Why Public Failure Was Just What I Needed

Perhaps the hardest thing about shutting the church plant down last year was the specter of failing in public. For fundraising and recruiting purposes, I communicated the early successes of our project through every medium at my disposal: blog posts, tweets, status updates, newsletters, emails, and sermons at other churches. I tried to build a tribe that would pray for, pay for, and join our community. I relished telling our story to anyone willing to listen.

There was a downside to all of this self-generated publicity. The more public you make your dream, the more public your failure will be if the experiment doesn’t work. When it was over, I had the distinct pleasure of sharing the bad news through the same media I had previously used to broadcast the good.

Compounding the pain of public failure was the importance I placed on professional achievement. I’ve always wanted to do great things and I’ve always wanted others to know I’ve done them. Despite my sometimes anti-social braggadocio, I want to be liked, respected, and admired. I’ve strategically tried to compensate for my introverted personality with public achievement.

This goes all the way back to Jr. High when I realized my skills on the basketball court, and not my farm boy charm, gave me the best chance to be popular (especially with the ladies). This proved to be just true enough to hard-wire within me a belief that achieving greatness in front of others would make me happy.

This partially explains why last year’s public failure was so devastating. Devastating, but also beneficial. Public failure forced me to face just how much your opinion matters to me. It challenged me to admit the absurdity of seeking happiness in public achievement. It is teaching me to find joy in the doing of the work, not in what others say about me after the work is done.

To this end, writing has become a form of therapy for me. I won’t pretend that I don’t care what you think of my writing. I want you to read it, like it, pass it on, and even be willing to pay for it. But this is not what I focus on while I’m writing. I think about the next sentence, the best word, the difference between a comma and a semicolon (still not sure).

For a few minutes a day, I forget about you and what you think of me. (Except for right now. I totally wrote that last sentence with you in mind.) All that matters are the thoughts in my head becoming words on the screen. When I emerge from the glorious fog of composition, I read back what I’ve written and like some of it enough to post for public approval. The rest of it remains buried in a nondescript folder on my hard drive.

Sometimes I’m tempted to go back and revise it and post it here. I resist this impulse because it’s important for me to not go public with everything I produce. Otherwise, I’m afraid I would fall back into the old habit of chasing happiness by trying to impress others with my achievements. If I ever go down that road again, it would be yet another failure, regardless of what I happen to achieve, because it would demonstrate that I still haven’t learned my lesson.

This is why I’ve decided not to let anyone else read this piece. I’m dedicating it to the sheer pleasure of doing work that no one else will ever see.

My therapist is right. I am getting better!