Schedule Your Brutalistic Failure Today!

Not to sound dramatic, but I’m going to sound dramatic. I once described the feeling of what it’s like to strike out (a common occurrence for a baseball player) this way. 

Can you imagine a porcelain bath tub? Great. Put that bath tub in the most remote forest in the Pacific Northwest. Tons of rain. Are you with me? Great! Place two car batteries in the bathtub. Now, you’re going to leave your car-battery-bathtub in the forest for seven years. 

You can imagine the liquid you’d find in this bath tub 2,555 days later. 

You can almost smell the thick, rusty, acidic battery acid water, can’t you? Well, to feel what it felt like to strike out after fifteen years of devoting your life to being good at not striking out, you’d have to imagine replacing your body’s blood with this beautiful fluid instead. Feeling your heart bump every being in your body with that toxic waste is a feeling I know very well. 

Now, that was dramatic. 

But, the reason I’m bringing this forward is that I don’t think there is a more dangerous, fragile thing to be than to be an adult who has yet to experience big failure. If the first time in your life that you get gnarly negative feedback or try your very best and get dominated is when you’re 43 years old, it’s going to be tough to digest. 

Consider failure, heartbreak, and brutal skin-in-the-game environments critical to building an immune system required of the adult world. Now, they say the best time to plant an oak tree is twenty-five years ago and the second best time is today. 

So, if you haven’t experienced gnarly, battery acid-type failure yet, I’d recommend scheduling it soon. A controlled, but challenging bout of hard truth does a body good.