新編大學(xué)英語第三冊(cè)u(píng)nit6 Text D: How to Succeed at Failing
UNIT 6 AFTER-CLASS READING 3; New College English (III)
How to Succeed at Failing
John F. Budd, Jr.
1 On the eve of my 50th year in public relations, I was asked to speak at a Phoenix Award ceremony.
2 Is there a signal here?
3 I've got to admit this Phoenix business confuses me a bit.
4 I know the historical roots about Atlanta being torched and arising from the ashes better than ever and so on, but I come from Brooklyn and we've never been set on fire.
5 I can only assume that a no doubt well-meaning "friend," recognizing my half century in this business, decided that I be given an opportunity to reinvent myself, rise from my own ashes, so to speak!
6 I accept the challenge.
7 We all know that a life not worth examining is not worth living.
8 Thus prompted I have looked back on a life misspent in public relations.
9 I admit it, I have missed the boat, have single-mindedly been focusing on the wrong goal.
10 I have directed myself towards success, neglecting failure.
11 Yet failure is of great importance; believe it or not, Soichero Honda, who founded and built the Honda Motor Car Company once said, "Success is 99 percent failure."
12 If I had known those odds twenty years ago, things may have turned out differently.
13 Perhaps I've overlooked the benefits of failure because I early came under the influence of my father, a true Horatio Alger-type, a true entrepreneur. He was the star Saturday Evening Post junior salesman who won watches and ponies. He was a scoutmaster; he was an ambitious man who started a small publishing business with a 25 cent booklet, building one of his properties into a heavy, 2,000 page foreign trade guide that sold for $400 per. He was a successful New York businessman, but he never went to college.
14 So, I inherited this fixation with success, never knew there was a better way. The Declaration of Independence guarantees us among our inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The smart men who wrote that knew that happiness was the race or the chase... not the cup handed the winner.
15 Happiness, I've learned, is racing madly after something that you have a remote chance of gaining. Success is supposed to be in getting it, only we often realize it isn't what we wanted in the first place.
16 So I became an account executive, only to find that clients were unreasonable. I became a corporate public relations officer, little realizing that the company didn't want my activism; they were perfectly content to live out the status quo.
17 We all want to get at the table, above the salt. We want that big title, corner office, parking space and the 6 or 7 figure salary.
18 We achieve this ambition, only to discover that the chief executive officer wants a spin doctor, someone to deal with the consequences of his irrational decisions which he calls strategies.
19 We want to talk about policy; he wants to discuss how we propose to quiet those rebellious employees, those fussy shareholders, the noisy politicians and the curious media.
20 I'm reminded of this because some 30 years ago a very perceptive gentleman, Charles H. Brower, then chairman of a well-known ad agency, gave a commencement address on "how to fail." I thought it was stupid and I ignored it, but I saved it. Coming across its yellowed pages recently I now wished I had paid it more heed.
21 You see, success, whether it's in the arts, science, or public relations, takes a great deal of work and sweat. For years.
22 Failure hardly ever sweats!
23 Successes get so worried about their job that sometimes they can't sleep: always plotting tomorrow's actions. There's no insomnia amongst failures. Their problems are small and personal. No one worries about them, except, perhaps their wives.
24 Be a success and you've got a mountain of people dependent on you, looking to you for guidance, your co-workers, maybe the chief executive officer and other senior officers, your peers, community leaders, not to mention your accountant, lawyer, investment broker, wife and family. There's no end to the problems success can heap on you.
25 What's worse, you're all alone. Nobody cares about your problems. There's no government agency set up to help success.
26 Ahhh, but fail at anything, your job, your marriage, your investments and there's an army of folks, government agencies, community, church groups who'll worry with you and rush to help.
27 You see we live in a society that cherishes the underdog. Who's there for the overdog, the success? A few people who give you a trophy in return for your contribution of your money or your time.
28 Now then, how can smart people like you become a failure?
29 To be a real failure you first have to have a job. Better yet, have a series of them.
30 So you start by finding something to fail at.
31 My mistake was that I ignored opportunities to fail, didn't recognize, then, its potential, so I tried too hard and was, unfortunately, good at whatever I was doing, so I kept getting better jobs and more responsibility. I suppose it was because I always did more than I was asked to do.
32 Foolishly, I now realize looking back, that I even suggested new ideas and better ways to do things when there was no call for me to do so.
33 Obviously my bosses could not see that I was desperately trying to fail, even I didn't know it then.
34 Samuel Goldwyn (who once said, "include me out") lamented that what this country needs is a new set of cliches.
35 He is right. The old sayings have been used so much that they aren't as meaningful as they used to be.
36 "He that will not work will want." That's not true today. There are so many agencies waiting to throw money at the indigent that Horatio Alger would have to rewrite his classic, "Sink or Swim."
37 "Sooner or later the truth will come out." But by that time the horse is long gone from the barn. Ask Texaco who paid $176 million to 1,400 black employees for calling them an epithet, only to find out later that the word was never said.
38 My favorite, maybe yours, too, "Facts speak for themselves." How much of our lives is spent telling chief executive officers that this is naive, that perceptions are often more important than hard facts. Chief executive officers still believe in this empty phrase, making our lives more difficult than need be.
39 Benjamin Franklin churned out a few aphorisms that deserve examination. Like "early to bed, early to rise makes a man wealthy and wise." In my now nearly 50 years I've gotten to the office by 8:00 a.m. There's no one to talk to; no one to phone. Besides, it's been seen by some of my bosses as ambition, surely this is the curse of failure.
40 On the other hand whoever said "don't put all your eggs in one basket" was right. Hold back, don't commit yourself fully to your current jobs, or company. It's the only way to avoid the danger of achievement.
41 The trick is not to allow yourself to be convinced to do more than your job description calls for, that way you avoid chances of promotion.
42 Above all else, make sure that you do NOT fall in love with your job! Please!
43 The real enemy to potential failures is the thrill of achievement. Because they have discovered that achievement can be fun, more promising failures have gone wrong for this reason than for any other one.
44 It's exciting... gets into the blood and before you know it you're working on your kid's birthday, or your anniversary.
45 Socrates said that there is "no happiness where there is no wisdom." Forget it. Study is boring. Besides he didn't have TV.
46 Samuel Johnson said curiosity is a characteristic of a vigorous mind. Maybe so, but it can lead you into speculation, to some form of intellectual analysis, to taking an initiative. Not for anyone truly committed to becoming a world-class failure.
47 Franklin would have you worry that "lost time is never found again." But pleasure has no deadline, failure, no agenda, or timetable.
48 To return to the beginning, we celebrate this noon the award of the Phoenix, that remarkable bird, who according to the Greeks, started a fire in its own nest, reduced itself to ashes, yet reemerged to a new life.
49 If you've been unconsciously doing some of the things that make a good failure, time to play Phoenix, resurrect yourselves, start a new cycle.
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