What Terry Crews Taught Me About Failure
“I knew from then on that I could have the courage to fail on my own terms.”
In Tim Ferriss’s Tribe of Mentors, failure is a large theme.
This may seem surprising. Why discuss failure if identifying habits that lead to success is the goal of the book?
Well, in many cases — if not all — failures do lead to success.
That’s why, of the 11 questions Ferriss asks all his participants, one is solely related to failure: “How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a ‘favorite failure’ of yours?”
Almost everyone that responded to the question had a strong takeaway from a failure, with the lessons learned helping set them up for success in the field they’ve chosen.
There were many good failure stories in the book with a variety of different types of failures. This from Terry Crews, after he missed a game-winning shot in a high school basketball game, was my favorite of them all:
“The coach afterward told the whole team that I had no business taking that shot and I should have passed it to our star player. It was in the paper the next day that I failed, and I was beyond crushed. A dark cloud covered me everywhere I went as I internalized the loss.
