The Odd One
We were in his office. Just the two of us. I had been brought in a few weeks earlier, and we were still mapping what the work between us could look like, which projects we could run, and what his team needed. I was speaking about something I have always believed, that failure is part of the work, that iteration is just the polite word for getting it wrong enough times to start getting it right, that a failed attempt is evidence you actually tried.
He cut me off.
“I guess I’m the odd one. I never failed. Everything I set out to do, I complete. I don’t stop until it’s successful.”
I tried to be generous. I assumed he was saying what I was saying, just stated differently, that he was describing the kind of leader who soldiers through every setback and refuses to quit. I gave him the most charitable reading I typically assign on the surface of these things. I was wrong. He meant it literally. In his telling of his own life, there were no failures, no missteps, no attempts that hadn’t landed. He had walked into a senior position in his family’s business with no track record to speak of, and somehow the absence of any battlefield was, to him, proof he had never been wounded.
I sat with that for a long time afterwards.
We talk about people being afraid of failure, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Most of us are not afraid of the failure rate. We are afraid of the judgment that follows it.
Someone walks around with half their hair dyed pink and the other half purple and doesn’t flinch at a single stare, but ask them to dance in public, and they freeze. Embarrassment has shapes. Shyness has shapes. And underneath both is the same low hum: someone is going to watch this and decide something about me.
This is why people don’t start the business. Don’t make the call. Don’t sign up for the public speaking class. Don’t run the marathon, they keep saying they’ll run. The rate of failure is not what stops them. The audience does. I know that. I fear that the audience on more occasions than I care to admit.
I once watched the same man refuse to put a strategy on paper. A real, written, sequenced plan. He would not do it. Not because he didn’t know what to write, but because if it was on paper and didn’t work, someone could look at it and conclude he was an idiot. So the strategy stayed in his head, where no one could grade it, and the team underneath him stayed in the fog, where no one could grow.
The young ones in that team. I watched what fear does when it sits in the chair at the top of the table. They stopped suggesting things. They stopped putting their hand up for the harder work. They learned, the way young people learn quickly when a room is teaching them, that being wrong here was more dangerous than being quiet.
I took a project with him. I knew, in the part of you that always knows, that something was off. I let the offer distract me. I let the potential of what could come after distract me. I did not do my homework the way I would have told anyone else to do theirs. That was the first mistake, and it was mine.
The project ran. The deliverables came in on time, as promised. By every external measure I could point at, the work was done.
I had still failed.
I had read the brief wrong. I was not brought in to scale the brand. I was brought in to scale the man. To take someone who had inherited a leadership chair and help him grow into the shape of one. I worked out what the brief actually was somewhere in the middle of it, far too late to redesign my approach around it. The stakeholders I should have been managing were not being managed. I was busy with reporting structures and operational fixes while the real project sat two floors up, untouched.
He doesn’t accept this. Whenever we cross paths now, and the project comes up, he tells me the challenges of the market made it hard for me to scale the business. He defends me. He explains my failure away on my behalf. I tell him, no, the job was to help you build this, and I didn’t. He waves it off. He cannot let me have my failure, because if my failure is real, then his is real, and his cannot be real.
بَلِ الْإِنسَانُ عَلَىٰ نَفْسِهِ بَصِيرَةٌ وَلَوْ أَلْقَىٰ مَعَاذِيرَهُ
سورة القيامة: 14-15
“Rather, man is a witness against himself, even if he offers his excuses.”
There is an inner instrument we are all meant to carry. A ميزان. A scale. Only you know what yours weighs. Only you know what it has measured and what it has refused to measure. No praise from outside adds to it. No criticism from outside takes anything away. The praise of someone who doesn’t know you is worth nothing. The criticism of someone who doesn’t know you is worth nothing, too. The scale is yours and it answers to you.
What I was doing wrong in that project, I knew before anyone else did. The verse is not generous to us on this point. It says we know, even when we throw our excuses in front of ourselves like a screen. مَعَاذِير. The plural is deliberate. There is always more than one excuse to reach for.
The man across from me had no scale. Or he had one and had put it down so long ago that he had forgotten what it was for. He could not weigh himself, because nothing he had done in his telling required weighing. Everything was complete. Everything was successful. There was nothing to put on the instrument.
You cannot grow a scale by reading about scales. You cannot inherit one. You cannot have one built for you by a mentor, a book or a teacher. You build yours by failing and weighing the failure. The man who has never failed has never weighed anything. He is walking around with an empty instrument, calling its silence proof of his accuracy.
When I run workshops with teams, I open the same way. I tell them I have probably made more mistakes than most of them combined. I tell them this is precisely why I am qualified to be in front of them. The mistakes are not the disclaimer. The mistakes are in the credentials.
He walks into every room claiming no mistakes. I walk into every room claiming all of mine. We are both performing authorities. Only one of us is telling the truth.
What he gave the young people in his team was not protection. It was a ceiling. They learned that being wrong was unsurvivable, and so they stopped doing the things that might require being wrong, and so they stopped growing. He thought he was modelling excellence. He was modelling fear, and they were copying it carefully.
Growing old alongside someone who chose to be your spouse is its own kind of work. The ups, the downs, the trials, the milestones, none of it simply arrives where it ought to. You try to the best of what you have on any given day. Sometimes you get it right. Sometimes you don’t. I am no stranger to getting it wrong in that room, more than once, in more than one shape. What I have learned, slowly, is to own the wrong when it is mine, and to try to mend what I can. You are not the same person you were two years ago. You are not the person you were five, ten, or twenty. You grow. You mature. Sometimes you drift. Sometimes you lose your way. Sometimes you find each other again. The repeated work of returning.
Parenting is its own room, with its own rules. You are doing it for the first time every single time. The child at six is not the child at four, and the version of you who knew how to handle four is not yet the version who knows how to handle six. You are expected to be wonderful at it every day, and every day is a day you have never lived.
I would rather walk into those rooms with all my failures in my hands than pretend I have never had any.
Keep creating
Thanks for reading Within the Margin of Error! I truly appreciate you taking the time to read my words. I hope I was able to bring you some value in exchange.