Failure and Resilience

And now for something completely different: here's Zach Galifianakis talking about his two weeks as a writer on Saturday Night Live:

Long story short: Galifianakis was a struggling stand-up comedian. After trying out--again--for SNL, he won a contract, moved to New York, got to work . . . and discovered he'd been hired as a writer, not as a cast member. It was cliquish, he said, though he holds no animosity toward the folk there. In the clip he recalls having a sketch of his read out in the writers' room to utter, deathly silence. He says he remembers hearing the AC click off halfway through. Tina Fey, sitting next to him, patted him sympathetically on the shoulder.

It's an awful feeling, he reflects, experiencing that failure from other folk. But by then, he says, he had developed a thick skin thanks to all the times he'd bombed on stage as a comedian. He'd gone through those dark nights of the soul, wondering if he were even funny. It still was awful, but it didn't break him.

I've been thinking a lot about resilience, the ability to endure unpleasant times. So much of growing up, becoming a mature adult, a friend of mine said, is the repeated experience of going through something awful and coming out the other side alive. You realize that discomfort, most of the time, isn't fatal. Your apprehension of discomfort, your efforts to avoid it at all costs--most of the time these burn up more life energy than the experience itself ever does.

There's a sense--I have it too--that a lot of our students nowadays are coming to us less resilient than in the past. Sometimes this manifests as escape tactics--avoidance, distraction, outbursts, panic. Sometimes this turns into mental health emergencies. Other times a lack of resilience radiates out as entitlement: How dare you expect me to do this assignment by X date? Don't you know how stressed that makes me??

What's tricky is that another part of growing up is learning not to tolerate or endure unnecessary pain. You learn to say no to abuse. It's tough when you aren't always sure whether a negative feeling is an unpleasant-but-not-fatal learning experience or an injustice. Sometimes, frankly, our experiences can feature a messy mix of both.

(A whole other post would be about our tendency to romanticize abuse as necessary learning experiences that we then inflict on those we're teaching or mentoring. That's a whole bushel of BS there.)

It's helpful to have people like Galifianakis speaking so frankly about their histories of failure, how failure can be good.

As Jake the dog says:

More tomorrow,

JF