Last night I spent the evening watching the opening night of the NBA. First the reigning champions, the Cavaliers, dominating the new look Knicks, then the Golden State Warriors getting stomped on by the fundamentalists, the Spurs.
Golden State Superteam
Quick synopsis (in case you don’t follow the NBA):
Since July, when Kevin Durant – one of the Top Three players in the NBA – decided to join the Golden State Warriors and leave the team that drafted him, the Seattle Supersonics/Oklahoma City Thunder, the hype machine has been touting the Warriors as the best team EVER assembled.
They have 4 players who were named All NBA last year. All 4 are between the ages 26 and 28. And two of them are Top Three players in the league (Steph Curry and Durant). Those two are the back-to-back-to-back MVPs of the NBA. On top of that, the Warriors won 73 games last year, the most-ever wins in a season. And now they’ve added Durant.
Even if you don’t follow the NBA, that synopsis should give you a good idea how amazing this superteam is (on paper).
Superteam, Super Failure
Yes, they’re a superteam, but last night was an absolute annihilation of the Warriors. The Spurs, who are very well-rounded, shut the Warriors down in the Bay area among many Silicon Valley onlookers. By the end of the game the arena was nearly empty, and the final minutes were painful to watch.
I don’t listen to sports-talk. I gave it up a few years ago when I stopped following the news. But I imagine today’s sports-talk radio will be talking about the blueprint to beat the Warriors, the demise to the superteam, and how Durant/Curry will never live up to the hype. How big a failure last night was and how this team, if they don’t win the NBA championship this year, is a failure.
I disagree.
Failure as a Learning Experience
They played one game last night. One out of 82. They lost, by a large margin. But in failure comes a chance for reflection. They have game tape to watch which they can use to look at their mistakes. In the coming days they’ll have another game, game two of 82, to apply their learning to the next game.
Without failure they’d never learn how to get better. They’d coast along thinking they’ve figured it out, when really they haven’t learned at all. Failure is part of the learning experience.
Society and Failure
Our society is based on success. We put the spotlight on the successes. Those who succeed are the ones people read about and wish to be. We also put-down failures. In school it was always awful to get an “F.” In life people put you down for losing. The media uplifts the Bezos, Musks, Bransons and anyone who’s “rich” and “successful.”
We almost never focus on the small-business owner who fails, or the start-up founder who ran seven businesses into the ground. We focus on the owners and founders who developed billion-dollar companies. But we can’t all be successes. And no success was so without failure. But we don’t care about that. As a society, we want everyone to be successes all the time. It’s not possible, and it shouldn’t be a goal.
I Fail, I Fear, I Survive
I fail, a lot. I am scared of failure, really scared of it.
But somehow, at the end of the day, I figure out how to survive. I live for the next day, and I try to move myself forward. Like the Golden State Warriors, I might get completely destroyed. I might take a 20-point beatdown on my homecourt. I have to remind myself that this is day one, game one. I still have game two to prepare for. And if I focus on my failure then I won’t move forward.
I’ve done a lot of self-reflection in the past couple of days and have come to a new conclusion:
Failure is the inability to learn from mistakes, and repeating the mistakes that make you feel that way on a continual basis. Success is learning from failures, cutting out the bad things, and building on the things you do well. Everyday move forward, learn from past mistakes, and eliminate the things that put you in a failure mindset.