I’ve got a bit of old TG trivia I’m not proud of: I failed my driver’s license exam twice. Yes, feel free to laugh. I didn’t get my license until I was 18, which in hindsight wasn’t the end of the world given Groton, NY—where there wasn’t much to do. Driving down Main Street took about 30 seconds, and the main hangouts were the Sunoco parking lot or a few corn fields. I was a typical teenager, more into staying home, lifting weights, flipping through baseball cards, or watching 90210. The ladies thought I was cute, too.
I wasn’t in a rush to drive my parents’ car anyway—the infamous 1992 Chevy minivan with wood paneling isn’t exactly sexy. The first time I failed, I’d managed to parallel park, then had to do a 3-point turn. I backed up, kept reversing, and hit the curb. Oops. The second time is hazy, but I think it came down to a missed blinker, the speed limit, maybe a near-miss with a pedestrian. The third time was the charm. I studied hard, stayed determined, and nagged my mom to let me drive to the store. I’d pop in my Tribe Called Quest cassette, and we’d head out in the minivan like two bosses. I practiced parallel parking, kept the turns smooth, and kept my hands at ten and two. I used those past failures to improve and get ready for what was next.
Fast forward about twenty years, and I can say I’ve never faced a major traffic ticket or a serious accident (parking tickets don’t count in a big city). My wife, Lisa, and I even survived driving in Australia, where the rules feel surprisingly different.
So what does all this have to do with anything? A lot, actually.
Not long ago I read a great book called The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. The author, Megan McArdle, argues that we shouldn’t fear failure or treat it as an enemy. She introduces the idea of “normalcy bias,” which explains why people freeze in a crisis or why even successful companies struggle to learn from past mistakes. In her view, and mine, failing is how we get better.
This isn’t just about sports or youth trends; it’s about resilience. If everyone always wins or never faces adversity, how do we grow, adapt, or improve? It leads to stagnation and a reluctance to try new things.
There’s a lot we can learn from failing and from failing well. Take the fitness world, for example. I can look back at programs I wrote five years ago and cringe. We once used the Sleeper Stretch for every throwing athlete and tested for GIRD (Glenohumeral Internal Rotation Deficit). When we saw GIRD, we added more Sleeper Stretches to their routines.
Later we realized that GIRD can be a normal adaptation in the throwing shoulder. It’s only a red flag when it comes with a loss of total range of motion. Those Sleeper Stretches may have made things worse, not better. We learned from that failure and overhauled how we assess the shoulder and how we design programs for overhead athletes in general.
And that’s the core of writing training programs: I don’t think I’ve ever written a perfect one. I assess someone’s static posture and how they move, ask about training history and injuries, even their favorite Mutant Ninja Turtle, and then craft a plan to move them from point A to point B as safely and efficiently as possible. I’ll often rearrange things, cross out drills, or drop certain exercises. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.
Basically, I fail a lot. But I use those failures to correct my mistakes, learn, and get better—hopefully without making the same errors again.
So, what about you? How well do you handle failure?
And yes, I probably just jinxed myself.
