Fail With Gusto
A stage lesson for life
“His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti”
Eminem
I hadn’t eaten any spaghetti but I felt the nerves like Em all the same. In improv, while waiting on the sideline, the brain can transform into the world’s worst search engine, returning zero results. Call it Froogle.
(...like frugal, get it? Cause there’s less words……fine, that was bad.)
Inspiration strikes quickly, like a saw-scaled viper digging its fangs into your mind.
Like the real thing, when the poison strikes, urgent action is the only cure.
Instead, I hesitantly stepped forward, then hastily reversed course.
The moment’s gone. My stroke of genius was lost. The patient has flatlined.
In these moments, commitment is paramount. I could have had the greatest thing in the world to add to the scene (obviously I’m never lacking high-quality material - Froogle anyone?). My hesitation to act left me stranded on the sidelines, gazing helplessly around at signs in an alien language like a typical American tourist.
We all do this. At wedding receptions, nobody ever wants to be the first one on the dance floor. However, once the first person has the courage (liquid or otherwise) to step up and start gyrating their hips to Lady Gaga belting out “Just dance, gonna be okay,” the awkward display of arm movements and Uncle Bill’s weirdly accurate recreation of T. Swift’s Shake It Off keeps the party going the rest of the night.
The antidote to so many of our problems in life can be found from the stage:
Commit more. Dare to fail loud and proud.
Simple advice - but simple doesn’t mean easy.
We avoid committing in life because we’re afraid of failure and how stupid we imagine we’ll look. We avoid the big moves that could free us from our doubts. New opportunities present themselves to us often. And almost equally as often, we reach into the wallet of excuses to pay our way out.
I just don’t have the time right now. People would think I’ve gone crazy. I’m just too tired.
I’ve done this. You’ve done this. Once, I passed on the chance to tour the country filming for a band because I was young and unconfident in my skills. Maybe I was - but they wouldn’t have asked if they didn’t think I could do it. Imagine your own past choices - which ones make you think, What if?
Regrets from a weak stage performance stick for a day or two. Regrets from a missed opportunity linger for a lifetime. They eat at us with a gusto reserved only for the Cookie Monster and his namesake.
We are all going to fail. It’s how we learn about the world and ourselves. It’s time to embrace that failure. Fail with confidence, like you’ll finally learn the skill if you fail just once more.
Don’t stop yourself by looking ahead at some distant end-goal - just get lost and find what you’re doing along the way. That’s exactly what we do on stage as improvisers. I know if I step forward with confidence, I’ll never miss my chance and my scene partners will always help me find the right path forward.
There’s nothing quite like coming off stage after a stellar performance. The adrenaline starts to wear off. Things slow down - your mind no longer has to process the entire second world on stage. A smile is affixed to your face as the realization hits that everything went exactly as it was supposed to.
The same feeling is available elsewhere in life. It’s yours - if you do the scary thing and dare to fail.
You owe this to yourself. Go get it.
Do the thing.
Froogle....so good.
I'm really loving your style Rick. It's exactly what I need in my day.
And as to the lesson, totally. I regret not having gone to BUD/S, I regret not showing the world (and myself) my weird, crazy, ass backwards ideas. But I never regret the times when I went for it, even when they failed.
Do the hard thing, that is where the real growth lives. The what ifs will eat you alive if you let them. A few years ago I dared to think “what if I went back to school after all these years”. I was so afraid of failure I told no one I was working on my masters degree. But I didn’t fail, and as I started to share my progress my parents, my kids, and my boss were wildly supportive. I think at the end of the day it’s our own self sabotage that holds us back the most.