HOW MANY FAILURES DOES IT TAKE TO BE A SUCCESS?

You may have read or heard some of these before, but like good green vegetables, you probably can’t get too many of them in your mental diet. I find them refreshing and encouraging, inspiring and amusing. They help me breathe a sigh of relief, and they lighten my load. They free me up when I start wanting to feel sorry for myself. They help put life in perspective. They help prevent whining.    

Henry Ford had five businesses that failed before he started a successful car business.

RH Macy had seven failed businesses before he opened Macy’s department store.

Soichiro Honda applied for a job as an engineer with Toyota, was rejected, and was unemployed for months before starting Honda Motor Company.

Akio Morita, founder of Sony, designed a rice cooker as his first product. It burned rice and was a total flop.

Colonel Sanders had his chicken recipe rejected hundreds of times before he opened Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor for lack of imagination.

Lucille Ball was considered very unpromising by her drama teachers and was advised to look for another line of work. Early in her career she was considered a B actress, at best.

Most of Emily Dickenson’s poems remained in her desk drawer during her lifetime. 

Helen Keller, well, you know about her.

John Lennon was dyslexic (dyslexia: has a hard time with words. Ha!).

Einstein was considered slow as a child.

He didn’t speak till he was four.

He couldn’t get a job at any university at the time he wrote four of the most important physics papers ever written by anyone, anywhere, at any time. 

Darwin’s father was very unimpressed with his young son’s intellectual abilities. (Way to go, dad!)

Isaac Newton failed at running the family farm before his uncle sent him to Cambridge.

In his day, Socrates was labeled an immoral corruptor of youth.

Edison failed at least a 1000, if not 10,000 times, designing a damned light bulb that would work.

The Wright Brothers suffered numerous failed attempts at making a plane that would fly, which only made their depression worse.

Mark Victor Hansen went bankrupt and wanted to kill himself before starting The Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books with Jack Canfield that sold over 100 million copies.

Lincoln suffered from depression and failed throughout his life, until he didn’t. 

Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade. He went walking the black dog, his code words for depression, quite often.  

Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job as a television reporter, since she was unfit for t.v.

Harry Truman went bankrupt before becoming president.

Jerry Seinfeld froze during his first performance and was booed off stage.

Fred Astaire: “Can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a little,” comments from his first audition.

Hollywood studios initially rejected Charlie Chaplin as too nonsensical.

After his first film, executives told Harrison Ford he didn’t have what it takes to be a star.

Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime, to a friend, for not much money.

Beethoven’s teachers thought he was hopeless.

A crowd ran the composer Igor Stravinsky out of town after his debut performance.

Mozart was dismissed from his position as a court musician.

Jack London’s first story was rejected over 500 times.

During his lifetime, Claude Monet was mocked as an artist.

Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, was rejected 30 times, so he threw it in the trash.

Steven Spielberg was rejected by USC film school.

Charles Schultz was turned down for a job by Walt Disney. Schultz later created Peanuts.

27 Publishers turned down Dr. Seuss’s first book.

“The colossus of independence”, John Adams, second president of the United States, “who was learned beyond all but a few,” suffered from self-doubt.

 Elvis Presley was told to go back to truck driving.

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

And so on.

The lesson I walk away with from these examples is that most of us are not failing enough. We’re playing it safe. We’re picking up our toys and sulking off to our rooms before we’ve even given the game our best shot, and then our next, and our next, and our next until we break through to the place where we are gifting the world with what we have to offer.

            Another word for a failure is a mistake. A mistake is a mis-take, a shot that didn’t take, a shot that didn’t quite make it into the basket. So take a shot, and then another, and then another. Learn something each time, like Edison did, like Lucille Ball did. Miss as many shots as it takes until you start sinking them, because that’s what it takes, even if you’re Michael Jordan, Lucille Ball, or Abraham Lincoln.

            So go out there and fall on your face. Get it over with. Do it again and again.
            If you really want to live, you’ve got to fail. If you really want to learn how to shot, you’ve got to go out there and miss a few shots—or a few thousand shots.   
            There’s no other way.
            But there is a way.
            So get on the court and keep playing.
            And enjoy the game.

For coaching or SE sessions please contact me at 805/680-5572 or drjohnluca@gmail.com

LONGING FOR HAPPINESS

You think you know where you want to go. It’s hard enough just trying to get there. That part you know too well, and you’ve learned to accept it, mostly. But what if a Harvard professor, the Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Daniel Gilbert, told you—supported by about 350 references—that you were pretty much clueless about what would make you happy in the future? Gilbert starts his book with a quote that pretty much sums it up:

“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance[.]” 

Willa Cather

If you thought the book of your life might, if you were lucky, be entitled Sailing Towards Happiness, Gilbert argues you’d be lucky to have a life where you were Stumbling On Happiness, the name of his book.

Gilbert’s stated intention is “to explain why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become.” And because we know so little about who we are to become, we know little about what will make us happy tomorrow.

I think he’s right.

I wish I could accept his premise right down to the core of my being. It would be radical to really get what Gilbert is saying. In a sense it would put an end to the future psychologically. It would put an end to becoming. It would put an end to the idea of tomorrow being better than today. If we really got that we have no idea about what would make us happy in the future, we would see that our only choice is to be happy now.

It would put an end to any sentence that began, “I will be happy when…”

Gilbert argues from oodles of psychological studies what mystics and wisdom teachers have been teaching for millennia. There’s only now to be happy. This is not to say that there isn’t suffering and pain. It’s not to say all moments are happy. They are not and never will be, though I think there are radical possibilities here nonetheless.

The point is if you are going to be happy, it better be now, and since you don’t know the conditions that will make you happy, you must free yourself from your happiness being conditional on circumstances outside yourself.

“I will be happy when I get my driver’s license.” Remember that one?

Or how about, “I will be happy when I graduate college, or get married, or have children?”

I will be happy manana. I will be happy someday, but not today.

A haiku by Basho, translated by Robert Hass, captures so much of what we struggle with even when we get what we’ve longed for.

Even in Kyoto --
hearing the cuckoo's cry --

I long for Kyoto.

Don’t you know that feeling? I’ve experienced it a thousand times. How hard it is to simply be in the moment and be happy, even while walking the very streets of the old city you so longed to see.

In the first few pages of his book, Gilbert makes his great statement, what he half-jokingly calls The Sentence, and which he italicizes. “The human being is the only animal who thinks about the future.” Gilbert finds this capacity for consciously imagining the future to be humankind’s greatest achievement.

It’s also the root of a good deal of our unhappiness.

You can set this book aside, and ignore it, or simply find it of casual interest, but the danger is your life may pass and you will never be happy. Happiness is here and now, if it’s anywhere. It’s an inside job, which you’ve heard before. And the good news is you can work the inside.

Tibetan monks seem to smile a lot, the Dalai Lama included, so does Robert Thurman, a former Tibetan monk, and Uma Thurman’s dad. The venerable monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh told a gathering of western meditators that he wouldn’t come back again unless they started smiling more often. Sounds silly, but it’s not. These practitioners spend time each day engaged in practices meant to open the heart and lead to acceptance and gratitude and happiness for the moment just as it is.

Daniel Gilbert states, “Despite the third word of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy.”

            I could not disagree more fully. Gilbert offers us an invaluable, though very difficult, lesson to swallow.

You do not know what will make you happy tomorrow.

So, you cannot effectively plan for your future happiness.

            Therefore, my conclusion, which I stole from countless wisdom teachers, is you must learn to be happy now, and give up the illusion of being happy tomorrow.

            I think that’s a pretty useful lesson.

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DISCIPLINE IS NOT A FOUR-LETTER WORD

               For some of us discipline is a dirty word. It conjures up images of old school principals with pointers in their hands mindlessly insisting that things be done this way because that’s the way they’ve always been done. We don’t want to be disciplined. Discipline is for dogs that misbehave. 

               We’re free spirits, adventurers who need space to roam and discover. What we need is freedom. And freedom, we think, is the opposite of discipline. 

               But discipline, along with truth, may set you free. 

               The teacher Krishnamurti spoke about discipline often. The root meaning of discipline is ‘to learn’. You need discipline to learn about yourself, and discipline to apply what you’ve learned and change your life. It takes effort, energy, attention, time, practice, patience, and repetition—a great deal of it. 

               It’s hard work. You’ll make mistakes. It’s frustrating. You’ll find it difficult to not go back to your old ways, even when you see how those old ways are killing you.  

               You’ll need discipline to stay the course, pick yourself up, and keep going. 

               Discipline is about learning, and to learn you have to be open, flexible. Discipline is as much about staying free as it is about anything. 

               A famous teacher of Zen Buddhism liked to point out that for a cup to be useful, it has to be empty. If we hope to learn we have to have room like that empty cup. And to have room we have to be free from the past, from what we think we already know and are. 

               And that is very hard to do, because we are so full of ourselves. Discipline asks that you leave your self behind, that you be able to drop your mask, that you be open to the demands of the moment in a new way.  

               Discipline requires that you stay open to hints, intimations, guidance, and help from wherever it may come. It asks that you be attentive and aware. 

               Discipline starts to look like a seasoned samurai, an akido master, or a wise grandmother. 

               You have to have eyes on the back of your head. You have to be fit, mentally and physically, quick, focused, ready for whatever may happen. 

               And yet you travel light, both in spirit and in body. Discipline requires that you put down your baggage.

               In some Buddhist circles they use the word ‘practice’ to refer to the sitting meditations, prayers, readings, teachings, walking mediations and other practices a person like the Dalai Lama might do every day of his life (possibly for many lives) as he works to become a truly free human being. Whether you call it discipline or practice, it’s about the same thing: freedom, your freedom, from unnecessary suffering, from the bondage of your story and your past, from your habits and your history. 

             You can see how this is a never-ending journey. And no one does it alone. You take help from others, especially those who are walking the same path, trying to live full, loving lives of service and depth. You stay open to help from this mysterious universe we live in, from the source that is keeping all things in existence, whether we know its name or not. You don’t do all this just for yourself—since you may not even have a ‘self’, but that’s another story. You do it for everyone, your family, your friends, your son, your world. It’s a good job. And we’re blessed to be given the chance to do it well.