Break it ’til you Make it

When it comes to fitness and/or nutrition, I hear a lot of the same story.

“I tried a few years back, and it went well for a bit until it didn’t.”

The details change; maybe they got a new job with new hours, they got hurt or sick, or they moved. For any reason, they “failed.” I’ve started to say out loud, “you didn’t fail, you just stopped.”

It’s okay, B-roll runner. I also gave up on running.

We’re a little obsessed with success and failure as a culture, maybe even as a species. In the last half a decade, we’ve definitely become accustomed to the idea of sculpting a “failure-proof” life, with a steady job that yields steady income for a routine life where we formulaically love ourselves and our nuclear families. Thankfully, that’s also been eroding in the last two to three decades as reality has slapped back reminding white Americans that they’ve reached for that goal at the expense of every marginalized group in our country.

In the last ten years though, I’ve done a lot of things and worn a lot of hats. I’ve changed my body through a variety of fitness and dietary regimes, and I’ve indulged my intellectual curiosity in engineering, education, and academia at large.

What I’ve taken away from my own work is that “failure proof” is an insane idea. Failure is a necessary part of growth, in the same way that death is a necessary part of life. Chasing something impervious to perturbations or failure isn’t just unrealistic, it’s wildly unkind to the inherently flawed, failure-prone nature of being human.

Instead, it seems more reasonable to begin to design my life, our lives, our systems around “failure-safe” living. And we already do that for some things. Cars aren’t designed to “not get wrecked,” because that’s a ridiculous pretense. Cars are designed so that when they get wrecked, you don’t end up a blood-flavored pulp. There’s an intrinsic acknowledgement in automobile engineering that the toy is absolutely going to break — the true test of safety becomes how much the damage can be minimized when it actually does break. Minimizing the damage means that the human component remains minimally marred (if at all) AND that repairs can be done with ease to restore the vehicle to a safe, operational state.

It’s hard to look away, truly. I like to name the dummies — poor Carl.

In general, this mindset of considering failure in design becomes more and more important for larger structures. In designing and constructing buildings and bridges, civil engineers have to account for environmental factors, like soil sedimentation, precipitation, wind, and tectonics IN ADDITION TO the specifics of the structure. Those designers have to consider as many possible roads to failure as they can because they’re meant to serve huge amounts of people for a long time. They cannot afford to fail on a person-by-person basis; it boils down to a matter of scale.

Cars are roughly human-sized. Designing cars involves considering humans on a smaller scale as a result. They’re expected to fail more often because they’re much smaller than buildings or bridges.

Since the expectation to fail is in the foreground of the discussion of vehicle design, handling and mitigating failure is an explicit goal for the design process. Importantly though, safety as a goal is not to the detriment of the other goals of the vehicle. A car gets you from place to place AND does so safely.

Humans are definitely human-sized.

It seems like it might be prudent to begin designing our lives and goals with the similar intentionality and expectations. Furthermore, we might begin doing ourselves the favor of making handling and mitigating inevitable failure and explicit goal in our thought process. After all we are human, doing human stuff all day, every day. We aren’t built to stay perfect, nothing is. If anything, as I’ve learned more and more about fitness and physiology, we’re very much built to fail, fall apart, and break without actually dying.

I am going to fail. In everything I try, I’ll fail somewhere along the way. I’ll succeed, too; beyond that I’ll fail again. I have a habit of falling forward from failure to failure, but hey —

I moved.

John Maxwell is an American author famous for his writings on leadership and success, specifically a book titled “Failing Forward.”

I do not let a fear of that inevitable failure dissuade me from moving. I also will not allow the inevitable failure to tailor or diminish my dreams. If I put the inevitable failure into the primary goal, then I’m just giving my future self loopholes and excuses for when I break down or stop.

“It’s okay that I can’t do that, I knew it could be impossible.”

At the bottom of my heart, I will always know that the failure is possible and present. By now, I’ve got plenty of bruises and scars for proof. When I give that failure space in the same breath as my goals and dreams, I tie them together hopelessly.

Instead, I keep two goals (at least). I pursue my passions and ideals as lofty goals while maintaining goals for when I fail. I get practice doing this everyday I wake up too exhausted or depressed to leave bed. When I’m that low, or when I break — yeah I failed, and?

Humans fail. It is human to fail.

When I fail, I turn to my goals for failure. I try to get out of bed, or to just practice writing my name. I do what I can and I acknowledge what I do.

I stop saying “I did nothing today” entirely. Seriously, stop saying that.

I ate. I showered. I laughed. I remind myself I did those things.

I never “do nothing.”

It’s sometimes said jokingly, but just being is a lot more than most give credit. Don’t take yourself for granted.

Some days, I fail to make my art, or exercise, or smile. Some days, I actually fail all over.

Those days, I failed. It’s still way more than nothing.

Creating a Failure-Safe Life:

• Make separate goals for your ideals and your failures.
• Admit the failure and acknowledge the small successes.
• Stop treating failure like nothing.

You can do this, even when you fail.

Sincerely Not Winning,

August