Face failure to achieve success

"Strike three!" yelled the umpire to the batter.

"We are getting a divorce," said the couple to their children.

"Sorry. Your work review isn't good enough. We have to let you go."

These are three examples of human failure.

The word itself is bad enough, but the experience of failure inevitably happens to us all.

Back in the day, kids had to try out for Little League baseball in my town. After my first tryout, the coaches lined us up on the third base line and picked their teams. I was one of about 12 kids left over.

"Try again next year," they told us.

I cried all the way on my walk home, afraid of what my father would say.

"Try again next year," my father would say.

That next year, with a renewed determination, I not only made it, I was selected to play on the all-star team at the end of the season. Failing that first tryout encouraged me to get better.

Is it cruel to let our kids fail? Some years ago, I was a guest at a youth football awards banquet. The team finished its season with no wins and no points scored. Each player was presented a gold trophy and congratulated for his efforts.

"Nobody fails" was the theme of the night.

Frantic parents rush to the school and demand to see their child's teacher because she received an F on her term paper for plagiarizing its content. They ask if she could do the paper over.

The teacher says, "No. I don't think that's fair in this case. She copied the research and she deserves to fail. That's the best lesson she can learn from this."

The parents then go to the school principal. He overturns the grade and allows her to do the paper again. The teacher refuses to read the rewrite. The principal gives the paper a B grade.

In this case, the child learned that her parents and her school would not allow her to fail.

George Carlin said it's a fallacy of our culture that we tell children they are all winners so they can have self-esteem. Then when they fail as adults, they still feel good enough about themselves to place the blame elsewhere.

For some, however, failure is not an option.

A local high school basketball team wears practice shirts that read, "Second place is for losers."

I get the motivational message, but in a literal sense, unless the team goes undefeated, the coach will have to call his team a bunch of losers at the end of the season.

Failure hurts.

It should. Defeat stings. Emotional pain lingers. Bill Musselman, former NBA basketball coach, once said, "Defeat is worse than death because you have to live with defeat."

Living with defeat is reality.

Teaching kids how to rebound from failure and how to make the changes necessary to succeed is a life skill. That's why I love that my son plays baseball. He strikes out. He makes errors. His team loses. He is learning about failure.

Yet he uses his failures to improve himself. He gets hits. He makes plays. He helps his team win.

He realizes that success after failure brings him an extraordinary joy because it has been earned and not just given away like meaningless awards.

Walt Disney once declared bankruptcy.

Seven-year-old Albert Einstein was expelled from a school because he couldn't read.

Thomas Edison made 1,000 light bulbs before he got one to work.

Stephen King threw a manuscript in the garbage after 30 rejections from publishers.

He pulled it out and it would later become a best-seller and a movie.

Jerry Seinfeld froze on stage at a comedy club and was booed off the stage.

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

In math, when you add negatives together, you get another negative.

In the lives of these men, you add up their accomplishments after you subtract their failures and you end up with some of our greatest American success stories.

Nothing beats rising from the bottom to the top.