Failure #2: July 4th Teaches the Wrong Lesson About Success

Welcome to Issue #2 of Learning to Fail, coming to you on July 4th.

Happy birthday, America!

If I’m being honest, publishing this issue on the holiday is an unintentional coincidence, but I’m going to lean into the kismet because of how well Fourth of July represents the flawed way we think about success, transformation, and identity. After all, July 4th is supposed to mark the “birth of America” — the one clean day when Americans stopped being a British colony and started being a free country.

Boom!

Done!

Cue the fireworks!

But, of course, that’s not how this whole “creating a new nation” thing actually works.

Wait… July 4th wasn’t even the real date?

For starters, fellow history nerds out there will know the vote for American independence happened on July 2nd, not the 4th. And even that day wasn’t some magic switch. Declaring independence didn’t instantly create independence. It took seven more years of war to make that happen.

Think about how long seven years is. I mean really think about it.

Seven years is nearly two trips through college. It’s roughly double the number of years most people stay at their jobs. Unfortunately seven years is also the average length of a failed marriage. (Ever heard the phrase “7 year itch”?)

As for the fledgling United States, when you’re in the middle of a war, seven years is a looooong time to be killing each other.

Even after the war “ended,” America didn’t suddenly become “America.” The new country needed another decade of debates, rewrites, and compromises to land on a working Constitution. Then, nearly a century later, the country fought a Civil War over the unresolved contradictions that were never really solved the first time around. Plus, if we’re being completely honest, the entire country has been arguing and struggling and rewriting the American experiment ever since.

So what are we really celebrating?

Despite what the holiday implies, July 4th isn’t about celebrating the day the country became what it is. It’s about celebrating the day we started trying.

This is a critically important distinction not enough people take the time to appreciate. Instead, we tend to imagine July 4th as a sort of shorthand way of saying “the day America became America.” But that’s a fairytale.

Not that there’s anything wrong with celebrating the fairytale. I enjoy grilling burgers, watching explosions, and celebrating ‘Merica just as much as anyone. But we also need to remember the problem with these types of shorthand origin stories since we constantly tell ourselves the same kinds of fairytales in our own lives.

We all have a lazy habit of thinking in “arrival stories.” We imagine if we just reach the right milestone — get the degree, land the job, hit the number, take the trip, launch the product — then poof, we’ll be whole. But life doesn’t work that way.

You don’t arrive. You evolve.

Let’s imagine the 10-year-old kid who gets asked what she wants to be when she grows up. She says: “Doctor!” And everyone “coos” and “awes” and tells her she’s going to be great. But nobody reminds her what being a doctor really entails.

She’s got another 10 years of school — double her current life — before she even applies to med school. And by the way, applying to med school isn’t exactly a relaxing experience. Just ask any of your friends who’ve taken the MCAT.

Even when she gets accepted to med school, that’s not the end of the little girl’s work. It’s the beginning. She’ll still have four grueling years of school, followed by an internship, and residency. And when she finally has the title “doctor,” she’s not suddenly relaxing on a beach somewhere, basking in her doctor-ness. She’ll quite literally spend the next 40 years showing up for people on the worst days of their lives — and trying her best to make those days a little better.

Are you starting to see the problem with measuring successful outcomes? Success doesn’t have clear endpoints. There is no “I’ve made it.” There’s only “I’ve started.”

Success as declaration, not destination.

This July 4th, while you’re drinking a beer, biting into a hotdog, and watching fireworks, take a moment to remember what you’re really celebrating. July 4th was never the end of anything. It was a messy, courageous, premature declaration. It was a moment of saying: We want something better. We’re going to try.

The same will be true for any meaningful change you attempt to make in your life, too. You’re not supposed to have it all figured out when the moment arrives. You’re supposed to begin figuring it out after the moment arrives.

Some of that “figuring it out” work is going to be messy and uncomfortable.

It’s going to feel like failure.

But it’s not failure. It’s the process of doing important things, and it deserves to be celebrated.

- Dr. D