Wake Up and Live - Chapter 4 - The Rewards of Failure

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The Rewards of Failure - 1
Chapter 4
ABSURD as it may seem at first consideration that anyone
would solemnly enter into even an unconscious conspiracy
to fail, it is a matter of observation that there is hardly one
person in a hundred who does not, in some fashion,
deliberately cripple and thwart themselves. To understand
why this should be so it is necessary to examine for a
chapter what may be called, without paradox, the rewards
of failure.
The recent widespread interest in all branches of
psychology has accustomed us to accepting an idea which,
when first offered, seemed laughable: that we are all at
some level, engaged most of the time in reverie. We dream
either consciously or unconsciously, awake or asleep, of a
situation in which we feel we should be happier than we are
in real life. Occasionally some childish idea of happiness or
success crops up to confuse or hamper us in the business of
adult living. Sometimes the dream is of a life of luxurious
idleness, the childish Unconscious determined on refusing
to leave the safe shelter of the nursery, where all wants were
remedied as soon as felt, where warmth and food and love
were given freely and unearned. As Emerson wrote, long
before we had any technical vocabulary to express that
backward turning reverie, long before we knew of
"fixations" or of "narcissism" "We do not believe there is
any force in today to rival or recreate that beautiful
Yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent where once
we had bread and shelter." To some extent this is true of all
of us, but less true of the happy and successful adult than of
others.
At other times, ludicrously enough, the life-wasting reverie
is about success: the mild man is a Napoleon of war or
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finance, the mouse-like woman a siren. If reality never
broke in upon such reverie, the dreamer might be happier,
self-absorbed in their silent tale-spinning, than if they were
to find themselves in a position to realize some part of it.
Such reverie is in itself compensation for a life of dull
routine or uneventful monotony. But, the world being what
it is, the dreamer must live, for part of their time at least, in
the cold atmosphere of fact. This is no Land of Cockaigne
that we inhabit: roast pigs do not run about crying "Eat
me!" Fruit does not fall from the trees into our mouths.
However blissful the daydream we entertain, we must wake
from it sometimes and struggle with the hard conditions of
real living.
The inveterate dreamer will struggle only just as much as he
need, and no more. He will do anything halfheartedly to get
his bread and butter. Then, when his daily task is over, he
will be back at his dreams again, whether he realizes it or
not. He succeeds at only one thing: in clearing away a little
space, gaining each day a few hours of free time, for just one
purpose - to go on wasting his life. But his dream is happy.
It is, for him, a true compensation for his failure in every
other relation, and so he continues in it. Yet, since after all
happiness is the true goal, he is deluded by not realizing
that the smallest success in reality brings with it more
happiness than years of reverie.
Nevertheless it is important to remember that the rewards
of failure are real in their own sphere, for otherwise we will
not brace ourselves to fight them adequately; and there are
other rewards of failure besides dreams.
Consider, for instance, that if you try for anything just
enough to give yourself some justification for saying that
you have tried, you can fold your hands for the rest of your
days. You can say humbly that you were tried and found
Report excerpted from The Strangest Secret Library

wanting in those qualities which make for real success. This
is rather a rare remark, but one of those which can be heard
now and then from older failures, usually in a humorously
deprecating tone. It will sound very honest and touching;
and there is no earthly way in which it can be proved
against the complainant that his statement is not fully true.
He has saved himself a lifetime of effort by some means,
nevertheless. If you join this group you can watch the
struggles of others with an eye half-amused, half-envious,
enjoying the results of their successes, but perhaps even
more - human nature being what it is - the spectacle of
those who fail, and who take up their onlookers' positions
beside you.
Then, "Mankind is very superficial and dastardly," as
Franklin said. "They begin upon a thing, but meeting with
a difficulty, they fly from it discouraged"; and why not,
asks the Unconscious, when you can try, stop, and feel for
the rest of your life that if you had tried just once more you
would have made the grade? You can thereupon become a
dilettante or amateur, frightfully hard to please by those
who go on working, severest of all critics either professional
or unprofessional, possessor of some inner knowledge, and
able to hint at standards of excellence untouched by those
who are still out trying to run the dusty race; standards so
marvelous, so unattainable, that failure to reach them is
more honorable, you may imply, than another man's easy
success. With not one thing completed, the acclaim you
might have received, the enormous financial coup you
might have brought off, the masterpiece you might have
accomplished, can assume in your reverie, and in the eyes of
those who will accept your version of things, almost more
importance than the real success would.

Or you can become an abettor and sustainer of more
persistent workers and artists, and perhaps that is the
friendliest failure, the most successful failure, of all.
But notice that in all these cases you will at the very least
have avoided the struggle, the pain, the humiliations that
attend outward activity. You will never have to see the
object you slaved to bring into being despised or
misunderstood. You will never have to feel the rancor of
those whom you necessarily surpassed in competition; you
will never have to stand the cut of adverse criticism. You
will never have to become aware of the malice of those who
envy any success, however trivial. You will never have to
back your opinions by argument when you are tired and
would rather rest for new effort. Or, far deeper and more
vital pain, you will never see the discrepancy between the
finished work you can do and the work as you had hoped to
do it. There is always that discrepancy to keep the honest
worker really humble.
These matters of discomfort and pain evaded are important
to notice, for when we come to examine the reasons why we
so often choose to fail rather than to succeed, they will
prove very illuminating. So it is worth understanding that if
you fail, you are rewarded by not running the risk of getting
hot and tired and discouraged, or sharp-tempered when
your co-workers or your materials, whatever they are, seem
more refractory than usual. If someone else does excellently
in the line you had dreamed of for yourself, you can always
believe that, if you had really tried again, you could have
surpassed them.
And then, if you can remain inconspicuous, you will not
have the experience of outstripping someone you love. This
is, perhaps, most commonly the woman's Reward of
Failure, although the children of distinguished parents or

the disciples of outmoded masters in any line also know it.
Still, it is only right to say that many who dread the
experience of causing pain to another are never called upon
to meet it; they failed to take into account the generosity of
love. So it is often an excuse for not working that is at the
root of this inaction, too, not a real matter of compromising
with ambition in order to keep a vital relationship
unspoiled.
By failing one escapes much gossip and incomprehension,
the semi-scandalous talk which most often springs up about
those who succeed. To dread this immoderately is neurotic,
but this dread does often act as a deterrent to many a
success. All vital persons are the target of the curiosity of
those who are not vital; but the few whose opinions concern
you will know the truth, and the others are of no
importance. Yet many withdraw from active life, not to take
up an intenser inner life, but merely to avoid the vulgar
curiosity of the crowd.
And then, if you have failed not too awkwardly, you are
usually more delightful as a companion than a better
worker. Those who reach real success are likely to be
constant workers. Even in their hours of recreation they
frequently are preoccupied with some element of the thing
they are engaged in doing. The successful man has less free
time, and observes more punctiliously his self-set hours for
withdrawing from companionship, than the failure. He can
seldom be counted on for impromptu gaieties, since he is
not unconsciously intent on finding any escape at all from
the unsatisfactory conditions of his life. And, since he has
none of the deep interior guilt which haunts the one who
knows he is failing, he is under no compulsion to be
winning. He reserves his humor and charm, his emotion
and indulgence, for those whose lives are closely bound up
with his by his own choice. So, except among his real

intimates, he may have the name of being gruff and
unapproachable, or too coolly civil. As long as you cannot
bear the notion that there is a creature under 21 heaven who
can regard you with an indifferent, an amused or hostile
eye, you will probably see to it that you continue to fail with
the utmost charm.
Perhaps it will be helpful to look for a while at three lives in
which the Will to Fail was at work. In every case the
onlooker would see a life of considerable activity, such
obvious activity that he would at first glance be likely to
agree with the victims that they were in the grip of a
perverse fate. On closer examination, each failure will be
seen to be by no means determined by any factor outside
the individual character.
Each of these persons had within himself or herself the
abilities necessary to make a full, happy, productive life;
each spent what energy they had on defeating their
ostensible intention: one saw her mistake and rectified it,
one died without facing the truth about his wasted talents.
The third is still struggling with his problem, as far from
success as ever, though his name is well known.
Case 1 is that of a woman, left a widow while she was still
very young. She came of a scholarly family, and had been a
brilliant student at college. With the little money left to care
for herself and her small daughter, she returned to the
campus to take degrees as Master of Arts and Doctor of
Philosophy in preparation for a career as an educator.
Actually (as she found to her astonishment when her
difficulties became so great as to force her to seek advice)
she delighted in being a student again, in continuing to live
in the condition of a child in an adult world, and therefore
strung out her period of preparation as long as she dared.

After her .D. was earned, she made what looked to herself
and her friends like a good honest effort to find a suitable
niche for herself.
Only she invariably engaged in wrangling acrimoniously
with those who would have to be her superiors, and always
about some rather remarkable and original economic ideas
of her own. These ideas had nothing whatever to do with the
subject she was to teach; their acceptance or rejection by the
entire world would not have made one grain of difference in
the class-room work which she was called on to perform;
but by making an issue of having her absurd and quixotic
ideas taken seriously by her co-workers, she brought about -
each time she found a position - a situation in which she
was distinctly disliked by the very persons on whose
goodwill she was dependent.
She went from one post to another, never holding one
longer than the year for which she had contracted. She was
a good teacher, a well-informed student, and she had much
to give, but she carefully saw to it that she would never be in
a position to work very hard for very long. Her hopes of a
professorship faded. She went from good colleges steadily
downgrade to obscure little schools, and as she slipped
steadily down she worked out a philosophy which
reconciled her to her steady decline. She held that we all live
much too luxuriously, and put too high a value on becoming
clothes, good food, and comfort. At last she reached the
place where she felt justified in taking an apartment in a
tenement district of a large city. Her defiant self-
justification broke down, however, when it came to inviting
friends to visit her. She grew more and more solitary, more
and more eccentric, her running fire of bravado continuing
all the while.

Fortunately for her, her one child was a girl, and a girl who
grew up to be extremely bright and attractive. She was quite
unimpressed by her mother's pseudo-philosophy; she knew
that she was being handicapped at every turn by the
oddness of their living and dressing, and as she emerged
into adolescence she began to fight for a more reasonable
life, a suitable background. Matters came to such a pass that
either the mother had to take cognizance of the girl's
objections or lose her daughter. All the efforts to correct her
false position which she made by herself were unavailing.
She still brought about the old wrangles whenever possible,
she still held the unsatisfactory position to which she had
dropped only on tolerance and because she had come to
accept a very small salary, in spite of her training and
ability.
When at last she sought help from a psychologist she
discovered to her dumbfounded astonishment that she had
actually thrown all her energy into failing. Unconsciously
she had resented having to go out into the world to work.
She wanted to remain either a child or become again a
cherished and petted wife. Her wrangles had been, as the
analysts say, "over-determined": they were intended partly
to make it certain that she would be discharged so that work
would become impossible, partly to engage the attention of
men. Since she could not acknowledge to herself that she
was cold-bloodedly "husband-hunting," she had fallen on
the technique - quite as effective in challenging attention as
being charming - of starting quarrels. She had a long, hard
pull to right the situation she had brought upon herself, but
she was eventually successful.
Case 2 is such a one as can be found in almost every town
and village in the country, a failure of the sort that is not
only treated tenderly, but often looked upon as being in

some vague way much nobler and finer than any success. It
was that of a man with a good mind, noted for his integrity
and yet not without a vein of good Yankee ingenuity. He
lived and died in the small town of his birth; a rather ugly
little manufacturing town. Not because he loved it loyally
and wanted nothing better; his reading was always of travel
and adventure, and he continually spoke wistfully of
countries and places he had never seen. Not that he had no
opportunity - opportunity came and tried to hound him into
activity. He was the manager of a branch store of a large
business, and so satisfactory at it that he was offered a
similar position in a larger city, at a correspondingly better
salary. He accepted with joy; then within two days he wrote
a letter saying that he had reconsidered, that he did not
believe that he could fill the better position. His timidity
grew on him. A few years later he was combating every
improved method that his firm tried to introduce, afraid to
try the new ways. A little later he was such an obstructionist
that his firm retired him on a minute pension, and he
became the town's lovable homespun philosopher.
A senator spoke movingly at his funeral; his fellow
townsmen were inconsolable.... Perhaps it is deplorably
callous to point out that his wife had preceded him to the
grave by ten years, worn out with overwork; that one son
had no education beyond what he could get at the village
school, although he had as good a mind as his father; that
the other son had to work his way through college, thus
dividing his energy and strength (for it is only one more
fallacy of the American creed that to work one's way
through college is the ideal way of getting an education);
that his daughter had taken refuge in a loveless marriage
from a home that had never had enough of the ordinary
comforts or attractions.

Let us be perfectly plain about one point: to hold that
honest success is in some way ignoble is one of two things -
pretense or cant. There is a tyrannical effort to impose this
fallacy on us, arising perhaps from a confusion of the mere
word "success" with the idea of a great fortune arrived at by
fair means or foul. But that there is anything ignoble in
accomplishing well what one sets out to do, and in receiving
in return rewards in the shape, sometimes of the approval
of one's peers, sometimes the quiet knowledge that the
world is richer for one's contribution, or sometimes in
money paid out gladly for an object or services fully worth
the price to the purchaser - such an idea is nonsense, and
the very opposite of what it is usually claimed to be,
"philosophical." William Ernest Hocking, in his excellent
book, Human Nature and Its Remaking, has this to say on
that very point: "If command of the fruits of the earth is the
normal and destined position for man, why should one
who has achieved such a position, and in so doing has
shown large powers of one kind or another, not receive the
recognition that he, in so far, has succeeded? It is a man's
work to make a fortune, and under normal circumstances
a measure of ability." Many who know Case 3 by his name
would protest loudly at his appearance here incognito as an
illustration of the Will to Fail at work. He is a writer, and
the son of a writer. From the first he has been under such a
fortunate star that he knows almost nothing of the long
struggle for recognition which is so often the prelude to a
literary career. Nevertheless, at one and the same time he
lives in terror of failure and in the grip of an instinct which
seems to drive him in that direction. He will not work until
he is desperate for money; then he will write like mad, tiring
himself till he is poisoned with fatigue, and acts afterwards
like a convalescent.

Trying to overcome this bad working-habit under the advice
of a psychiatrist, he attempted to work, more than once,
when there was no urgent necessity for money. In those
circumstances he invariably turned out stories which were
unacceptable until rewritten. The world knows nothing, of
course, of those wasted efforts, that time spent on the
disheartening revisions which he is constantly called on to
do. Each time this occurs his career seems drearier and less
glamorous to him, his belief that he can eventually write a
book he will not be ashamed to sign with his name grows
dimmer. Here again analysis brought some illumination as
to the unconscious reason for this action, and again the
tendency to do haphazard and unsatisfactory work was
over-determined: there was on the one hand a dread of
surpassing his illustrious father at the same profession, on
the other the sly unconscious notion that if the stories he
seemed to slave over were rejected he would not have to
work at all, and would be free to dream through his life in
his own way. For the Unconscious always refuses to
understand that reality must be taken into account, refuses
to admit that "work or die" is the rule the average mortal
must live by.
Yet this tormented man recurrently has an experience
which might, if he could comprehend it, show him the way
out of his dilemma: when he is at last desperate for money,
when he cannot go any longer on credit or the indulgence of
his friends, or his reputation, when, in short, he has the
courage of desperation, he writes material which is
immediately accepted. Instead of drawing the workable
conclusion from this fact, he has made it an item of
superstition: only work done, as he says, "at the thirteenth
hour," is ever lucky for him! So he continues on his
treadmill.

Now, in each of these cases, failure, or comparative failure,
brought its reward with it: escape from adult effort and time
to waste in day-dreaming. Only in those cases where
frustration was more painful than success was there any
attempt to reshape the life-pattern.
Do you feel that obviously those who waste life in this way
are at least mildly insane? We all make similar difficulties
for ourselves, avoid work, miss opportunities. Have you
ever looked back and thought, "If I had done this or that
five years ago I'd be better off now?" But the opportunity
was there; why didn't you see it? Are you sure that you are
not closing your eyes at this moment to one which you will
see later in retrospect? Is the Will to Fail not operating in
your own life every day? Yet the rewards of success are so
immeasurably more worth having. Once more, the smallest
task well done, the smallest object, out there in the world
where it would not have been if you had not acted, brings in
a moment more satisfaction than the failure knows in a
lifetime. The knowledge that one is being tried by a real
scale and not by the shifting standards of reverie is like
having land underfoot after weeks of drifting at sea. Only
those who are at work on the best they can do are free from
the danger of panic-stricken awakening to reality -
awakening sometimes so late that the very habits and
attitudes of normality are forgotten.
And, beside the innumerable purely subjective advantages,
there are the rich objective rewards. A dream-picture brings
no buyer, a dream-plan no dividends, a fantasied book is
followed by no royalty statements. Crass as this may sound
in a world which spends a great deal of its breath in
persuading futilitarians that they have chosen the better
part, it is the literal truth and stands for a truth still greater.

Fantasy may call the grapes of reality sour, but those who
have tasted them know at last a dependable delight.

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Wake Up and Live - Chapter 4 - The Rewards of Failure