How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong. Elizabeth Day
once getting out when I had made 98 and chipped a return catch to the bowler …
‘One of my books was shortlisted for the Bancarella, a big prize in Italy, but did not win (the prize to the brother-in-law of the chairman of judges).
‘And of course there was an embarrassing setback when my famous soufflé à la nage d’homard rose a mere 288mm instead of the desiderated 290.’
He was joking, of course, and when I did interview him for the podcast he spoke eloquently about his periods of depression and feeling as if he didn’t fit in at school. The point he had been trying to make was a serious one, however: it was that failure was all a matter of how you looked at it. On coming second in the Italian literary prize, for instance, he said: ‘Is that a failure? I mean, I wouldn’t have thought so, I thought it was rather a success to be going to Milan to be celebrated in a country not your own for a book with no Italian connection.’
The author James Frey had a similar take, despite the fact that he was publicly outed for fabricating parts of his 2003 debut, A Million Little Pieces. The book, which had originally been marketed as a memoir, did not suffer from his notoriety and became a global bestseller.
‘I don’t look at things that other people might consider failures as failures, it’s just a process, right?’ he said. ‘And you can either handle it or you can’t. If you can’t, get out. But I don’t look at all the books that I tried to write before A Million Little Pieces that I threw away that were no good, as failures, I just look at them as part of the process.’
To this day, Frey said, his mantra is: ‘Fail fast. Fail often.’ It’s a mantra that holds great weight in the (male-dominated) entrepreneurial world too, where risks have to be taken in order to think differently. In this sphere, failure is not only accepted but sometimes even celebrated. There are certain venture capitalists who won’t even think of parting with their cash unless an entrepreneur has failed with a start-up company at least once – the idea being that the entrepreneur will have learned from that failure, will have got all the mistakes out of their system, and will therefore present a sounder investment. Thomas Edison, after all, went through thousands of prototypes before perfecting his light bulb. Bill Gates’ first company was a failure. Over his career in major-league baseball, Babe Ruth set a new record for striking out 1,330 times but also set the record for home runs, hitting 714.
When asked about his batting technique, Babe Ruth replied: ‘I swing as hard as I can … I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.’
What Babe Ruth was essentially saying was this: that in order to succeed on a grand scale, you have to be willing to fail on an equally grand scale too. Often the former relies on the latter, which is why failure can be integral to success, not just on the baseball field, but in life too.
What does it mean to fail? I think all it means is that we’re living life to its fullest. We’re experiencing it in several dimensions, rather than simply contenting ourselves with the flatness of a single, consistent emotion.
We are living in technicolour, not black and white.
We are learning as we go.
And for all the challenges that come our way, I can’t help but continue to think: it really is an incredible ride.
When I was four, my family moved to Northern Ireland. It was 1982 and the height of the Troubles. Bombs routinely exploded in shopping centres and hotel lobbies. On the school run, my mother would be stopped at checkpoints manned by soldiers in camouflage with machine guns strapped around their chests. At night, the television news would dub over the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams’s voice, which always seemed bizarre to me, even as a child.
When I did hear his voice, several years later, it was something of a disappointment. I’d built him up in my head to sound like a less friendly Darth Vader. As it was, he had the air of a geography teacher unable to keep control of the troublemakers at the back of the class.
I, meanwhile, spoke with a precise, received pronunciation English accent and stood out from the first day of school. I had been born in Epsom, in the comparative safety of suburban Surrey. Every year, the Derby took place on the Downs next to our house and my mother would have a picnic to which she would invite a large number of family friends. I once saw the legendary jockey Lester Piggott fall off his horse and watched him being stretchered off, his face as white as plaster. I was struck by how small he was, even though I was pretty small myself back then.
In Ireland, there were no picnics and no family friends. It was an isolating experience for all of us, but particularly for my mother who did not have a job through which she could meet new people. My father had moved us for his work, and was taking up a new position as a consultant surgeon at Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry. It was a place where he would treat a lot of knee-cappings.
I was aware of the civil unrest, and accepted it in that way that one does as a child. It simply became a way of life. The monsters under my bed were replaced by visions of balaclava-clad terrorists and I got used to the checkout ladies in the supermarket asking us suspiciously if we were ‘on holiday’ when we did the weekly shop. I hadn’t realised then that what we were actually being asked was whether we were there in connection with the British Army, but I do recall being scared that we’d be bombed by the IRA, to which my mother replied sensibly that my father ‘treats people from both sides’. That was true: he ministered to both Loyalists and Republicans. When a shattering bomb went off in Omagh in 1998, he rushed to help. My father went on to operate in many war zones with the charity Médecins Sans Frontières, including Chechnya, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. When, years later, I asked him which place had affected him most, he said Omagh and recounted in detail the scenes of carnage that he had witnessed.
There were moments of absurdity amidst it all. For the first year or so, my family and I lived up the road from a village called Muff. I did not think to question this extraordinary name until many decades later when my friend Cormac howled with laughter when I mentioned it.
‘Muff?’ he guffawed. ‘You might as well have lived somewhere called Vagina.’
The village was a few minutes’ drive away from our house in the north of Ireland, and yet it was across the border in County Donegal, which was part of the south. My mother used to drive me and my sister to Muff for our Irish dancing lessons (all part of an effort to help us belong) and it baffled me that an entirely different country existed down the road from us. It seemed so arbitrary and, of course, it was. I couldn’t fathom, aged four, that it was all because of this map-drawn border that people were killing each other.
The Irish dancing wasn’t the only way our family tried to fit in. When we moved from near Muff deeper into the countryside around Claudy, my father bought a donkey, a red-and-blue-painted cart and four sheep to keep in the raised hillock at the back of our house which we called, without my knowing why, ‘The Rath’.
The donkey, Bessie, soon spawned a foal, christened with dazzling imagination Little Bess. We were better at naming the sheep, who we called things like Lamborghini and Lambada. Each summer, my parents would heroically attempt to shear the sheep by hand using what looked to me like a huge pair of scissors. My sister and I were required to act as sheepdogs in order to round up the bleating animals, and we had varying degrees of success.
For breeding season, rams would be borrowed from local farmers to impregnate our ladies. One of them dropped dead while on the job. We notified the farmer and then my father dug a pit to bury the ram. The ram was heavy and the only way my father could manoeuvre it into place was on its back, with its legs facing up to the sky. Mysteriously, when it came to replacing the earth, there was no longer enough of it to cover the ram in the pit, and his legs stuck out of the ground. For months, those legs poked out of the grass like spooky totem poles and I learned to avoid that particular area.
Periodically, the lambs too would disappear and I never thought to question these sudden absences. It was only some time