Paying Struggle Forward

I torture myself when a mission is going badly. Let’s say it’s a difficult project at work that I’m responsible for.

In the night, as I’m trying to fall asleep, I imagine myself in the CEO’s office, getting reprimanded, in front of my whole team. I feel the burn of my colleagues’ fearful, nauseated glances. I think about what I’m going to tell my wife, with a tail-between-legs posture, feeling like I embarrassed our family.

And when torturing myself in this self-imposed thought experiment, the bosses voice echoes enough to rattle my jaw. In my head I’m thinking, how did this happen, what was I thinking, why does this have to happen to me, why does it always have to be so hard?

But this week, in this particular version of my irrational thought experiment, the CEO asks me a question he never has:

“Why shouldn’t I fire you?”

And now, in a moment of clarity, I snap out of this hazy daydream. The answer is so clear to me. The boss shouldn’t fire me, because the next time we’re in this bad situation I won’t get beat. I’ve learned something.

Bad situations - whether it’s tough projects, losing a loved one, a failed relationship, an addiction, trauma, entrepreneurship, writing a book, climbing a mountain, you name it - are like viruses to me. They knock me on my ass. Sometimes, like viruses, bad situations quite literally make me ill. 

But just as bad situations are like a virus, learning from our mistakes is like an immune response. Once we get through it, we’ve learned something. We’ve developed a sort of immuno-defense any time this particular bad situation comes up in the future. And I can share those anti-bodies with others.

The imaginary CEO shouldn’t fire me, I think in my head, because I now know a little bit about how to survive this bad situation, and I can tell the others how, too.

But that means I have to put this bad situation under a microscope and study it. I have to learn from it. I have to learn it well enough to teach others and then I have to actually teach others. Which means I have to tell the story of my struggle and failure again and again.

But reframing this into a process of learning from mistakes and teaching others makes the struggle feel meaningful. When I share what I’ve learned, I’m giving someone else a line of defense against this type of bad situation. They may not have to endure the same struggle as I did. And that is gratifying.

This was a mindset shift for me. In the past, when I’ve had bad situations happen, particularly at work, I’d just struggle. And I’d get angry. And I’d pout. And I’d just live with the struggle in a chronic condition sort of way for a long time. And I’d live in fear of the CEO’s office, or whoever the boss happened to be, until I had a new success to share.

I’ve had that utterly destructive thought of, why does life always have to be so hard, so many times, in so many types of bad situations. Like when my father died. Or when I choked on standardized tests. Or when I’ve had my heart broken. Or when I’ve been way over my head at work. Or when I’ve been up with a newborn that won’t sleep, for weeks at a time. Or when we’ve lived through a global pandemic. Or whatever.

But now I think there’s an opportunity to think differently. All these struggles are terrible, yes. But they don’t have to be in vain. They can be teachable moments, for me yes, but more importantly for others. I - and not just me, we - can give others some level of immunity from the deleterious effects of these bad situations that happen to us. But only if we’re wiling to share what we learn, humbly and specifically.

The option of paying our struggles forward to our children, our friends and families, our colleagues, and our neighbors seems much better than just living through them and forgetting about them.