Jayson Blair, the Fail Whale and a Rock & Roll Flameout

The Twitter critter affectionately referred to as the Fail Whale recently popped up on my screen, and it seemed apropos, as failure references are cropping up everywhere lately. Take Jayson Blair, the New York Times darling-turned-pariah (for rampant plagiarism) who spoke as part of a journalism ethics panel at Washington and Lee University last Friday.

Say what? You heard right. The university invited Blair to speak at the Journalism Ethics Institute as an example of failure, and this Associated Press article touts his usefulness as a failure example to today’s college students, who grew up being told that they're good enough, they're smart enough, and doggone it, people like them. But when it comes to facing the specter of failure, they are ill prepared.

I also just finished reading Jen Trynin’s “Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be,” an unapologetically honest memoir of being the Next Big Thing in Rock that wasn’t, back in the mid-’90s. As the object of stratospheric expectations in a soul-crushing industry, Trynin ultimately did not live up to the hype heaped upon her or to her own Rock & Roll fairy tale dream.

Truth be told, it’s not just Those Coddled College Students that are ill-prepared for failure. I’ll admit to adhering not only to “look before you leap,” but “look before you leap, then calculate the optimum distance from the edge for takeoff, decide you need the perfect shoes for the run up, take a detour to Sports Authority, look to see if the perfect shoes can be found on sale, berate yourself for forgetting your coupon at home, buy the shoes anyway, get back to the starting line, decide the wind isn’t right ... ,” well, you get the picture.

I don’t think I would be as afraid of failure if it wasn’t so, well—terrifying. But for now I’ll start with the advice of Pema Chodron from the prologue to her book, “The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.” She writes, “At the end of [any] activity, whether we feel we have succeeded or failed in our intention, we seal the act by thinking of others, of those who are succeeding and failing all over the world. We wish that anything we learned in our experiment could also benefit them.”

People succeeding and failing all over the world—it makes me get all goose-bumpy.

Take Blair and Trynin, who are both still plugging away. Blair has started a new venture of, err ... life coach, and Trynin is married, has a daughter and, hey—she wrote a book. According to the back cover bio, “She still rocks, when she feels like it.” Not too shabby.

Here’s to failure. Rock On.

For the curious, here's a video clip of Blair's interview with a W&L senior journalism student after the panel event.

via commonwealthchronicle.com