#76 | Strategic Life Creators Series #5: May the Best Failure Win!

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Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel

May the best failure win. Really? Let me explain.

When we go through the collaborative proactive problem solving process with our autistic young adults, trying to address an unsolved problem, where there is probably a lagging skill present,  we are not going to succeed in every experiment we agree to make. That's the truth. And that's the good news. Here's what we want to do with those Mis-Takes.

Ray Dalio was one of the 100 wealthiest persons on Earth, according to Forbes, and has a company Bridgewater Associates, that is the fifth most impactful company in the United States, says that the whole point of life is making mistakes.

He believes that we go through this process, one step at a time.

1. We come up with an audacious goal.
2. We almost always experience some form of failure.
3. Then we figure out what we're learning. 
4. Finally, we figure out how to improve our results.

Of course, that propels us out to an even more audacious goal, because after all, we're human and we just want to get better all the time. We just have continuously evolving ambitions.

Notice how this circular process is an imitation of the hero's journey.

• The hero has a challenge put it in front of him/her, a difficult situation where she needs to save mankind.
• She screws it up.
• Then she figures out what really needs to happen.
• And then she puts that in place and she goes and makes it happen,
• and of course brings back everything she's learned to her tribe.
• And then there goes the next challenge.

So here's what Ray Dalio says. He says I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and feel well. By feeling well, I mean, being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game. Interesting.

We all know that learning from our struggles is important because we've all had to do that.

But with our autistic high school graduates, we need to be more explicit on how that learning can happen. And here's the best way.

Writing. Harvard Business Review, recently published an article called Writing can help us heal faster. And there's even a book above it. Louise DiSalvo writing is a way of healing how telling our stories, transforms our lives. And we know that our autistic high school graduates had a bit of a bumpy road getting to that goal, and now that they're trying to decide what they want in their life, and what they're willing to do next, to get it. They're pretty concerned about failure. After all, they've lived in a world that doesn't cater in any way, shape or form to their different brain. The world stays within that bell shaped curve of needs, and really only addresses two thirds of what the world really needs, as we've seen in the education system, and sometimes in the healthcare system. That there's a good tag tail over here where it's just not suited and a good tail over here where, okay, they can manage because they have superpowers.

But most of the world caters to those middle needs, and those didn't encompass our kids needs. So we had to put IEPs and Viva force in place to even the playing field to accommodate their brain’s differences. Now that they're out of school, or in higher education or in the work world, they're finding that there's even fewer combinations unless they ask for them. And that's the purpose of adulting is to recognize what are the thoughts, emotions and actions we need to take  to encourage in order for them to get what they want, once they've decided that's what they want. 

So, how do we get them to learn from these mistakes? The writing practice that so many suggest is most helpful for those that don't hold back and provide details, especially about feelings, and they reach for what is a lesson and all of this recognizing that the only way out is to go through them. We can't go around them. If we miss the opportunities to learn from our mistakes, they will come back later. And we've seen some literary giants express what they've learned in very difficult situations such as Victor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning, where he really found that the space between the situation and his thoughts was where his power of amazing revelation (that I'm glad he shared with all of us) and is the root of many lessons from wisdom teachers. 

So what does a good process look like where we learn from our mistakes? I believe it has these seven steps. Now I know some of our kids have dysgraphia; they're not interested in writing. They have a hard time getting the thoughts out of their heads and producing. The input came in, they processed it but trying to get it outside of them is not easy to do. So I suggest that we need to be at times their scribe, and if we're not the best, that maybe they don't want us to hear all the details. Perhaps they could record their thoughts. In an app like otter.ai, which not only records their voice, but also transcribes the words so that they can look at them later. And here are the questions that we want to ask. What was my physical state, where and what had I eaten recently? Was I tired? Had I recently gone through something that had already triggered me and here I was in another situation that was making things difficult for me to process what was going on inside of me? And  then what did I do that wasn't aligned with my essence, my true self, the one that is in there always and wants to keep me centered. And the more I listened to it, the more aligned I am with who I truly want to be. What was the situation that triggered it? Any details are really helpful here. And then what was the thought that triggered the emotion and colored my actions? We can find that thought or even that fragment of a thought like oh god or just something, some kind of a thought that helps us recreate what our thinking was at the time of this mistake and did I just pause and sit with that emotion or did I immediately lash out or punch out or walk away or say something snippy? We've all done this. And what did I learn as a result that comes from seeing what could I have done differently? And maybe even I can take some perspective on this Stear map to figure out what the other person may have been thinking at the time that my mistake occurred. And then finally, what will I do next time? This process is golden. It works so well when we take the time to do it. Sometimes we're reluctant but when we do do it especially in the presence of a loving, loving guide, who is always on our side, like we are as the parent of our autistic high school graduates. Try doing it first for you. And then you'll feel even more prepared to teach and encourage your autistic young adult to practice learning from their mistakes because the bigger we fail, the more we learn, and the more likely we are to take that next step. That's going to get us a life that we love. Bye for now.