The Hairball of Success
First Wednesday with Greg, Willing to Fail Big, JAWS holds up, and things that amused me this week.
Risky Business
This is the first edition of the Wednesdays with Greg newsletter. I’m glad you’re here, and humbled you chose to spend some time with me.
Sincerely - thank you.
Willing to Fail Big
Failure and success often feel the same to me.
Both are riddled with anxiety and insecurity. Together they create the deadly cocktail of, “I don’t deserve this” and “you’re going to lose this.”
With failure there is the oppressive self-talk and negation: “I’ve been rejected. I’ll never be good enough.”
With success there is the worry of: “This is good now, but when will it end? When will these good feelings turn on me?”
To be clear, neither of these perspectives is good, true, or beautiful.
Together, they are bad, false, and downright ugly.
So why is so much of my life — and the lives of countless others — dictated by slavery to one or both of these oppressors?
Fears — of failure and success and spiders and airplanes and bubble gum — always have roots. Throughout our lives, we spend an inordinate amount of time cultivating those roots, watering them, and protecting them.
Then when the harvest comes we’re left with bitter fruit that sprung from the roots of these firmly germinated fears.
“This is not what I thought I was growing.”
My more spectacular successes have often ended with catastrophic failures.
Are these failures the result of self-sabotage? Am I doomed to repeat my failings?
Can I ever experience success without failure cutting in on the dance?
One of the most helpful things I’ve read recently is Scott Adams’s book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
I’m not talking about the whole book. I’m still reading the book.
I’m just talking about the title.
I’m very familiar with the warning to fail early and often. Logically, I understand that failure should teach us lessons that, in our advanced emotionally intelligent and mature state, we can hold and look at with complete understanding and say, “Ah yes, I see how this painful thorn in my life is actually an unending cornucopia of knowledge and bountiful learning! How blessed am I for such lessons as these!”
But fears are fears and there’s a reason I don’t watch scary movies or chew gum.
I don’t like things that freak or gross me out and I tend to avoid them at all costs.
(Ask my kids about how their dad has reacted in the past when he discovers gum in the house. I’m not defending fears and phobias, but I won’t pretend they don’t exist, either).
Failure — because of a lifetime connection to success and the accompanying fears they each bring into my life — is something I have avoided more and more the further I fall into my fifties.
But this also means I avoid success more and more.
Again, it’s not rational, but it’s there.
In his snarky and sarcastic style, early on in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams managed to bust through the idea that failure was something to avoid.
Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value. - Scott Adams
There’s something about Adams’s brazenness that, for me, knocked those two companion fears on their tail feathers.
Adams talks about about “grabbing failure by the throat and squeezing it until it coughs up a hairball of success.”
This throws all of my thoughts of the interconnectivity of success and failure on its head.
I’ve often seen eventual failure (as I defined it) as the output of successful behavior.
The rise [pride] always comes before the fall, and all that.
Other times, I see failure as the output of my own inadequacies.
Then you have a guy like Adams that suggests we all “forget about passion when you’re planning your path to success” and that “everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.”
Have I been leaving all the good stuff I have in me on the table (or in the bubbling vat of my life) because I’m afraid to muddle through the gunk?
Has my avoidance of more rejection and “failure” actually been the thing that’s keeping me from having successes that are genuine successes that don’t end with me seeking additional therapy?
Perhaps so.
And this is the impetus for launching this newsletter, and why I’ve begun releasing my completed novel, Eighty-Sixed, in serialized form.
This is the book that back in 2015 I was sure would lead to success, but ended up with a series of near-misses with agents, along with a slew of rejections.
Adams got me thinking: what if I define what success is for my writing? What if success can be found in allowing my creativity to run rampant and seeking out as many failures as possible, rather than avoiding them as much as I avoid bubble gum?
What if the successes are in the missteps?
So here we are. The first of what I hope will be many missteps.
I’m glad you’re here.
But don’t expect me to try gum anytime soon. That’s a non-starter.
Next week I’ll tell you about the three key rejections in my life that I think got me on the trail to avoiding failure, and how thankful I’ve become in recent weeks as a result of them.
This amused me.
The other day, the Apple Photos widget on my phone recommended this old photo I took maybe twelve years ago.
All I saw was the look on my son Ben’s face. He’s the one in the middle.
If I had to guess, he’s in second or third grade here. He just started his second year in college studying mechanical engineering.
Ben (and one of his older brothers) were diagnosed with high-functioning autism from a fairly early age.
This look on his face? It was a pretty regular thing at this time in our lives.
Ben could be the absolute sweetest kid around. Just a joy.
But if he didn’t like something?
He REALLY didn’t like it.
And there was no snapping him out of it.
This was the first day of school, obviously.
When I zoomed in on this, I immediately took a screenshot and sent it to our personal family group text and said, “If Ben and Tommy (his younger brother also featured here) ever start a podcast, this needs to be the cover photo.
But I couldn’t stop there and pulled it into Canva and made the actual cover photo.
Tommy (who is now 18 and taller than us all at 6’7”) wanted the original photo.
But apparently, I’m the only one who thought this fake cover photo was hysterical.
Books Consumed
Here are the books that have my attention this week:
Creative Calling by Chase Jarvis has been an excellent companion to the Scott Adams book. It has further awakened in me the need to be more courageous (and protective) of creative endeavors, and to ignore the naysayers from throughout my life who did their best to make me think I was wasting time whenever I wanted to write one true sentence (yes, that’s a Hemingway thing) or paint one beautiful picture. Jarvis tends to veer off in different places that make the book meander more than I’d prefer, but in other places, he says things that bring me to wonderful daydreams and the permission to wander through creative endeavors.
Wise Guy by Mitch Pileggi is the basis for the movie Goodfellas. Back when I got my first apartment by myself when I was nineteen, Goodfellas was one of the few movies I owned on VHS. I didn’t have cable, and very few channels via rabbit ears, so I’ve seen Goodfellas more times than I can count. For some reason, I never tracked down the book. Like Creative Calling, it meanders a bit with many stories repeated from different points of view, but it’s a very easy read. I’m a slow reader but I feel like I’m breezing right through this.
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams. I said enough about this above.
Liturgy of the Hours (Currently on Volume IV). Last January, a priest who listens to our Adventures in Imperfect Living podcast heard me talk about my goal of one day praying the morning and evening prayers from the Liturgy of the Hours every day.
I said once I did this for a year that I’d reward myself with the full four-volume set. I went to check the mail for Rosary Army one day, and this priest surprised me by sending me the entire set.
This was right after I’d given up the goal after I’d stumbled (failed?) earlier in the month.
I’d gone six weeks in a row and then missed a day and just gave up. But then he sent me the books and I immediately picked them back up again. I haven’t missed the Office of Readings or morning and evening prayers since then. I’ve gone almost seven months in a row after years of failing to go a month.
Again, choking failure until it coughs up the hairball of success.
JAWS Holds Up
Last Saturday was apparently “National Cinema Day.”
I have no idea if this was an already existing thing, or if it was recently made up in an effort to get people back in theaters after Covid nearly killed movie theater chains.
Anyway, tickets for all shows were $3.
I sent a group text to my wife and our friends, Mac and Katherine and told them JAWS would be in IMAX.
Here’s how that went down:
Between those texts and the actual showing, I ended up having to buy three more tickets as miscellaneous children of ours wanted to join us.
About a year ago I actually got into a bit of a JAWS kick when I was inspired to draw a picture of Roy Scheider as Sheriff Brody.
Here’s the final product:
You can get it on a coffee mug (I’m literally drinking my coffee right now out of a mug with this image on it).
And here’s a video of the drawing process if you’re interested:
Did JAWS hold up? Absolutely.
Interestingly, after drawing that picture in 2021, I checked out the original Peter Benchley book on Kindle from the local library and kind of hated the book.
In the book, Hooper (Richard Dreyfus’s character) was a complete sleaze who had a lecherous affair with Brody’s wife, who was also a terrible character. Combined, they made Brody look paranoid and weak.
Oh, and in the book, the mafia was the reason why the mayor refused to close the beach.
In the movie, the characters are so much more appealing and sympathetic and real. This is one of the only examples where the movie is far superior to the book.
I loved how Steven Spielberg allowed scenes to breathe, and for the characters to think. Modern audiences would find it slow by today’s standards, but I was taken aback by how real the characters were, how nuanced and vibrant and strong and weak all at the same time.
And on a cleaned-up IMAX print? It was gorgeous.
It was also fantastic seeing both my 22-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter falling prey multiple times to all the jump scare scenes that I’ve seen so many times.
It was a nearly sold-out show, for a movie that was first released in 1975.
When I first sent out that group text, I had no real intention of going to the movie until Katherine said, “I want to see that.”
So glad we did.
Final Thoughts
Let me know your thoughts on this first edition of Greg Takes a Risk!, as well as what you think of the prologue to Eighty-Sixed that I released last week.
Go find some failures and choke the hairballs of success out of them.