The Value of Failure

We stumbled upon a blog post from Jeff Kubiak and Eric Ewald today, gotta love the internet. We actually know Jeff personally…a most excellent swimmer and coach who now appears to be a renowned educator. Anyway, the subject was failure and its importance in the role of success…in all walks of life.

It resonated with us in particular since this Tuesday is our first day back in the water. We haven’t had much interaction with the team for the better part of a couple of weeks, which feels like a much longer period of time than it actually is.

We know as coaches we feel energized and ready to move forward and suspect that most if not all of our swimmers feel the same. The ones who may not feel so are perhaps the ones who missed some success last season, at least in their eyes.

The ball player who hit a home run last night cannot wait to get to the ballpark today; the one who struck out 3 times, maybe not so much.

One of our recurring themes this year is grit…defined as” the tendency to sustain interest in an effort toward very long term goals” (thanks Jim Richardson!).

From Kubiak and Ewald we get this: “Failure + Perseverance = Success”

Michael Jordan missed more than 9,000 shots. He said he was entrusted to take the game winning shot and missed 300 times.

Point: we all fail and we need to use it, not shy away from it. As coaches we need to keep reassuring our athletes on this point…you cannot succeed without failing.