The Woman in the Arena
In high school, my English teacher gave the class a piece of advice I will never forget: fail loudly. The context then was to read aloud with confidence despite not knowing the correct pronunciation of words in Socrates’ “The Apology,” but that bit of wisdom has become a mantra for me in every facet of my life since.
On April 23, 1910 Theodore Roosevelt, a year after leaving office, delivered a speech in Paris titled “Citizenship in a Republic.” In his speech, Roosevelt chastised the cynics who jeer at the ones trying to make a difference in a passage that would come to be known as the “Man in the Arena.”
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belong to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
It takes courage to fail loudly, arguably more than to succeed. Failing has become so taboo today, in an age of social media feeds overflowing with everyone’s every achievement. We have optimized success to the point of not even mentioning the process. A pristine finished product is all that’s wanted. No admission of the false starts, the trials and hardships. And god forbid you fail. The critics circle like vultures as soon as you begin, willing you to misstep, to stumble, to fall. Then when you do, they pity the way you tried.
It’s a shame these naysayers never allow themselves the privilege of trying. They will never know the satisfaction of a fight well fought or, conversely, the sting of defeat. So they will never learn. Life’s greatest lessons hide in the trying, not the outcome nor the triumph. We learn through the process, because it is in the process you find the subtleties of what makes win and loss. When we dare to fail greatly, I think we dare to do something else too: we dare to believe that we are worthy despite the outcome and dare to try again.
I hope we will fail so greatly, so loudly, that the outside eye may think we have won. And I suppose we will have won, though in a less obvious way. We will gain the experience of doing the thing; the confidence to vocalize our pitfalls despite the norm of burying them; we will rise above the critics who mask their insecurity behind a veil of self-righteousness.
As you try and try again, take refuge in knowing your critics have never known the sweet taste of victory or the sourness of defeat; and be proud of your failures, because they are merely proof that you ever had the courage to try.
