A Real Failure

Have you ever been reading a book or listening to a presenter and all of the sudden this one thing that they say just hits you right in the gut? Recently Steven Pressfield did this to me in The War of Art.

(Check out this excerpt)

The first professional writing job I ever had, after seventeen years of trying, was on a movie called King Kong Lives. And I my partner-at-the-time, Ron Shusett (a brilliant writer and producer who also did Alien and Total Recall) hammered out the screenplay for Dino DLaurentiis. We loved it; we were sure we had a hit. Even after we’d seen the finished film, we were certain it was a blockbuster We invited everyone we knew to the premiere, even rented out the joint next door for a post-triumph blowout. Get there early, we warned our friends, the place’ll be mobbed.

Nobody showed. There was only one guy in line beside our guests and he was muttering something about spare change. In the theater, our friends endured the movie in mute stupefaction. When the lights came up, they fled like cockroaches into the night. Next day came the review in Variety: “..Ronald Shusett and Steven Pressfield; we hope these are not their real names, for their parents’ sake.” When the first week’s grosses came in, the flick barely registered. Still I clung to hope. Maybe it’s only tanking in urban areas, maybe it’s playing better in the burbs. I motored to an Edge City multiples. A youth manned the popcorn booth. “How’s King Kong Lives?” I asked. He flashed thumbs down. “Miss it man. It’s terrible.”

I was crushed. Here I was, forty-two years old, divorced, childless, having given up all normal human pursuits to chase the dreams of being a writer; now I’ve finally got my name on a big-time Hollywood production starring Linda Hamilton, and what happens? I’m a loser, a phony; my life is worthless, and so am I.

My friend Tony Keppelman snapped me out of it by asking if I was gonna quit. No way! “Then be happy. You’re where you wanted to be, aren’t you? So you’re taking a few blows. That’s the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines stop complaining and be grateful.” That was when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure.

At 33 I can't say I've had a lot of successes but I've realized that that's not really the point. Instead, what we should ask ourselves as we inventory our journey is "Have I had any legit, honest-to-God, failures?" If the answer is "no", you probably haven't even started the game. I don't want to turn this blog into a cheesy, self-help speech but seriously, don't let fear paralyze you to the point that you never move out of your tracks. Get out there and fail and fail big! Fail in front of peers, friends, and total strangers. Get engaged in "doing what you've always wanted to do" even though you don't even know how yet to do it.

I started my church planting journey over four and a half years ago and have been trying to figure it out ever since. Let's just say I've crammed a lot of public failure into just four short years. Is the humiliation of failure fun? Absolutely not. Do I regret any of it? Not on your life.
What does make me break out in cold sweat, however, is to think of how petty and insignificant my life would currently feel had I not dove in with both hands and feet into what I felt I was called to do and began experiencing failure...REAL FAILURE.

God Bless,

Jathan