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.”
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.