On Failure

I am afraid of failure. Maybe too afraid. I did not realise how much of my life that fear had quietly organised until recently. It was in the decisions, in the friendships, in the ambitions I trimmed before anyone could see how big they had been. You can convince yourself that your mind is evolved enough to keep things in perspective, that your convictions are strong, that what burns in you is passion. I told myself all of that. It was only when I began to look behind the mask I wore daily, a mask I had worn so long I forgot it was one, that I started to understand what had really been steering.

And once you see it, you see it everywhere. Why you hedged on major decisions. Why it was so easy to close the door on people, places and situations and not look back, calling it discipline when it was really escape. Why what you named cautious optimism was fear wearing a nicer coat. Why you kept the peace in rooms where you should have spoken plainly, because if you told someone the truth about what their actions cost you, and it all fell apart, you would be the one at the losing end. So you reined it in. You always reined it in. I am not dismissing emotional intelligence. I work in an industry where caution and long-term thinking weigh on everything you do, and there is real wisdom in restraint. But wisdom and fear can wear the same clothes, and for a long time I could not tell them apart.

Part of me wants to judge myself for this. To stand at the mirror and hurl thoughts at the man looking back. The other part of me understands, because I know the world he grew up watching. We punish failure as a society. We may not admit it, but we do, and we are brutal about it. So many people chase success by any means because they have studied the contrast, up close, between what happens to the one who wins and what happens to the one who loses. Sometimes the punishment is loud. If you have not won, nobody reckons with you. Your story does not matter, however long the epistle, however honest the effort. Maybe we are shallow as a people. Maybe it is just the law of nature. Either way, it is what it is. But most of the punishment is quiet, and the quiet kind cuts deeper. Nobody announces it. You read it in the cues. The calls that come slower. The rooms where your opinion once carried weight and now floats. The question "so what are you doing these days," asked with a softness that is really pity. The quiet pacification at work over a career that no longer looks like the blazing star it used to be. The way people recalibrate around you without ever saying a word. I could go on. Anyone who has been on the wrong side of a season knows exactly what I mean.

They say the antidote to failure is success, but the cost of success is high. If it was high decades ago, it is higher now. And still, it is nothing next to the cost of failing. Perhaps that is why so many people refuse to put it all on the line. It is easier to draw a small boundary and live inside it, because if you shoot for the moon and it comes crashing down, life gets complicated and lonely fast. That thought haunts me, because I have lived through tranches of it. It is the hardest thing to explain to someone who has not. It feels like swimming in the deep end while everyone stands at the edge of the water, dry, saying we support you, we are looking out for you, we are praying for you. And they mean it, mostly. But then you realise every one of them has a current of their own they are fighting, and when the water closes over your head it is just you, yourself and your God.

And here is the strange part. Nothing is wrong with that. Once the knowledge soaks in, really soaks in, it is freeing. It felt like a message God had been trying to pass to me in a dozen gentler ways, and I needed the deep end before I would listen. It mellows you. It hands you a perspective no book and no mentor can teach. It sorts out your vision, because you now know precisely what matters and what was noise. It steels your resolve. And I suspect it is the stem from which all your fears begin to die, one by one, quietly, the way they arrived.

Lately I have picked up the habit of watching YouTube shorts, and for reasons I could not name at first, I keep returning to videos of people diving from great heights into the sea. I sat with that for a while. Imagine the first plunge. The height, the ledge, the long look down. Then nothing holding you, just your body weaving through air against unforgiving gravity, the wind loud in your ears, trusting a patch of water you can barely read from up there. Everything that can go wrong might. A false step, a bad landing, a sudden gust, poor visibility. Malcolm Gladwell writes in Outliers that a true disaster needs a whole chain of things to go wrong on the worst day, at the worst place. The diver knows this and jumps anyway. And when you watch them do it again and again, without flinching, an assurance passes through the screen. It says there is a shred of our being that can read the signals of the universe, some part of us that understands the Creator has already encoded our limits and our possibilities inside us, and that the ledge is not the whole truth about the water. One day I hope to take that plunge myself.

Because if I am honest, the fear was not really about work or money. It was the fear of everything. Failing in love. Failing to stay in love. Failing to do right by people who trusted me. Failing as a son, as a partner, as a friend, as a leader people look up to. I am even afraid I might not be a good person. Failure at that too. And underneath the whole pile, holding it all together like mortar, the fear of looking weak. Of being weak. Of being seen mid-fall, before the water, with no way to make it look graceful.

So here is where I have landed. Failure means starting over. Then start over if you have to. Failure means trying again. Then try again. Failure might mean being misunderstood, painted as a bad person, a terrible partner, someone plain washed out, when in truth you are calibrating more in a single day than most people will ever see or credit. Failure might mean the thing you hung your hope on did not arrive when you expected it to. That is not the end of the story. The sun will come again. The beauty of the life God has given you was not meant to be spent lavishing in comfort. It was meant for adventure, for hoping, for dreaming, for believing past evidence, sometimes for fighting like hell, and most times for resting and then getting up to put in another shift. I know how hard that sounds. It is hard, as hard as hard can be. But to dine with the divine is to accept the precariousness of the road there. He faced hell before he ascended into heaven. Then I catch myself, look in the mirror, and say, Temi, nobody is asking you to face hell today. You are not Jesus. You are being asked to believe another day. Hope another day. Put in a good day's shift. Explore the boundaries of your imagination. Create, build, work with your hands. The cost of failing is high, yes. But it should not be a fear. It should not even be a motivation. It should just be another one of the things life is made of. Another cog in the journey.

One last thing. When you do fail, embrace the quiet. Do not rush to fill it. There is something redeeming in it. The quiet is where you see things as plain as day. You gain perspective. You see people for exactly who they are, which is a gift, even when it stings. You reshape your expectations, your realities, your imagination, your breath. It makes you more understanding, more tolerant, more humane. It gives air to the human inside you. And more importantly, it lets the divine in you operate. Because the children had flesh and blood, he also shared in the same, so that in the moment of testing he was not unaware of what it means to be tried, but clear eyed enough to show the way.