Failure is not an elective...

…It’s a requirement

My clients' questions sometimes haunt me for days. One time, one of the participants in an organizational mediation asked me whether it's ever an option to simply let the organization fail.

Not only is it an option, there's an entire legal specialty devoted to organizational failure - bankruptcy. There's even a federal recovery code, Chapter 11. It permits an institution to fail and then reorganize itself. Think GM, Eastman Kodak, Continental Airlines.

But Personal Failure? What About That?

But the question more on my mind for the past week has been personal rather than commercial failure. If it is an option that's good news for those of us who are busy trying to shore up systems now being held together by toothpicks and wax paper, relationships that have us at a breaking point and careers that are digging vampire teeth into our necks.

I have friends whose jobs have quite literally killed them and they weren't people working with dangerous machinery. They were lawyers.

Everyone has an idiosyncratic response to the dilemma of presumed failure vs. pretense of success. One former colleague told me no one ever left the AmLaw100 unless they were failing. He became counsel at a major motion picture studio so I'm certain he's redefined his definition of success to fit his circumstances. Don't we all?

Once, in a class at the Straus Institute composed 50% of boomers getting late-in-life LL.M degrees and 50% of law students earning joint JD-MDR's, the Professor asked everyone to write down their greatest fear and then to pass it to the next person. Unsurprising to my boomer cohorts, we all wrote down "nothing" even though death and illness must surely occupy our thoughts from time to time.

The youngsters, all in their early to mid-20s all wrote down one word: Failure.

We'd Already Been There

You don't get to fifty without having failed at something. As a parent. As a spouse. As a worker. For those of us past the half century mark, failure was not just someone else's opinion or a vague premonition that wakes you up at 3 a.m.. We'd failed. And we'd learned it wasn't that bad.

Things fall apart and plans go awry when they aren't the best fit for us. The shoes of our occupation may have been pinching our feet for decades but we'd just carried on, assuming it was our fault for not lacing them right or replacing them once every three years. Sometimes we'd assumed there was something deeply wrong about us. No one made a shoe the right size for our left foot. It was too misshapen, grotesque, or simply out of the norm.

And Then One Day Everything Changes

And then one day we realize it doesn't make much sense to suffer chronic pain in circumstances where others seem happy. We make a change, have an insight, pirouette or take a week off. Whatever it is we do, we learn, we recover and then, once again, we achieve.

Here's what happens after career "failure" —

Recovery. Resilience. Happiness. Fulfillment. A higher purpose. Mastery of something we're actually well-suited for. Autonomy. Family. Friends. Comfort. Peace. Failure is not an elective. Turns out, it's a requirement.

As a speaker at the Massachusetts Conference for Women in 2013, I was asked to weigh in on career failure. My response, which remains relevant to this day, is below.