There’s only one way to learn from failure

Live “whole ass” or die

Ron Swanson, easily a top five sitcom character of all time, is played by Nick Offerman on the show Parks & Rec. His character became known for his brash one-liners.

"I’m a simple man. I like pretty, dark-haired women and breakfast food." 

"Any dog under fifty pounds is a cat and cats are useless." 

"Fishing relaxes me. It's like yoga, except I still get to kill something."

My personal favorite Swansonism is "Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing." In other words, caring about one thing and doing it well is better than being mediocre at multiple things.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a documentary about Jiro Ono, one of the most accomplished sushi chefs in the world, featured one of his apprentices, Daisuke Nakazawa, who had to wash rice for four years before he was able to touch fish. Can you imagine, instead of the time you spent at university, washing rice every single day? Never has a man whole-assed one thing more than Daisuke did with rice. 

I think about Daisuke Nakazawa a lot. I, too, try to whole-ass what I do, whether it’s building an annual marketing and communications strategy for a startup or folding the laundry. If I’m going to do something, I care about doing the thing well because I’ll either succeed or, at worst, experience effective failure I can learn from. 

Failing, on its own, is not enough to help you grow. The world is replete with quotes about the importance of failure, from Michael Jordan, the best basketball player ever: "I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed,” to Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido: "Failure is the mother of all success.” But they’re all leaving out one, critical element that transforms a screw up into an effective failure.

Caring.

Early in my career transition to tech PR I made a mistake I still remember; I put a press release out on the newswire with the wrong number. I wrote “65,000,”when referring to the number of customers a client had. It was supposed to read “75,000.”

Press releases, for those who don’t know, are not editable, unlike most digital content. If a blog or a paragraph on a website or a LinkedIn post has a typo, you can quickly fix it, push the update, and no one is the wiser. Press releases are final final. Once they are distributed on the newswire and out in the world, the only way to fix an error is to retract the release and spend thousands of dollars reissuing a new one. Seemingly innocuous typos become intractable errors. 

So when the press release announcing the company’s new $60 million dollar fundraise had a typo, the client was, to say the least, not happy. My boss, Leslie, was even unhappier. I was unhappiest. I remember the pit in my stomach that felt like it weighed a hundred pounds; I remember the pricks of sweat on my skin; I remember acute shame. 

I panicked. 

So I did the only thing I could think of: I called Leslie and offered to resign to try to make it right. “And so dies my burgeoning career in tech PR,” I thought. I don’t remember exactly what Leslie told me on the call, but it amounted to something like: “Shut up, don’t let it ever happen again, and go back to work.” (Dear reader, Leslie, to this day, remains one of the best bosses I’ve ever had and I’m delighted to call her a friend). 

I never made a mistake like that again.

When I work, I “whole ass.” No one was more disappointed or upset than I was at the typo. It was, to be frank, a stupid mistake. I really gave a shit not just because I was starting off a new career trajectory and I didn’t want to screw it up (though that’s true), and not just because I let other people down (though that’s true), but because I failed to reach the high bar I set for myself. The press-release-typo-kerfuffle wasn’t the first time I failed to meet my own expectations, and it won’t be the last. 

That won’t stop me from trying. 

Genuinely caring — making an emotional investment in work, doing more than checking boxes because of a belief in the intrinsic value of doing something well — is increasingly uncommon. Record low numbers of people across all age groups say their job is important to their identity. 

And it’s not just work. We’re all overloaded with information, and it feels like something horrific is always happening somewhere in the world. The psychological exhaustion from everything everywhere all of the time makes caring about work, life, social issues, friends and family — everything — harder. 

But apathy is the path to nowhere. 

Caring is the path to growth.

Care because you will fail. Care about mistakes you make at work, learn from them, become a better professional, and advance your career. Care about being the best partner or friend, so when you fight, you can learn from it and forge stronger relationships with the people you care about. Care about little things, like folding the laundry, so you don’t deal with wrinkled shirts that look like shit. 

Daisuke Nakazawa cared. He washed rice for four years on the path to perfecting his craft. Today, he’s head chef of Sushi Nakazawa, a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City. I can personally say, having frequented the Sushi Nakazawa location in DC, his work paid off — the tasting course is a crescendo of sashimi that delights me every single time. 

So whether it’s work, or your marriage, or washing the dishes, take a cue from Diasuke Nakazawa and Ron Swanson.

Care.

Care because the pain you feel from a mistake you’ve made is the only way to learn; it’s the only way to grow, to evolve, to live.