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Try, try again
Last spring, as hundreds packed into a parking lot in Belleville to celebrate local breweries, a different kind of event made headlines.
Amidst the rush of noise and crowds, one man collapsed, sparking chaos. An apparent heart attack. Another man, local radio personality Tim Durkin, jumped in. With training in first aid, Durkin was able to revive the man before the paramedics arrived. The man survived, and Durkin earned accolades for his heroic rescue.
It’s funny how much outcome has to do with it.
At another, more anonymous moment, a man and his friends are working on a project. It’s summer. It’s hot, dry, sunny. Their work is labourintensive, digging holes. It’s not the kind of thing this man should be doing. He’s overweight and has had a few heart attacks already. His doctor has warned him against this type of work.
A sudden explosion of pain in his chest brings the man down, and in an instant, he’s unconscious, his friends standing over him, concerned but untrained and unable to help.
A witness nearby with first aid training jumps into action. The man isn’t breathing, and doesn’t have a pulse.
The witness demands someone call for an ambulance, then begins administering CPR. He does everything he was trained to do, and he does it right.
No response.
After a few tense minutes, the paramedics arrive. They take over, assess the situation, then cover the man up. The rescue was unsuccessful.
In fact, it’s likely the man had died instantly. The witness hadn’t done anything wrong, he had just been trying to save a dead man. The paramedics inform him as though this will console him, but the implication of this news is not comforting— it just means the witness had been spending minutes breathing into a dead body.
The paramedics take away the man’s body. His friends leave to mourn their loss. The witness is shaken, but there is nothing more than that. The victim died.
The outcome of these two stories was the major difference between them. It’s a quirk of our society that seems obvious, but doesn’t make much sense. We praise success, not effort. Effort, especially when it ends in failure, only leads the person making the attempt to mourn.
And yet it’s effort, especially when it does lead to failure, that we should celebrate.
That’s not to say we should be giving out awards to all participants. That develops people who make minimal effort. But when we celebrate only successes, we miss a huge part of the story.
The Guggenheim Museum in New York City will display artists’ sketches alongside completed works. It shows ugly, misshapen drafts of the finished work, months of painstaking attention to detail, correction, perfecting an idea before we finally see the masterpiece.
It tells us something we don’t always realize: every success, from the beautiful to the heroic, only comes after hundreds of unrecognized failures.
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