Elite Lessons — Making failure possible

In order to make failure possible, you first have to try, to commit, to go where it may scare or even terrify you, to be vulnerable, to say “this might not work” and do it anyway.

Very recently I was disappointed to witness this first hand in someone. They were presented with a real opportunity, yet my sense is that it felt too scary to them to try, so instead, they creating a rationale for them to choose to back away and shut down. Rather than risk failure, they chose not to commit, to make the effort, to try.

By making the choice not to try, as Cate Campbell notes (see letter below) that person “let the fear of failure destroy the possibility of success”. We all have our own journey to go on, our own choices to make, and reflecting on that experience, today I’ll riff on this with lessons from two leaders.

First, Cate Campbell, one of swimming’s all-time greats, the World record holder in the 100m freestyle and one of the greatest relay swimmers of all time. However, in 2016 she “choked” (her words) at the Rio Olympics. The instagram post above is from when she completed the Rio competion, putting a brave face on her failure.

She then took almost all of 2017 off from the sport, and I had the great privilege of seeing her swim at her first major meet after that, the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Gold…