Lucky Enough To Fail

Without waxing nostalgic, growing up as a kid in the 1960’s was different than it is today. Families were different and schools were different and kids sports were different.

In short, we played baseball. Some of us were better than others, and some were terrible at the game, but we all played it. When it came to playing in Little League, we had to try out for a team. Some of us didn’t make the cut.

And while not making the cut was difficult and sad, those who didn’t get chosen didn’t grow up to be serial killers or anti-social maniacs. We dealt with it. (I say ‘we,’ but I always made the teams I tried out for; I use the colloquial ‘we’ here to illustrate the communal nature of life at that time). The point is, a kid could be told he wasn’t good enough to make the team without him making a silly leap that he wasn’t good enough for anything.

One kid who was cut one year, Dennis Coffey, was pretty upset about it. He got angry and sulked and went through a series of emotions when his name wasn’t on the team list.

Then he got over it. Accepted it. Moved on.

That summer after the season, Dennis started coming out to our sandlot games, which we had perhaps 4 out of 7 days a week. We played in a horse or cow pasture, used whatever for bases and made up teams according to how many players we had. We used special rules because we rarely had enough players for two complete teams. We had one ball and maybe two bats, one of which was taped up because it was broken. On questionable plays or calls, we put the matter to a vote and came up with an acceptable solution. And moved on.

And we had a tremendous amount of fun.

Dennis improved his throwing, catching and hitting, and when next year’s tryouts came, Dennis found his name on the team list. In fact, he became a pretty formidable pitcher and actually hit a number of home runs.

Now you want me to say that Dennis went on to become a major leaguer. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Dennis Coffey grew up to be a successful dentist and, eventually, a professor of dentistry at a prestigious New England university.

Dennis told me once that not making that team that year, while devastating to him, instilled in him a resolve to work hard to become good enough to have a chance at making the team the following year. And he said, “That summer that I dedicated to becoming a better baseball player was tremendously instrumental when it came to the much more difficult challenges I faced in my journey to becoming a dentist and a university professor.”

Baseball does that.

Or did.

Now, thanks to a legion of touchy-feely self-esteem gurus in the 1970’s, not making the team is no longer an option. Regardless of a child’s ability or talent, he—or she—will be a Little Leaguer. That includes the tyke who has no desire to play the game, but is wedged in there by a parent who thinks of Little League as a rite of passage, or one who is trying to relive his childhood.
And that is a disservice to both the child who doesn’t measure up and the remainder of the team that does. Because the artificial attempts to soften the blows of reality—to handle a child’s self-esteem with care—serve only to eat away at a child’s self-respect; because the kid knows he’s not good enough, and telling him he is presents a serious conundrum in his mind that leads to a life of presumed entitlement regardless of talent, lack of ambition or hard work.

Experiencing adversity at an early age is not crippling to a child; rather it affords that child with an opportunity to take stock of his or her talent and desire, and the very important chance to accept it, face it and to unearth within that child the will to overcome.
Look at video games. Young people play a lot of video games, spending hours trying to get to the next level. They try and they fail. And the games send them back to try again, sometimes even mocking them for their failure. They don’t head for the clock tower with a sniper rifle; they try again. When they finally do succeed, they know it was a direct result of never giving up, and the self-respect boost renders any self-esteem question moot.

Dennis Coffey—and the rest of us before the devastating self-esteem movement—instinctively understood that. Our parents allowed us to try and to fail, because they knew that success—especially fabricated success—teaches us nothing. It is only via failure that we learn.

Some say we’ve come too far to get back to a place where children are told the truth about their abilities, where personal responsibility and accountability that lead to solid childhood development can be re-introduced into our kid’s lives.

Not my kids.

They’ve been allowed to try and to fail and as a result have implicitly become aware of their individual talents and lack thereof. They are allowed to decide if something is worthy enough for them to make sacrifices and perform the hard work to achieve it. I don’t have to hold their hand and smooth over the tough times with fantastic lies to cover their inherent inabilities. They already know who they are. And who they aren’t.

Children are stronger than we’ve been led to believe. They know—perhaps better than their parents—that failure isn’t the end, but the beginning. Pretending they haven’t failed or—much worse—that their failure was the fault of something outside themselves, is a tremendous way of sheltering them from the realities of a challenging world and impeding their personal development into adulthood.