In September of 2008, Philip Schultz, a humble and plainspoken fellow, crossed the hardwood floor and slid in behind a temporary lectern in the Center for Well-Being at The Ross School in East Hampton. It was commencement day for the eighth-grade class. Some students recognized Schultz, who was giving the address, as the father of eighth-grader Eli. He was a local poet.
Schultz told the students he hadn't learned to read until he was 11. By then, he'd been held back a grade and was a permanent member of what the other kids called the "dummy class." Teachers just didn't know what to do with a kid like Phil Schultz—who, it turned out, was dyslexic. When a teacher asked him what he wanted to do with his life and Schultz said he wanted to be a writer, the teacher laughed. "I wasn't insulted," Schultz recalls. "I understood it was a funny thing to hear from someone who hated to read and couldn't write a simple English sentence."
Schultz' punishment for being a dummy was exile to shameful outsiderdom within a class moving forward. And that's exactly the kind of experience from which writers are made. Within "the loneliness of having so little expected of me, and the pain of being overlooked and forgotten," as he put it to the assembly, was time for careful attention to his interior life. All a writer really needs are the self-knowledge to decipher his feelings, the judgment to recognize the original ones, and the courage to make them public. It's a job open to anybody—even dyslexics. And so Schultz steamed ahead toward the one career for which others thought he was the most ill-suited—poetry.
Cut to 2007. A working poet now, Schultz realized that almost everything he wrote was about failure. Failure was his clay. He was writing about his dad—a drunkard who'd been a lousy parent and a worse provider—but he was also tapping the part of himself that felt like a failure. Schultz had aimed to be a novelist, but couldn't pull it off. Alongside the very personal poems about his father, a long poem took shape about a character who walked other, more successful, people's dogs.
The voltage that shot through the plainspoken language was unlike anything Schultz had produced. He called the collection, simply, Failure. On its cover: a bent nail in a board. Last year, it won the Pulitzer Prize.
These days, failure—what Schultz calls "the great American taboo"—has bubbled to the surface just about everywhere. Few people can escape the feeling they're giving up ground. The global financial crisis has produced the sort of circumstances playwright Arthur Miller warned every generation must face—the sort that mints Willy Lomans.
The recession has brought a sense of siege, and within it, the collective emotional tone of the whole world seems to cycle. More than 4 million workers have been laid off since the recession began. On a single day in January, 70,000 people were laid off, and another 50,000 or 60,000 lost their jobs on each of the 10 days that followed. The rage spilled into the streets in 10 countries.
One day, we may look back on this period as "a time when the gods changed," to paraphrase James Michener, a moment when a convergence of big scares rattled people's beliefs about basic things: Am I safe? Who can I trust? Is there anything I can do? And how, given everything that has happened, should I live? It no longer seems possible to avoid failing simply by being conscientious and working hard—the formula our parents, and their parents, took to the bank.
There are failures and there are Failures, but the differences between bankruptcy and financial diminishment, divorce and marital strife, spiritual crisis and anomie are distinctions of degree, not kind. And they are connected. Woe in one sphere strains the seams of others. It's not pretty. And that's why failure is something you wouldn't wish on your least agreeable relative.
Or would you?
A theory is gaining momentum that looks at failure differently. Failure, it says, is at worst a mixed blessing: It hurts, but can pay off in the form of learning and growth and wisdom. Some psychologists, like the University of Virginia's Jonathan Haidt, go even further, arguing that adversity, setbacks, and even trauma may actually be necessary for people to be happy, successful, and fulfilled. "Post-traumatic growth," it's sometimes called. Its observers are building a solid foundation under the anecdotes about wildly successful people who credit their accomplishments to earlier failures that pushed them to the edge of the abyss.
Last fall, J.K. Rowling described to a Harvard grad class a perfect storm of failure—broken marriage, disapproval from her parents, poverty that bordered on homelessness—that sent her back to her first dream of writing because she had nothing left to lose. "Failure stripped away everything inessential," she said. "It taught me things about myself I could have learned no other way."
Apple founder Steve Jobs describes three apparent setbacks—dropping out of college, being fired from the company he founded, and being diagnosed with cancer—that ultimately proved portals to a better life. Each forced him to step back and gain perspective, to see the long view of his life. "I have failed over and over and over again, and that is why I succeed," said Michael Jordan—as did Oprah, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, and Thomas Edison, in slightly different words. Indeed, so oft-repeated is the trope that we lose sight of how strange it is.
