Life

The courage to let people watch you fail

In the 1850s, before she became a pioneer in education, religion, and women’s rights, Rebecca Mitchell’s life was turned upside down. Her husband died, leaving her with two small children to raise. Under Illinois law, a widow couldn’t inherit her husband’s property—it all went to the government. Everything she owned, right down to the clothes on her back, was no longer hers. If she wanted it back, she’d have to buy it.

Rebecca had dreams of becoming a minister, but women weren’t allowed to… well, do much of anything. Her second marriage ended in separation, and by 1882, with her two sons grown and a sense of opportunity pulling her west, she and her teenage daughter boarded a train for Idaho. When they arrived, the only shelter they could find was a shed—just warm enough to keep them from freezing. And yet, in that tiny shed, Rebecca started a school, eventually squeezing in 40 students.

Determined to expand, she set her sights on a larger building that could serve as both a school and a church. For two years, she worked tirelessly to raise the funds. When the chapel was finally built, it housed the school and the school district she had helped establish.

But Rebecca’s ambitions didn’t stop there. She continued founding schools in neighboring communities, and by 1891—now in her fifties—she turned her attention to the government.

After fighting for and winning women’s suffrage in Idaho, she took an even bolder step: she applied to be chaplain of the Idaho legislature, something no woman had ever done. The men were baffled. They said they had never heard of such a thing.

“Why not do the unheard-of thing?” Rebecca asked.

And that’s the question, Sharon McMahon writes: Why not do the unheard-of thing?

“Humans aren’t so much afraid of failure as they are of having people watch them fail,” McMahon continues. “The shame doesn’t come from not scaling the summit, it’s from the people who judge you for not having succeeded.”

Rebecca knew that judgment well. She had been criticized for her failed marriage, for starting a school, for daring to believe a woman could be a chaplain, and for refusing to retire. When she didn’t get the chaplain position, the judgment only intensified. But she didn’t stop. A year later, in 1897, at the age of 64, she got the job. Letters of congratulations poured in from across the country.

After she died in 1908, The Idaho Republic paid tribute to her legacy, calling her “ever ready to proffer the hand of aid and the voice of sympathy to the needy and distressed.” She had lived a life of self-sacrifice, courage, and unstoppable determination in pursuing justice.

More than a century later, in 2022, Idaho unveiled a bronze statue commemorating women’s suffrage. The Spirit of Idaho Women stands tall, a graceful figure with a hand stretched out. “Behind her,” writes McMahon, “stand twelve sets of shoes, those of the generations of women who came before, each decade of suffragists treading the path to enfranchisement. In her hand, she extends a shoe to the women of the future, inviting them to continue in the work that was begun by those with the courage to let people watch them fail.”

Don’t ask, tell

In the 1980s, Leonard Mlodinow was beginning his career as a physicist at Caltech. He was given the freedom to research whatever he liked. At first, this sounded great—complete freedom. But it soon became clear he had a problem: he didn’t know what to work on. He became increasingly anxious. String theory was popular; should he study that? What about that other theory gaining traction? That would be good to research, right?

Desperate to figure it out, he sought out Nobel Prize winner and fellow physicist Richard Feynman and asked him for guidance. After some probing, Feynman finally said to Mlodinow, “Look, selecting a research problem isn’t like climbing a mountain. You don’t do it just because it is there. If you really believed in string theory, you wouldn’t come here asking me. You’d come here telling me.”

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If you let others decide what’s “acceptable,” you’ll never get to the good stuff. And that, Elizabeth Gilbert warns, is the real tragedy. “Your life is short and rare and amazing and miraculous, and you want to do really interesting things and make really interesting things while you’re still here.”

So go for it. Do the unheard-of thing, the thing that lights you up.

Tell people what you’re going to do—and have the courage to let them watch you fail.

Wind the clock

Developing an experienced fighter pilot can take ten years and cost $50 million. Pilots must make life-or-death decisions with incomplete information and limited time—all while traveling faster than the speed of sound.

Veteran U.S. Air Force fighter pilot Hasard Lee says their most important training focuses on decision-making. In The Art of Clear Thinking, he says, “Though we have talented pilots, the mantra that we bet our lives on is that a good pilot uses superior judgment to avoid situations that require the use of superior skill.”

Tucked into the right-hand corner of the cockpit in each F-16 fighter jet is a relic from the past: an analog clock. While almost every other part of the jet has been upgraded since the 1970s, the wind-up clock remains. But it’s not used to tell time. It’s used to slow it down.

Seasoned instructors will tell the pilot, “Before you make a decision, wind the clock.” Although it doesn’t seem like much, it allows a pilot to pause and focus, preventing them from rushing into action.

“Winding the clock occupied the pilot’s attention for just a few seconds and physically prevented them from touching anything else,” Lee writes. “It forced their brain to spend time assessing the situation before they acted, allowing them to make far better decisions.”

Tighten the window

Louise DeSalvo says there’s an inverse correlation between the amount of time she has and the amount of writing she gets done. Too much time, and she becomes unfocused or needlessly worried over each word. “I wrote more, and published more books, when my kids were small and when I was teaching more classes than I do now,” she writes. “And the hardest writing times for me were always summers and sabbaticals.”

Like the old saying—if you want something done, give it to a busy person—she prefers to write on days she has a lot to do. It tightens her window of time, sharpening her focus.

“Knowing that I must write during my allotted time or I won’t get to write at all urges me to get right to work, draft a few pages. If all I have to do is write, writing becomes too fraught for me.”

Start the clock

Ryan Holiday has a phrase he often uses with his team: “Start the clock.” If a vendor says something will take six weeks, he wants to start the clock immediately. He doesn’t want to add days or weeks by being slow to respond or indecisive. We can’t control how fast others move, but we can control how quickly we get the ball rolling.

“The project will take six months? Start the clock,” he writes. “You’re going to need a reply from someone else? Start the clock (send the email). Getting the two quotes from vendors will take a while? Start the clock (request it). It’s going to take 40 years for your retirement accounts to compound with enough interest to retire? Start the clock (by making the deposits). It’s going to take 10,000 hours to master something? Start the clock (by doing the work and the study).”

Let it be enough

While it’s important to know how to get the right things done, it’s more important to know your limits.

We’ll never feel like we’ve “finished.” We’ll never feel like we’ve done enough. And guess what? That’s a great thing—it’s how it’s supposed to be.

On a trip to Portugal, professor and author Kate Bowler visited the Batalha Monastery. Inside a giant octagonal chapel, an older man said it was perfect—the layers of beautiful, imperfect ornamentation.

“He gestured up,” Kate writes, “and where the ceiling should have been, there was only open sky. Seven kings had overseen the rise of this monument and had buried their dynasty in its walls. Yet none lived to finish it.”

“It was never finished, dear,” the old man smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful? Don’t you see? It’s us! I can’t imagine a more perfect expression of this life. I came all the way to see it. We’re never done, dear. Even when we’re done, we’re never done.”

Kate reflects:

“All of our masterpieces, ridiculous. All of our striving, unnecessary. All of our work, unfinished, unfinishable. We do too much, never enough and are done before we’ve even started. It’s better this way.”