I love being a coach–right up until the part where I have to give out the medals. Time and again I find myself handing out medals to everyone and thinking that it means nothing at all. I have a kid on the books on one of my teams that did nothing. He went to a few practices, maybe held a conversation or two with a teammate, but when I look at the stat sheet–nothing. The across the board zeros are indicative of his utter lack of effort over the course of the season. In truth, his effort deteriorated as the season dragged on. Yet, this kid is getting the same medal as everyone else on the team. His effort is being viewed as equal in the eyes of reward as those kids who left it all on the field every practice and every game. That is wrong. That is indicative of a culture plagued with an inability to accept failure. It is indicative of a broken culture too coddled and afraid of dealing with the ‘handlers’ of people who are absolute failures to allow them that opportunity to fail.
A few years back my fellow coaches and I started giving out MVP trophies. The idea behind it was straightforward: The current system did not allow us to praise a kid who worked hard and earned the right to be told s/he was a rockstar. The ‘everyone medals’ situation felt more like nobody medaled, and that kids like the one I mentioned above would feel like they didn’t have to exert any effort to be presumed to be successful. This is dangerous to the individual as well as to society as a whole. What happens to us when we never have the opportunity to recognize what it feels like to fail? What happens when suddenly those fail-sheltered kids are thrust into a situation where they do fail. Not only will they not understand what failure is, but they will be ill-equipped to recover from it.
The next Michael Jordan–in any endeavor–is going to be someone who screwed up enough to figure out how to do things the right way. The way we are going, the next Jordan has no chance of coming from the U.S.A. Failure is an opportunity to realize where you actually are in terms of skills and to realize how much work is needed to get to where you want to be. This is a universal concept. It applies to, and is perverted by our culture, all things that have the possibility of failure. I find it especially pervasive in the academic realm. It is extremely hard to fail a student in the k-12 system. So much paperwork and justification is involved in leaving a kid back a grade that it happens far less often than it needs to. Worse still is the way we treat failures. I’ve watched a student act like a complete screw up and work so little at learning that I thought, for a moment, he was trying to fail on purpose. What happened as a result? The kid was named student of the month.
I kid you not.
We are so afraid of letting people fail in life that we prop them up beyond the point of reason. This isn’t a political attack on systems like welfare because that is a separate situation. This is about the more prolific fear of failure that we have as a society. Jordan said failure is why he is successful. If we abandon the idea of being allowed to fail, we are abandoning the idea of success along with it.
Some Thoughts:
- Round 2 of the webpage rebuild. I’m trying to find something that fits me and is readable. I’m happier with this than the last one.