Failure

Failure is part of climbing.  Failure is part of life.  Failure is essential for growth.  For too long and for too many, failure is looked at as a vice. In reality, failure is a virtue.  People who dwell on failure, or worse yet, people who don’t even try because they are afraid to fail, sentence themselves to a life of mediocrity (at best). 

When it comes to climbing, we are all guilty of passing on a route because it is well beyond our ability, but that’s different than passing on something because we are afraid to fail.  Obviously, I would encourage everyone to try things even when the fear of failure strikes, which leads to us to the next question.  What happens next?  What happens when we fail?

There are numerous possibilities that follow a failed attempt, here are a few that strike Carrot and High-Clip as worthy of consideration.

Carrot

1. Quit!  Quitting sounds bad, but sometimes as Abraham Lincoln once said, “you gotta know when to fold ‘em”.  You just tried something and failed, that’s the hard part.  Sometimes when we try something very hard, it is apparent that we are way out of our league.  Sometimes we have to be willing to admit that we just can’t do it.
2. Never give up!  In the immortal words of Albert Einstein “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”.  I can’t tell you how many times High-Clip and I have been working a route together, and while at the crux, teetering on the point of exhaustion, ready to call it quits, the person belaying will shout “give it one more try”, and that one more try always ends in success.  That’s a lie, it rarely ends in success, but when it does, it feels great!  If you can recognize that something might have a chance, it’s always worth giving it a go.  If it doesn’t work out, you’ve learned something for the next time, and if it does work out, the feeling is among the best experiences out there!
3. Fail with grace!  I have seen so many levels of failure.  I’ve seen people punch and kick the wall, I’ve seen people start crying, I’ve seen people blame everything but themselves.  From my point of view, being content should be the primary goal of failure.  If you give it your all, and fail, how can you not be satisfied.  If you didn’t give it your all, then it teaches you to try harder next time.  As 1970’s Swedish pop supergroup ABBA once proclaimed; “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”  Well said ABBA, I couldn’t agree more!

High-Clip

1. Fail to quit. This is along the lines of a quote from Suits: “I quit every goddamn day. I just never said it out loud. Because no way was I gonna give them the satisfaction of breaking me.” You don’t have to try. You don’t have to put in the work. You just need to stay in the game. I don’t mean sit there and hang dog…no one wants that. I mean keep your options open. Perhaps you are horrible at rose moves, and you just keep falling every time you try one. Maybe you train them some, maybe you don’t, but the next time you see a route with a potential rose move on it, give it a go. Maybe you make it, or maybe you find alternate beta to skip rose moves forever…
2. Celebrate! In order to fail at something, you must have had the chance of succeeding at it, and the fact that you made an attempt at success is itself a win. Climbing anything can be scary. Climbing hard can be terrifying. Maybe you didn’t send the proj, and maybe you never will, but the fact that you tried means that you allowed sending to be a possibility. And maybe now you are more comfortable with trying things. As a mathematician, it’s my duty to remind you that if you try an improbable thing sufficiently often, it is bound to happen. Don’t worry about the sufficiently often in there…
3. Own it. Everyone wants to hide their failures and act like they’ve only ever known success. Perhaps we feel too embarrassed or too scared to share these things with others. This may not be a mathematically sound argument, but it tends to be true: if you’ve failed at something, chances are someone else has, too. This is why, as a society, we value literature and the written word. If we had to repeat every failed experiment to find the right material for a job, instead of simply looking up past failed experiments, we would never progress as a society. Use your community to help make sense of what went wrong and how to fix it. You can try and dyno to footholds all day, but asking someone for an alternate perspective or beta might make your attempts worthwhile.