by Todd Rose
I filled out the form, but about a month later, as I was sitting with Kaylin at my parents’ kitchen table, I decided it was not worth the money, and dumped it into the garbage can. “I’ve got a much better chance at Michigan State,” I told my family.
Shaking her head, Kaylin promptly retrieved the application from the trash and dusted off the pages. “There’s nothing wrong with getting rejected, but if you don’t even try, you’re going to spend your life wondering what might have happened if you did,” she told me.
A couple of weeks later, I got a thin envelope from Michigan State, containing a letter of rejection. But a few days after that, a fat envelope arrived from Harvard.
The news of my acceptance—this seemingly storybook ending to my earlier academic failure—was broadcast on Utah’s ten o’clock TV news and made the front page of the Salt Lake Tribune. The newspaper featured a picture of Kaylin straightening my collar while my mom looks on. Kaylin and I are looking grim and focused, but my mom, who is wearing a gaily flowered dress, has her head thrown back in what looks like ecstasy. The caption says, “Todd Rose’s mother says she always knew he would succeed.”
BIG IDEAS
As my father taught me, everyone makes mistakes, but what matters most is what you do next. I continue to believe that this is one of the most important things that you, as a parent, can teach your child.
Having compassion for yourself is a prerequisite for healthy self-improvement. But keep in mind that it’s not the same thing as letting yourself off the hook for bad behavior.
Abundant research confirms the truth of what most people know intuitively, which is that children need their dads. Studies have shown benefits including a reduced risk of drug abuse, better impulse control, and even strengthened memory.
Resilience isn’t something you’re born with, but rather is the result of positive feedback loops, most of which involve people who believe in you and provide their support.
ACTION ITEMS
Encourage self-awareness and self-compassion by keeping your own “D’oh” journal, recording your lapses of judgment so that you might later reflect on them. If you want to, share your insights with your child. My point is that before trying to understand your child, it’s important that you understand yourself.
Take a measured attitude toward stimulants for ADHD. The side effects aren’t negligible and the pills are not a magic bullet. At the same time, under certain conditions, stimulants can be a useful tool in managing—not curing—impulsivity and distraction.
Teach and help your child to find mentors throughout his or her life—all kids need adults outside their immediate families to help guide them.
8
Failing Well
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
—Samuel Beckett
Crash
* * *
The life of a square peg, by its very nature, is rarely distinguished by its stability. Predictability simply isn’t our strong suit. Serenity tends to unnerve us. When the going gets too smooth, we may be counted on to roughen it up.
That said, and after thoroughly searching my self-doubting soul, I still can’t find any reason to believe that I in any way invited the calamity that hit my family, literally, in the autumn of the year 2000, so soon after my triumph of getting admitted to Harvard. It began with an accident that ushered in one of the hardest years of my life, a phase I happily would have avoided if I’d had the choice, yet which ended up offering a valuable curriculum in the art of bouncing back. It happened only a few days after we arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard is located. I had driven our minivan into a busy intersection, with Kaylin sitting next to me, and little Austin and Nathan in their car seats in the back. As I turned left, a woman driving a Toyota truck from the opposite direction ran through a red light and barreled into us, head-on. Our van skidded through the intersection and spun around. Just like in the movies, it seemed like it all happened in slow motion, and in complete silence.
As soon as the van stopped moving, Kaylin and I jumped out, and Kaylin slid the back door open to look at the kids. Austin, age six, got out on his own, but Nathan, two months shy of his fourth birthday, refused to unbuckle his booster seat. Instead he reached his arms out for Kaylin, who released him and picked him up. He wrapped his arms around her neck and stayed like that throughout the next two hours.
We stumbled over to sit on the curb, where a few passersby approached to ask if we were okay. The police and paramedics arrived within just a few minutes, but after checking briefly on us, went to help the Toyota driver, who hadn’t left her truck and appeared to be seriously injured. The four of us sat in silence, while Nathan buried his head in Kaylin’s chest, until the police said we could leave. The van—it wasn’t even our van, but a loan from Kaylin’s unluckily generous parents—was totaled, so we had to get a ride home in a squad car.
Back at the apartment, we once again asked the boys if they’d been hurt. Austin, whose arm was scratched and bleeding, said he was okay, but when Kaylin finally tried to put Nathan down, he screamed as if he were being stabbed.
Finally, he pointed to his thigh. As we’d soon discover, his right femur was fractured. We got a ride to the emergency room from our next-door neighbor, a graduate student whom we hadn’t met until that evening, and ended up staying overnight at the Children’s Hospital, where Nathan needed surgery.
For the next two months, poor Nathan had to wear a cast that covered nearly all of his body. To stabilize his hips, it went down from his chest to the toes of his right leg, and down to his knee on his left. Once the cast came off, he needed a full month of physical therapy to help him relearn how to walk.
Our medical bills amounted to roughly twenty thousand dollars, delivering the kind of unpredictable and devastating setback that, as I’d later learn, hits hundreds, if not thousands, of families every day in this country. What made it so much worse is that we had arrived from Utah betting on the come, as they say in the casinos, with our bank accounts depleted and with less than one hundred dollars in cash to last until my first student loan check. Under Massachusetts auto insurance regulations, we had to sue the Toyota driver to recover the bulk of our losses. The case lingered on for the next three years, during which I got into the habit of playing chicken with our bank account, often writing checks to pay our bills several days before my loan checks arrived, and simply paying the penalties when they bounced.
Throughout the next seven years that it took me to get my doctorate, I survived financially by taking out as many student loans as I could, while also earning extra cash as a teaching fellow. I juggled as many as five classes a week, and rarely slept more than five hours a night. Yet there was still never a month when we were able to pay all of our bills.
We had moved into a small, no-frills apartment that overlooked the building’s trash bins. It smelled terrible all summer long, yet had the singular advantage of giving us dibs on valuables abandoned by our neighbors. Every piece of our furniture, from our bed to our kitchen table, was handed down by people who were moving out. Sometimes the transfer was made in person, but more often one of us would rush to nab a piece minutes after it was hauled out to the garbage.
Over all of these years, Kaylin managed the boys’ schedules, homework, sports, and carpooling. She shouldered complete responsibility for running our household, with all the thankless, unpaid, routine tasks that implies. This continued even after she got her first full-time job, at a child-care center near our apartment, and subsequently even after she went back to school herself, eventually earning a master’s degree in human development at Harvard.
Kaylin and I never explicitly negotiated this traditional division of labor. Perhaps, encouraged by our upbringing, we simply fell into roles that our own parents had filled. And of course I realize you might also suppose that Kaylin, who was far more organized than I, and who gave me that critical push to register for college in the first place, was
still, in addition to everything else on her plate, organizing me. By this point, however, she just didn’t have time. Like so many other scrambling parents of young children, the two of us were lucky most days to get everyone out of the house in time for school and work. So, with Kaylin’s organizational bandwidth fully occupied, I had to sink or swim. For at least those first few years, I guess you could say I dog-paddled.
A Bad-Hair Year
* * *
As an additional budget-cutting move in those anxious weeks after the crash, I stopped going to the barber. Alas, my first effort to cut my own hair was such a comical failure that I ended up shaving most of it off. I showed up at our new-student orientation meeting looking like a skinhead, and not even a particularly tough one. Yet that wasn’t the only reason I instantly felt out of place in the Eliot-Lyman room in Longfellow Hall, with its blue and gray walls, soaring ceilings, glass chandeliers, and gleaming oak table, around which the dozen of us new students sat on elegant, high-backed, uncomfortable wooden chairs.
As we took turns introducing ourselves, the student just before me went on for more than ten minutes, describing her stint at an elite prep school, followed by an undergraduate degree from Yale, and a year of “self-discovery” in Europe. After hearing this, I was so intimidated that when my turn came, I began by blurting out: “This isn’t my usual haircut!” From there, I’m sure my fellow students’ general perception of me deteriorated, especially given that just a few minutes later, after I somehow missed receiving a stack of materials that one of the faculty members was handing out, I piped up: “Would someone please pass the syllabuses?” This evoked a round of snickers, after which the overprivileged Yalie retorted: “You mean the syllabi?”
It made no difference, of course, that I was technically right about that arcane plural. The point was that I was way out of my Ivy League, and it seemed to me that everyone in the Eliot-Lyman room knew it. For the next couple of months, I struggled to put that awful first meeting out of my mind. I assured myself I’d have the last laugh, once I wowed my fellow students with my virtuoso academic performance. This confidence lasted right up until I got my grade on my first major assignment, a paper with the formidable title of “Information Processing and Central Conceptual Structures” for a course in “Cognitive and Symbolic Development,” taught by the notoriously demanding professor Howard Gardner.
Professor Gardner is one of psychology’s undisputed rock stars, famed in particular for his theory of “multiple intelligences,” which suggests that the way psychologists and educators have traditionally defined intelligence is much too narrow, and as a result overlooks several important ways that kids can be smart. A child who can multiply numbers with ease, in other words, may be no more genuinely intelligent, nor more likely to succeed in life, than another who is gifted musically, spatially, or interpersonally.
I’d been fascinated by Gardner’s work for years, writing one of my honors class term papers at Weber University on his theory. Despite his tough reputation—from the first day of school I heard rumors that his course is legendary for making unprepared students cry—I figured I had a good head start, and might even do well in his class.
My grade on that first paper was a C+.
At Harvard, a C+ is considered a failing grade.
My first thought was that Gardner’s teaching assistant, an advanced doctoral student, had made a mistake. I was an A student, not a C student—or at least, I’d earned all A’s back at Weber State University. But then I read Gardner’s personal note, scribbled under the grade. I can still repeat it verbatim from memory. “Judging by your work here, it is not clear to me that you possess the writing skills to succeed at this level,” he’d written.
I read the note over again, and then again, and again, feeling suddenly just as numb as if I were right back in that intersection, standing beside the wrecked minivan. I guess you could say I was in “flight” mode, since as soon as class ended I grabbed my books, blew off my next class, and headed for home.
My walk from the center of the campus to our apartment took about twenty minutes, passing under Harvard’s famous flaming red- and orange-leafed elm trees and centuries-old redbrick dormitories that had once housed the likes of Emerson and Thoreau. Along the way, the numbness wore off, and I started to cry. My junior high school nightmare had finally come true. So many people had told me, for so many years, that I was so smart, and could do such great work if only I tried. And here I was, having tried my hardest, and failing. Maybe I really wasn’t so smart after all.
Luckily I didn’t run into anyone I knew, although that wasn’t so surprising, since I knew so few people on campus. I had no one, in fact, that I felt able to confide in except for Kaylin, and given that she had left all of her family and friends to follow me on this now obviously doomed adventure, I couldn’t imagine telling her what I was thinking—that we should catch the first plane back to Utah, lean on our parents again, and start over.
When I reached our building, I sat down on a wooden bench outside for about half an hour, contemplating my options. In a state of utter wretchedness, I fantasized for several minutes about how easy it would be to exploit Nathan’s injuries to save my pride. Showing up back in Utah with our little boy all bandaged up might even make it look like I was being a good father, getting my family the support we needed rather than selfishly pursuing my career. I had my story ready for my mom, and walked over to a pay phone to call her. Luckily for me, however, nobody answered. I walked back to the bench, dried my eyes, and started thinking again.
That’s when a memory popped into my head from a few months earlier, when I was still applying to graduate schools and interviewed at the University of California, Berkeley. It seems in retrospect like the timely redelivery of a gift I’d yet to open.
The Biggest Loser
* * *
My trip to California had been a powerful experience, not least because it was the first time I had ever flown in an airplane. Much like at the orientation meeting at Harvard, I felt like a hayseed compared to the dozen other recent graduates competing for a spot in the prestigious doctoral program, even granting that at that point I still had a decent haircut.
Throughout the day, we met with various faculty members who asked about our grades, goals, research interests, and why we thought Berkeley might be a good fit. I was ready for most of these questions, but repeatedly stumped by one. In every single interview, someone asked me to tell them about my biggest failure, and what I’d learned from it.
It was hard for me to believe that they really wanted me to answer this question honestly. Initially I assumed it was their way of weeding out the idiots willing to admit to their own stupidity, in which case it seemed that my best strategy was to find a faux-humble way to tell them about my strengths. I care too much. I work too hard. I tried that in the first interview, but after watching it bomb, switched at the next meeting to confessing I’d never finished my Eagle Scout project, a failure that supposedly taught me how important it is to finish things you start. This didn’t go over any better. My interviewer’s eyes appeared to be glazing over. So at my last meeting, I figured I had nothing to lose. “If you really want to know,” I began, “my biggest failure is obvious. I flunked out of high school.” This time the Berkeley interviewer sat forward in her chair, smiling eagerly. “That’s interesting,” she said. “Tell me more.”
That evening, I ran into the same faculty member during a faculty-student reception. I managed to talk to her alone for a few minutes and finally asked her directly: was I the only one who had been asked that question, since everyone must have known about my dark history in high school? No, it turned out, that was pure paranoia. Instead, they had all come to agree that the answers to this particular question about failure were unusually predictive of future success. “As scholars, you’re all going to need to be able to deal with adversity,” she told me, “and grades don’t tell us anything about that. What we need to know is how honest you were about where
you went wrong when you had trouble, and how you used that to move forward.”
As I sat and pondered this memory in Cambridge, in the cool of that early autumn twilight, I realized a few things. Above all, there was no way I was going to take that flight back to Utah. Not only did I know how much it would have hurt to quit, but what if someone at some future interview once again asked about my biggest failure? Would I have to acknowledge that I’d risen beyond my potential, that I didn’t really have what it took to survive at Harvard, and that I couldn’t bear to be criticized? Besides, after all of last summer’s hoopla in the press, how would I ever live that down? How would my mom?
Confronting myself this way helped me remember what my father had told me so many times while we were golfing together: that everyone makes mistakes—some, like me, certainly more than others—but what matters most is what you do next. Getting that bad grade because I hadn’t sufficiently prepared for Gardner’s course was an error that was definitely worthy of the “D’oh!” journal I had kept during my years at Weber State University. But now the stakes were higher and I needed to do more to make amends. I promised myself that I would try harder from then on not to be so surprised and flustered by setbacks, but rather to use each one as a lesson on how to move forward.
Failing Better
* * *
Just as that Berkeley professor suggested, there is research supporting the idea that the ability to “fail well”—staying calm despite adversity, and making the most of experience learned through mistakes—predicts success in a variety of professional fields. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs frequently recite the mantra “Fail early and often,” acknowledging the obvious truth that never failing suggests you haven’t really tried. Howard Gardner himself has commented on this phenomenon, writing, in his 1998 book, Extraordinary Minds, that high-achieving people share “a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses, for accurately analyzing the events of their own lives, and for converting into future successes those inevitable setbacks that mark every life.”