Leadership Thought: Leveraging Failure on the Ball Field of Life.

Dear Friends,

I have been umpiring baseball for over 30 years, and as an umpire I have learned you are only as good as your last game. When you think you have arrived and believe your experience has taught you all you need to know, watch out.

Last week on the baseball field I made a couple of serious mistakes on judgement calls that put me in very uncomfortable situations. In both cases I found myself face to face with unhappy coaches, and I couldn’t think of one legitimate excuse for my poor decisions.

I walked off the field that day feeling like a failure, and there are few things more uncomfortable than that.

Whether on the ball field, or in ministry, I have made more mistakes that I ever would have time to admit.

It is always a temptation to ignore those mistakes or blame them on someone else, but when we do, we lose our opportunity to learn from them, so we don’t repeat them again.

Thomas Edison, commenting on one of his many failed experiments, said, “Don’t call it a failure. Call it an education,”

Failure prevents arrogance and egotism. If we were perfect and never made mistakes, who would ever want to be around you?

“Sometimes it takes a painful situation to make us change our ways.” Proverbs 20:30

I recently read an article on failure, and in it pastor Rick Warren shared a lesson I hope I will never forget. He said, “We must always remember the lesson of the whale: that when you get to the top, and you start to blow-that’s when you get harpooned.”

Now I don’t mean to imply that I am near the top as an umpire, or as a pastor-I have had too many failures both on and off the field to claim mistake free status. I am not an expert at anything.

The Bible reminds us that, “Pride leads to destruction and arrogance to downfall.” Proverbs 18:8

The historian James Anthony Fraude writes, “The worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure under a singular and peculiar trial. Peter the apostle, though forewarned three times, denied his Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who knew his nature in its strength and in its weakness, chose him. Successful leaders have learned that no failure is final, whether his own failure or someone else’s. No one is perfect, and we cannot be right all the time Failure and even feelings of inadequacy can provoke humility and serve to remind a leader who is really in charge.” Spiritual Leadership, Oswald Sanders, P. 163

Our attitude toward failure will always determine whether it is of value. It is not failure that is the problem-we all will fail- but it’s our response to failure.

If we learn from it, and we leave it behind us, the chances are that we will not be prone to repeat it again.

Failure is never our enemy if we learn from it.

Yours in faith and friendship,

Tom