learning from failure – Experience Has Made Me Rich

40 Years and 30 Minutes

I was not an adventurous child. My mother loved to tell the story about how, as a toddler, when I wanted to get off a chair I would turn around and slowly back off, turning my head at least twelve times to check and see how far from the floor my feet were. It’s an apt summary of my nature. Cautious to a fault.

As I got older, though, I realized that while caution is a valuable consideration, when it is the driving force behind all decisions it is really suffocation masking as prudence. So I learned to take risks. Heavily mitigated risks, propped on as many sides as possible by cautious supports, but risks nonetheless. Things that seem tame to many are fraught for me: Riding a roller coaster for the first time in my teens. Diving off the deck of a sailboat. Moving away from home to attend university. Travelling solo to Chicago for a business trip. Travelling to Africa for three weeks. The list continues. In every case, whether the risks seem large or small, I had to prep myself mentally with extensive research, physical preparation, and all sensible precautions taken. I grew accustomed to adventure. Gusseted by safety nets, admittedly, but still. Adventure.

There was one adventure that hovered above the others, though. A blur of colour and chrome that first caught my attention when I was about 17 years old. I was walking back to school from lunch with some friends and the guy flew by. It wasn’t the first time I had seen a motorcycle, obviously. But it was maybe the first time the vibration of the exhaust and the shine of the chrome strummed my nervous system like Clapton’s opening Layla riff. And the guy riding it just looked so fucking cool.

For 40 years I held that image and filled my mental motorcycle album with thousands more. Every year I thought this summer I’ll learn to ride. But summers are short, and life moves along. Stomping on the glass under the chuppah. Changing diapers. Hanging pictures. Negotiating mortgage rates. Road trips to PEI. Watching Sons of Anarchy …

40 years of picturing myself riding the back roads, noticing the way the temperature changes every few kilometres, and the way the smells change after every turn – or so I assumed.

40 Septembers of saying, “Ok. Next year.”

But life either happens or it doesn’t. So this year I made it happen. It’s not hard to get your M1 license. It’s a multiple choice test that is about 85% common sense and 15% studying. I studied for about a week in between sets in the gym, on a website I found that lets you take infinite practice tests. I studied until I was getting them all right every time. Then, sort of on a whim, I took the actual test and passed. It’s amazing. Having a G1 means you are allowed to drive a car as long as there is a licensed adult driver in the passenger seat. Motorcycles don’t have that kind of passenger seat. Pass that multiple choice test and now you are legally allowed to get onto a Harley Road King and ride on public roads. Not me though. Not Richie P. Cautious.

I messaged a bunch of friends who ride. What gear do I need? What course do you recommend? What bike makes sense for a beginner? I spent probably a hundred hours watching YouTube videos on everything from getting on a motorcycle for the first time, to recommendations for starter bikes, to what skills are the most important to master. I signed up for the M2 course and did not even want to attempt to ride a motorcycle until the first day of the course. But in the meantime, I went to 5 different dealerships to sit on bikes. I picked the bike I would buy and the seller agreed to wait until after I passed the M2 course before selling. Super nice guy. Turns out every rider I have met is super nice.

Instagram and Facebook figured out I was into motorcycles. The algorithms started supplying me with endless reels. I learned that there is at least a large subset of riders who are fascinated by falls. I also heard “Oh, you’re going to start riding a motorcycle? Be careful!” from pretty much every person I told. The entire culture, from within and without, has a built-in “this is dangerous” backdrop. Even the instructor of the M2 course, when I took it, said more than once “When it’s your time it’s your time, but we do everything we can to ride safe and smart.” Like you just have to accept that you’re probably going to die doing this.

That is not me. I don’t have that extreme-sport, adrenaline junkie, adventure seeker gene that causes people to think it would be fun to free-solo El Capitan. At the same time, every rider I spoke to, without exception, gets this unmistakable warm cast to their features when they talk about riding. And most people I know who ride have been doing it for years, and have been safe. And I know myself – if there’s a precaution, I’ll take it. When I went to buy the gear for the course, I bought the safer versions of everything. AAA-rated pants with armour. ECE 22.06 helmet. If the guy at the store said there was an extra safety advantage to something, I bought that version.

Finally, the day of the course comes around. They put me on a Honda Grom. And I immediately realized there’s a whole collection of things you need to learn and master, and none of them are automatically intuitive.

Friction zone. Did I turn off my signal. Rear brake. Pylons. Countersteering. Why did my horn honk. Down for first, up for second, third, etc. Why am I suddenly in neutral. Why won’t the bike go into first. Look through the turn.

Ok. I passed the course. I got my M2. But now I knew something I didn’t understand beforehand. Taking the course and getting your M2 does not mean you’re ready to ride on roads. It means you’re ready to learn how to. I was excited. I was nervous. I was anxious to start. I was afraid of making mistakes.

I bought my bike. A 2022 Kawasaki Versys 650. The seller was a very experienced rider who took great care of it. The bike looked new. It was stunning.

It was also about 480 lbs wet. The Grom is less than half that. But the Versys was one of the bikes that was repeatedly recommended to me as a sensible beginner bike. And when I sat on it, it felt right. Sport bikes and cruisers aren’t for me. Touring is how my body wants to sit.

I bought it on a Wednesday. I booked a private lesson for as soon as the instructor was available, which was the Friday morning. He would come to me so I didn’t have to ride the bike on any road with a speed limit over 40 km/h to get to a parking lot. In the meantime, I figured I could practice riding up and down the small residential streets near my house. During the work day. When there’s almost no traffic. Where the speed limit is 40 km/h. I took it out Wednesday afternoon for about 15 minutes. Nothing crazy. Got up to second gear a few times. Never stalled. Never dropped it. Never had a single problem. After 15 minutes I decided that was enough for day one and came home, and successfully parked it in the garage. It looked so good in there.

Thursday morning I figured I would do another 15 minutes of similar practice. No major roads. No roads that are even close to major. Just starting, stopping, turning, and changing gears. Getting used to the bike. To the height of it. To the idea of being on it. I got up to third gear a few times. Never stalled. Never dropped it. Never had a single problem. After about 15 minutes I decided to head home. That meant turning left from a stop sign at a small T-intersection. No biggie. I had proven I could manage that multiple times. Except this time, my brain made a new choice.

Why did it happen? Lots of reasons. My wrist was probably forward on the throttle so that a neutral wrist meant gas. I didn’t look through the turn. I released the clutch too fast. Then I saw I was going wide, and saw the curb coming. I target fixated. There were no cars around. There were no people around. Just me and my bike on a warm summer day. There are five or six things an experienced rider could have done to recover from my error. It wasn’t that I chose not to do them. It’s just that none of those skills were automatic for me yet.

I hit the curb.

Even still, that could have just meant an embarrassing fall. But physics decided to add special sauce. The front tire hit the curb at an angle and that caused the rear of the bike to swing right, and slam into my right leg. Then it threw me off hard into the ground. At least, that’s how I’ve reconstructed it, based on where the bike was, where I was, and what hurt. I don’t remember the fall. I just remember the curb.

My next memory is lying on my right side in the fetal position on someone’s driveway in front of their car, not able to breathe. The owner of the house came out to see if I was ok. I managed to take some breaths, get my helmet off, and answer him. I told him I was ok. No, I didn’t need an ambulance. Sorry this happened in front of your car. Yes, I could get out of the way of your car so you can take your wife to the doctor. So sorry about this. I can move.

Just need a sec.

No, I didn’t need an ambulance. I managed to slither sideways so he could get out of the driveway. I realized then I was not going to be able to get up easily. I still thought I was ok though.

Just needed a sec.

I called my wife. She came with my daughter. I was not ok. Yes, I needed an ambulance. I had suffered a mild concussion, heavily bruised ribs, and a badly bruised calf. My right kidney, it turns out, was also bruised, which we discovered at the hospital when they asked for a urine sample and instead I provided a blood sample. The next two nights were spent on a stretcher in the hallway of the ER so they could keep me under observation for the kidney. When I was discharged, I couldn’t take a single step because of the ribs. I had to take a private ambulance home. My wife had to go out and buy a urinal. We luckily have a medical recliner that we inherited from my mother-in-law. My world narrowed to that recliner and the tray of pain meds sitting next to it. I lived in fear of the first time I’d have to take a dump because I literally had no idea how I’d make it the 15 steps from the recliner to the bathroom. The first time I sneezed, I saw God – and I’m an atheist.

The bike is fine.

40 years of dreaming. 30 minutes of riding.

Ok. Maybe 40 years and 29 minutes. I made a mistake in minute 30. I have spent a career working to help students see that mistakes are only the end if you allow them to be. I thought I took enough precautions. I had all the gear. I wasn’t speeding. I wasn’t showing off. I wasn’t trying something I knew was beyond me. I was doing something I genuinely believed I had made reasonably safe. But I was wrong about how much competence I had yet to acquire.

Toddler Rich checked the floor a dozen times. At fifty-seven, after forty years of thinking about motorcycles and a hundred hours preparing, the floor found me. Hard.

I want to keep going. I am not sure if I will.

40 years and 30 minutes. And counting.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Let Your Child Fail

Depending on the perspective of the different people in my life I am many things: a son, a father, a brother; A student, a teacher, a mentor; A friend, a colleague, a training partner. And yet, in all these capacities I have learned one lesson well, and seen it play out repeatedly. Failure is critical for growth, and letting loved ones fail is one of the hardest manifestations of loving them that there is.

This is never more acute than when it comes to your child. It is one of the most painful struggles in normal parenting. Seeing that a child is making poor choices and is therefore on a path to failure, letting it happen, and watching the fallout is heart-rending. And yet, the alternative is worse: Letting them believe that there is always a safety net.

As parents, it is our job and our duty to give our children all the tools and guidance they need to succeed as they grow. But it is not our job to give them success. It is not our job to undo their failures, or to mask them as something else. In fact, any “success” that is not earned is not a success at all, and any part we play in delivering these false successes is, in fact, failing in our duties as parents.

Repeatedly and consistently rescuing a child from failure teaches them that failure is not on the table. It teaches them that life will be fine regardless of poor choices, lack of knowledge, or lack of skill. It’s like giving someone voice lessons and using autotune to correct their pitch before playing back their singing to them and to the world, letting them believe they are the next Freddy Mercury or Whitney Houston, and then letting the world watch their train-wreck audition for American Idol. It not only sets them up for confusion later in life, it inhibits self-awareness to the point that life in the “real world” will for them will seem like walking through a minefield, where the reactions from others are so completely out of line with their internal measures (calibrated in their youth) that they can, at times, feel like they never really know what is wrong with them or why they get the responses they do. Consider those American Idol auditions where the singer is so clearly awful, and yet they think so highly of themselves that they tell the judges it’s the judges who are terrible.

The thing is though, that in the moment failure is happening, we parents want nothing more than to take the pain away. Every parent knows what I mean. Your child’s pain, whether physical or emotional, is about a million times worse than your own. My wife always talks about that moment when a toddler is running to you in the park to show you some amazing treasure they found, with that big toddler smile and enthusiasm, when they trip and fall and start crying miserably. We all want that enthusiasm and joy to be the only thing they ever feel. We never, ever, want them to fall.

But it’s unrealistic. Everyone falls. Learning what caused it, analyzing how to have avoided it, and recovering from it are the real lessons. The lessons that lead to a person who truly can be successful. And so we have to let our children fail. And then we have to be there for them to love and support them as they recover from it. We have to show them that failure isn’t the end of anything, and that even in their failure we believe in them and love them as much as we always have. That is how they will learn to grow from failure, without spending a ton of counter-productive energy and emotion on self-recrimination and shame.

In my years of teaching, I have had countless conversations with parents concerned about their children’s academic success – or lack thereof. And on more occasions than I care to count, a parent has outright asked me if there is anything I can do to raise their child’s grade. These parents are always taken aback when I tell them that there is nothing I can do, and nothing they can do either. However there is everything the child can do. We can give them the tools, we can be there to support their learning. We can be the best parents and teachers there are. But we can not “raise the child’s mark”. That is on the student. And sometimes, the student fails. When I tell the parents that I am willing to let that happen, they often think it means I am a bad teacher. There have been a few occasion where they said so. But my response is always the same:

“I am being the best teacher I can be. I will always be there to support your child. I will give them every tool I have, and the guidance to use it, in order for them to succeed. When they need me, I will be there. I will be there even when they don’t realize they need me. But I will never do the work for them, and I will never assign a grade they did not earn. And if they should fail, I will be there to support them and help them see what went wrong, and how to address that in the future. Given all that, my only hope is that your child will look back on their time as my student and realize the gift I gave them: The gift of letting them fail.”

We want the next generation to be resilient, strong, caring and educated. Failure is the path to all of these. As hard as it is, we need to let our children fail.

And then celebrate the heck out of their successes!

Thanks for reading,
Rich

The Death of the Mistake

(Disclaimer: NOT ALL PARENTS are guilty of what I describe in this blog, so please don’t take it personally. But many are. Far too many.)

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I imagine you have too. Some of mine are pretty indelible for me.

Like the time my friend and I were playing with fire (literally) and almost burned down a hotel. We were scared to death and actually grateful we got caught.

Like the time I decided I could get through that intersection before the car coming from the left got there. Result? One totaled car that wasn’t even mine. It was my girlfriend’s car.

Like the time I thought I could get away without studying for my final exam in STAT 331 and still scrape a credit in the course. I earned a 42. I asked the prof to remark the exam which he did. The mark went down.

I didn’t like any of these or the countless others when they happened. Actually they felt pretty miserable. Yet each one has had an impact on decisions I made later in life and each one of those failures thus resulted in bigger successes. This is not a revolutionary concept. The phrase “we learn from our mistakes” is not new. But have you ever considered exactly how true it is? We aren’t born with an abundance of knowledge. In fact we are born with almost none. We know how to do things like breathe and cry and fill diapers, but we can’t even control those actions much. At first, all the knowledge we accrue comes from our innate curiosity and willingness to take risks. What’s funny is that as babies we don’t even know we are risking anything. We’re just really curious. Watch all the stuff a baby is willing to put in his mouth. You’ll know exactly what I mean. So babies try things and sometimes the result is pleasant or satisfying and other times its not. Each experience whether success or failure goes into the data bank and both guides subsequent experiments and imbues us with confidence regarding our ability to reproduce successes. In this way it is completely correct to categorize both “success” and “failure” as positive outcomes. And yet we have attached so much negativity to the word failure that it has become a thing to be reviled and feared … avoided at all costs. Which is a true tragedy, because success in the absence of failure is yin without yang.

As time passes the culture we grow up in imposes a formalized education, mainly because there is value placed on certain nuggets of knowledge. This happens in the form of school. And that’s where I come in.

Sort of. I teach high school so I guess I come in about 10 years later. After 10 years of a system which has sadly killed the mistake. Kids are no longer encouraged or allowed to experiment. They have to “get it right” the first time. Many parents spend insane amounts of energy making sure their children never experience failure, defeat or mistakes. A friend of mine calls this phenomenon “the snowplow parenting” model. The parents walk ahead of the child, plowing all obstacles out of the way, frantically making sure that no failure is ever experienced. As the child grows and the potential obstacles increase, parents run themselves ragged continuing to pave a smooth way. The effect this has on the kids is incredibly frightening. The child grows up not ever really experiencing a failure, but watching parents become more and more neurotic making sure this “failure monster” never has a chance to get near their kid. It’s a doubly-bad edged sword. First, no failure is ever experienced so there is no chance for the best kind of learning and second, the children pick up on this deep fear of failure and when they find themselves faced with the potential for a mistake they freeze in terror at the possibility. In short, they are simply not equipped to deal with anything but a smooth road, and lack the understanding and confidence that comes from having failed.

So what I see in my math class is kids who are petrified of assessment. I have seen kids cry when they earn a mark in the 90’s on a test. Worse, I’ve seen kids with marks in the 90’s crying when they come in to write a test because of how afraid they are that they might make a mistake. And I’ve had to defend marks to parents who insist to me not that their child earned a higher mark, but that their child needs the higher mark. In grade 9. A grade that no university or college even remotely cares about. A grade for which no scholarships are awarded. Yet the child needs the higher mark. Lest they experience failure.

This phenomenon may actually be the single biggest threat to our culture. Thanks to Snowplow Parents we are raising a generation of kids who have never had a chance to experiment and fail. Never a chance to pursue curiosity, which is the spark for innovation. So what we get is anxiety-ridden underperformers with huge self-esteem issues, fostered by parents who have made it clear that the child is not capable of fending for themselves and thus needs the parents’ involvement every step of the way.

Parents, please. Take a step back. Watch them do it themselves. Watch them fail and celebrate the failure. Mistakes are critical for evolution. Let’s bring them back. Let’s start the Mistake Revival.

Thanks for reading,

Rich