#190 - The devastation of failing

And what failure cannot touch

While in college, writer John McPhee wrote a novel that he sent to several publishers. He received rejections from every single one of them. One of his English professors suggested that McPhee write to Alfred Knopf, of Alfred A. Knopf publishers and one of the most famous names in book publishing, and ask for reader’s reports on the submitted manuscript. The point was, having failed at making the publisher’s cut, at least young McPhee would come to know what to work on in the future. McPhee describes what happened next:

Alfred himself wrote back to me, saying that his company never released its readers’ reports, adding, gratuitously, this:

“The readers’ reports in the case of your manuscript would not be very helpful, and I think might discourage you completely.”

This was the letter that caused my mother to say, “Someone should go in there and k-nock his block off.”

Failure has two aftermaths: immediate and lasting.

The immediate effect of failing is that you have not completed the task you set out to do. You have to do it again. 

The lasting effect is that failing has diminished you. It has eaten up your energy. So you would rather not do it again.

We would all prefer to just fail at the task while retaining all our precious energy for future endeavors, wouldn’t we? Yet, it often happens that failure breaks us like water breaks a stone—it searches for a crack and keeps cutting into. It can get worse. Sometimes, terrified of the steady gush of water, the stone may give itself up. 

We may be doing just fine on a task until someone says something discouraging or unflattering. Like lethal gas sliding in under a locked door, doubt will creep in. Maybe this is not worth doing. Maybe it’s not for me. The daze in our heads will feel more real than our limbs. Slowly, surely, our spines will buckle and we will fall to our knees. Kaput.

At this point, you may be wondering that just failing is a luxury. And it is, kind of. When you don’t have a clear idea about what it is that gives meaning to your life, failure can be devastating. Many suffer the shame of both failing and being robbed of their zest for trying. How do we stop this double whammy?

When you have a good sense of who you are and what you want to be, failure can barely sniff you. You may fail at the task, but never at summoning your will to make another go. Over a lifetime that makes a huge difference. 

Clocking ninety-two as of 2024, John McPhee has published thirty-two books. He has won a Pulitzer and been nominated for it three other times. There’s no subject that McPhee cannot write about without making it engrossing. He loves to write like bees love making honey. 

About two decades after the rejection, when McPhee had made a name for himself at The New Yorker, he found himself at the offices of Alfred A Knopf, Inc. He was there to pick up a friend, who worked there, for lunch. I’ll let McPhee’s prose paint the picture.

In this narrative, I have now come to the day I have been aiming at, on which I showed up at the Knopf offices to collect Tony and go to lunch. I was standing beside Tony’s desk while Tony shuffled some last-minute memos and stood up to go. His office door was open to a corridor and, just then, Alfred Knopf walked by. The year was in the seventies, Knopf in his eighties. Tony called to him, “Alfred, come in a minute. There’s someone here I want you to meet.”

Knopf joined us, and Tony said, “Alfred, this is John McPhee.” In that exact instant, seemingly cued by my name, Alfred Knopf’s eyes narrowed to a stare, and his arms stiffened at his sides. Very slowly, his arms began to rise, came up like wings, while his falcon eyes stayed on me and blazed. The arms went on up until they were high above his head.

By now, of course, Tony and I had realized that Alfred Knopf was having a seizure. Tony wondered if I knew what to do. I did not. 

If you must know, Knopf survived the episode. 

What was it that McPhee knew at the point that let him take failure in his stride? He knew what Robert Greene, author of Mastery, calls his life’s task. Here are some steps he suggests we take. The stuff in parentheses are my additions.

• Find your interest (instead of following what is trending or is safe)

• Commit to the process (instead of justifying your effort by the end result)

• Enjoy your work (instead of being even more goal-driven)

• See time as a friend (instead of demanding that it pays you back immediately)

• Find what experiences excite you (instead of coasting to get by).

• Get better at what you do (instead of demanding more variety in work)

I don’t think McPhee has any special kind of insurance against the kind of things that can cut us to size—professional tedium, unreasonable bosses, glaucoma in both eyes. In fact, he continues to produce undimmed. Well, what powers him? What does he have? 

In Draft No. 4, an ear-to-the-ground account of the writing process, McPhee ponders about his algorithm for choosing subjects. It is an important question given that, like a filmmaker, McPhee devotes months and years to a single project.

I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe twenty or thirty years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than ninety percent.

I only recently learned that there’s a name for what McPhee found out empirically. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, of Maslow’s hierarchy fame, calls it our “impulse voice”—we have it loud and clear as children and we lose it as adults once we start listening to teachers and peers and what not. We lose it to the extent we do not—cannot—hear it. We need permission from others to hear it.

So: try not to be daunted by the prospect of failing. Take a cue from the greatest living nonfiction writer there is. Failing is not a problem at all when you have discovered your life’s task. Find that first. Clean your internal radar. Listen to your impulse voice. Make everything else wait. 

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📢PS: An update on my call for 1:1 coaching sessions made in previous weeks:

Thanks to a satisfying response from among readers on LinkedIn and Substack, I’ve had several conversations in the last two weeks. Thank you for trusting me🙏 Two themes that I see repeating are “I enjoy doing X but Y is my safety net” and “I don’t know what I truly want.” This has made me think about creating a series of prompts that can help people get clarity during such confusion. While that may take some time and a few iterations, I’m looking to close my coaching engagements for the rest of the year. If you’re curious about about coaching can help you with, write to me at satyajit@satyajitrout.com

📢A few months back I made a home for my longform writing. This is creative nonfiction essay writing. Last week I published my third essay. People have been saying encouraging things about it on Substack. You can check it here.