Failure

| Dec 6, 2017 |

When I see the word failure, I think of a day many years ago in San Antonio.

I was 25 years old and had been playing with the San Antonio Symphony for three seasons (the first season as associate principal trumpet, the second and third as principal). The orchestra was leaving on tour for a week, but I was staying home, because I had caught chicken pox from a friend’s young daughter. The doorbell rang. The postman handed me a registered letter. I opened it and read that I had been fired from the orchestra for “lack of development in phrasing and musical articulation.”

It was not a good way to start the week and, more importantly, not a good way to start a career. You could say it was a failure with a capital F.

I still had to finish out the final four months of the season and wondered how I should handle the rest of the season. So I called Irving Bush, who not only was one of my teachers but a close family friend and a man of great integrity. I asked Irving what I should do, and he told me to play as well as I possibly could, handle myself with dignity, and leave with my head held high.

It was valuable advice, and I did my best to follow it the rest of the season. The politics in the orchestra were very tense and paranoid at that time, and I was just one of a group of musicians who had been fired. But because of Irving’s advice, my final months with the orchestra went well, and I learned a lot. As a result, what started as a failure ended up being a great experience for me. In fact, as crazy as it seems, I look back on it with a certain fondness.

I learned a number of important lessons from that experience, but two stand out. First, you can’t control outside circumstances; you can only control yourself and your actions. And second, people who talk the loudest in a crisis are often the first to fold, while the quiet ones are sometimes the strongest. I think, for example, of Leland Sharrock, a hornist in the orchestra. Leland was married with a young child, and yet he put his job at risk in order to support the musicians who were fired. That kind of courage is not forgotten.

So, although failure is never fun, I try to see it (in the words of self-help author Tim Ferriss) as a feedback mechanism. To me, that means to reflect honestly on the experience and, if possible, determine what could have been done differently.

I also try to remember that if you take risks, you will inevitably fail at times. I love a quote from the actress Vera Farmiga, who said in an interview, “You can only go as far as you risk.” Which means I will have to keep pushing myself to risk more, which means I will fail more.

So although it is never fun, I am trying to embrace failure as much as I want to embrace success.