fashion convince the politburos of America’s venerable institutions of higher learning that I am party material. With so much depending on these essays, I am finding them incredibly difficult to write. Acerbic wit and dripping sarcasm are great blog-fodder, but less impressive in a personal statement. Unfortunately, besides punchy business writing, the occasional rant about airlines or earthquakes on my blog is the only writing I have done since leaving college. And sadly, my go-to format when I can’t think of something to write, a link-fest, is also discouraged in these supposedly reflective essays. “I don’t know how an MBA would help my career at this time, but I just found an article on the 50 Most Loathesome People in America in 2007 that is my kind of mean-spirited vitriol. Oh yeah, and Buzzfeed has some mouths-for-eyes pictures that are creepy.”

So with excellence almost within my grasp and with mediocrity waiting to catch me, I will probably continue to fret about writing and continue to write about writing and in so doing avoid any actual writing until the last minute. But while this period of self-reflection runs amok, I will continue to parse stylistic elements or thematic devices from examples of writing that I hope to emulate.

These examples come from the most surprising places. Who would have thought that one of the more poignant essays I have read this year would hide itself in GQ? More importantly, who knew that I would ever admit to reading such trash aimed at the aspiring-but-not-yet-nouveau-riche? (Though I will freely admit to thumbing through Vogue—I happen to like non-silicone enhanced women in fashionable clothes—having another GQ columnist rehash the brown shoes with blue suit question bores me. As an aside, I should get 1000 points for implying that emaciated coke-snorting Vogue models better represent the female form than the silicone stuffing meth-addicted starlets on GQ’s pages. Also 1000 points for despising the nouveau riche despite my own negative financial net worth.) That gem, which I tore from the hundreds of other useless GQ pages on a NYC-LA flight, is below and my thoughts while reading it are in brackets. I think it is worth your attention--it had mine and instilled an unshakable sense of pending doom.

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The Secret of My Failure

The secret of my failure was that I thought success was permanent. Like a lot of men, I had reached a sweet-scented peak [nice phrase] that I thought was mine for life. Then one foul day I fell into the pit of failure. And then come, oh, ten years when the postman became the most important person in my diminished life, because his footsteps outside our shabby little flat brought the possibility of some paltry cheque. [I apparently picked up the British edition of GQ—those turds, invading my airport news kiosks with their filth.]

Ten years of fretting about money. Ten years of waking up in the middle of the night, wondering where the next mortgage payment was coming from. Ten years to contemplate where it had all gone wrong. And ten years dreading that inevitable moment at a party when someone asked, “And what are you doing these days?”

The funny thing is, I was working like a dog, taking any job that came my way, because failures can’t be choosers. [That is a GREAT line. I really like this guy.] But it didn’t make any difference. All successful men work hard, but so do the vast majority of failures. [Crap, is that me?]

I had left my first job in journalism, as a staff writer on NME, with great expectations. I was 25 years old and for the previous three years I had been writing cover stories for the biggest music weekly in the world. I was quite popular—but it was only when I left NME that I discovered I was only popular with spotty, high-IQ misfits who were saving up for their first pair of bondage trousers. [Lol both at that sentence and the fact that he uses “trousers.”] Nobody else had heard of me. Nobody else wanted to know.

In rapid succession I was married, a father, divorced, and a single father. There had never been much money—Julie Burchill and I used to take bottles back to get the tube fare to work—but now there was none. For a single man, failure is hard to take. For a family man, especially a broken family man, it is poison.

Here is how failure finds you. First there is a creeping sense of dread and then suddenly the sky falls down.

“How did you go bankrupt?” asks a character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

“Two ways,” comes the reply. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

That is how your failure hits you. Gradually and then suddenly. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first—the increasing struggles with money, the nagging sense of things not going how you had expected, how you like, and then the terrible realization that the world can get along very well without you—and finally disaster. The bills that can’t be paid. The career in the ditch. The relationship in ruins. Your health shot.

Jay McInerney uses that quote from Hemingway’s novel at the start of his own masterpiece, Bright Lights, Big City. Widely considered to be—with Bonfire of The Vanities—one of the ultimate zeitgeist Eighties books, Bright Lights, Big City is really the story of a young man failing: chemically, professionally, economically, personally, socially. All the ways we can fail. [Those books are going on the reading list.]

For all its references to Bolivian marching powder and clubs and girls with shaven heads, Bright Lights, Big City is really the best novel ever written about coping with failure, and taking the first steps to recovery.

The book ends with the protagonist trading his sunglasses for some freshly baked bread, down on his knees, stuffing it into his mouth and trying to keep it down. That’s what fighting failure feels like. It feels like it might just be beyond you. It turns your stomach.

I felt that way for ten years. From the middle of my twenties until the middle of my thirties, I was that man on his knees, struggling to keep the fresh bread in his stomach. My problem was that the only formal training I had ever received was how to take drugs with rock stars. [Hmm, much like the training of a consulting analyst!]

And there was no great shining moment when I felt failure was behind me. After ten years of slog, things started to turn the corner. There was money, there was opportunity, there was the ebbing away of anxiety. [Nice last phrase.] But when you have known failure—real, kick-in-the-bollocks failure [bollocks!? I hate this brit]—it never really leaves you, and you take nothing for granted again.

Things change. The new boss doesn’t like you as much as the old boss. There are tensions in the office. You are overlooked for a promotion / raise / blowjob at the office party [this is a family blog! but I included it because of artistic integrity]. You get sacked. Or you feel hemmed in, unfulfilled, and frustrated. You move on. And stumble. And fall. And fall.

Every heroic myth has failure built in to the narrative. We think of Ali with his jaw broken in the first fight against Joe Frazier, Sinatra in the dog days with no recording contract, Christ on the cross in his moment of doubt and pain. [Hmm, no recording contract vs suffering sins of all mankind….ok, yeah, sure, I get that parallel.] But we all know how the story ends—that Ali will me Frazier again in Manila, that Sinatra has Capitol Records and From Here to Eternity around the corner, and on the third day the stone will roll back, and eternal life awaits. [After all, eternal life would be more like eternal damnation without New York, New York—Sinatra’s most popular song according to Itunes. Yes I had to look it up. I actually hate Sinatra.]

Great men overcome failure and it makes them greater than ever. But when you can’t pay your gas bill you don’t feel like Muhammad Ali or Frank Sinatra or Jesus Christ. You feel more like Mr Bean. [Nice!]

They say that failure isn’t fatal. But it doesn’t feel that way when you are in the middle of it. Failure feels like it will kill you. Failure is the dirty bomb in the life of the modern male, as undeniable as serious illness, a condition it closely resembles.

Looking on the bright side, my ten long years of failure didn’t kill me. Somehow the bills got paid. I never went bankrupt. Although what happened to me was personally devastating, and not what I would have wanted, some people might even consider it a kind of measly, modest success. I never had a boss, or had to go to an office, or had to wear a suit and tie when I didn’t want to. I kept working at the job I love. One man’s abject failure is another man’s bad decade at the office. Failure is relative.

There are a thousand ways for a man to feel like a failure, but nothing cuts to the bone quite as acutely as professional failure, because so much of our self-esteem is derived from what we do for a living. So how to fight failure? Stay fit. Work hard. Then work harder. Then work better. No drinking to excess over the age of 30. No drugs at all over the age of 25. Never let your vices become your day job. Never get lazy. Never get fat. [btw, the Economist has a piece on beautiful people getting paid more.] And never ever bet against yourself.

There is no shame in failing. Great men have spent a lifetime on their knees. In his mid-twenties, Orson Welles was cinema’s favourite son. Then came decades of development hell. “Something always turns up when you are down and out,” said Wells. “Usually the noses of your friends.”

By the end, the man who made Citizen Kane was making sherry commercials. But a failure? I don’t think so.

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” said Hemingway, who changed American literature but ended up one sunny Sunday morning, aged 61, with a double-barreled 12-bore shotgun pressed against the roof of his mouth. They say his wife Mary was woken by two shots that were almost, but not quite, simultaneous. But a failure? As time goes by, Hemingway’s life seems more like a triumph, even though the colossus was torn down at the end by the nightmare-ticket failure of body and mind.

Hemingway believed any story followed to the very end would be a story of failure, and perhaps that is how we need to think of it. Failure—financial, professional, personal—is not a cruel act of God, but an inevitable fluctuation in life’s fortunes. You will get sacked. [close, sometimes] You will get sick. [not so much] You will run out of money [check] and luck [check]. You will get your heart pulped by your true love. [check, but hopefully she wasn’t my true love.] Failure in one shape or another will get you, because it gets all of us sooner or later.

Failure hardens you. This is a good thing. You get sacked and you find out who your friends are. You get your heart broken and you learn that you give it away too easily. You get sick and you realize that you took your flesh and blood for granted in your carefree, drug sozzled youth. [Brings back memories of my Dr. Pepper induced teenage haze.]

The big problem with failure is that it is so time-consuming. When you are worried about money your mind has no room for anything else. When the red bills are on your doormat you find it hard to lift your eyes to the stars. But failure is the best education money can’t buy. [lame line, for sure]. It will ultimately do you a lot more good than going to “uni” for three years. [At least, uni in Britain, which clearly sucks.]

Perhaps real and lasting success is impossible without the experience of real, grown-up failure. Until you have lost that job and lost that women and watched your self-esteem running down the drain you will never truly have lift-off.

In the school of hard knocks [yawn at that phrase], genuine grinding failure—the kind where people wonder what happened to you, and so do you—is like a double first from Oxford. Surviving failure makes you a man. It makes you run twice as fast as the competition, it makes you twice as hungry, it makes you twice as hard. Once you had your nose rubbed in dirt—when you have spent hours beyond counting waiting for the postman to bring some pathetic little check—then the competition has no chance. The safe little flight plans of your rival’s life—from school to university to office—are no match for what you have endured.

When it is happening to you, failure feels like a beating. It literally feels like you are on the sharp end of a kicking. And as anyone who has taken a good hiding will tell you, it is not the pain that hurts. It is the humiliation. Failure is like that. You taste it

But it leaves some steel in your spine. It leaves a chip of ice in your heart. [nice phrase] It makes you ready for anything. You always remember what failure felt like. And you remember it every day of your working life.

How dumb was I in my twenties? This dumb: when failure came looking for me, I was shocked. When I lost the job; when the money ran out; when serious illness found my family; when I was wearing my Harrington jacket to divorce court—I was stunned that any of this could possibly happen to me. “Nothing bad ever happened to me before,” I said to my mother, as though that meant I truly believed nothing bad could ever happen to me. That’s why it took me ten long years to climb back. I didn’t see failure coming. And I honestly thought it never would.

Don’t be like me. Bounce back fast. Expect failure to hit you hard somewhere along the line. But I promise you this—if you lose the job then you will find a better job. If you lose the girl then you will find a better girl. And if you lose your health then you might learn to stop putting rubbish into your system. [Unless you really are a failure, in which case none of this applies.]

Embrace failure. Make it your greatest ally. Because at the very moment they all think you are finished, your success is assured. [GREAT clencher!]