Dear grandson,
Well, there must be a lot going on in your life to be disinterested in hard cash! So, there is $350.00 of birthday money waiting for you as soon as you send me a bank account number so I can Zelle it to you.
I was a bit concerned about you, due to our inability to get together, so I checked in with your dad to see what was going on. Let me be clear: not to rat you outđ but to find out more about your life. He gave me a sense of the challenges you have been facing during your first semester of college. So, I thought I might write you a note about that and perhaps help guide how you think about the past five months.
Let me start with a few summary comments. No one of importance to you – other than your parents, who appropriately deal with the day to day – is going to care about any measure of performance you experienced during your first semester of college. It does not measure your intelligence. It is not a predictor of future behavior. It will not be part of the evaluation of you for graduate work, or jobs, or whatever. It is an indicator of the challenges of going from high school to college. As one moves from one level to a higher level, in just about anything, rarely is the challenge of that move correctly anticipated. But a challenge it is which is why these kinds of things are called levels. All smart people know this.
I write from my own experience. I dropped biology at ten weeks during my first semester because I was flunking it. That salvaged a âCâ average. During my first semester I sat in the last row back in classes with 300 kids, where even superman could not have read the notes the professor was writing on a board. (Yes, I know. You donât exactly have writings on blackboards anymore.) Moreover, I couldnât have seen the notes if I had been 50% closer because, unknown to me, my eyes did not work and I badly needed glasses. I got them. Beyond that, I really did not know how to take notes. I slid by in high school without having to learn how. And study? I did not know how to study, and I didnât even try to learn how until my second semester, sophomore year.
A big difference between high school and college is that in high school you largely study what you are told to study and find a way to survive. College work is much more challenging, and you canât just get by. This also means that you need to be studying subjects that really interest you to find the energy to learn. At least in my day, a lot of the freshman courses were required, and many of them far from my interests. I became a superstar in my second semester, sophomore year, when I began to study subjects that really interested me.
OK, so thatâs a little context. A pretty smart guy named Harvey Mackay, who writes a newspaper column, wrote a piece a few weeks ago that made me think about you. He titled it, âKeep in mind that failure is not fatal.â Put in my words, everyone needs to try to live in the moment which means let go of the negative stuff from the past and try hard not to worry about the future consequences of your present actions. All you can do is choose the best course, make it happen, and then accept the consequences, unencumbered by what happened before, and by what might happen in the future. If you donât like the consequences, examine the factors that led to failure, adjust them, and get on with it.
This is as close to universal advice as you can get. It has even reached pop psychology in sports:
âHave the ability to live and let go.â
âLearn and burn.â
Mackay sites Dr. Cindra Kamphoff, a mental performance coach, who said âyou have to learn from the mistake quickly and then we have to burn it. We have to let it go. Thatâs the heart of it. The reason we want to do that is to remain in the present moment because the past play, we cannot do anything about. We canât change it. All we can do is rest for the next play.â
In golf, which is a great teacher for life, we call this having a very short memory. This has burned in so deeply with some professional athletes that they perform a sort of âmistake ritualâ to cleanse a mistake from their mind. They even call it âthe flush.â So perhaps you can collect any documents that relate to poor grades, take them outside, and perform a ritual by burning them. That wouldnât be my style. But, hey, I am not particularly hip.
My style was and is to really think hard about stuff that is important to me. Not repeating my failures would be on that list. I have written to you kids so many times about your âcircle of influence.â The emphasis before has generally been to separate yourself from the things you do not control. So, even with failure, you need to do that. However, failure is also the time to stare down the things you do control. Mackay list these four question:
What went right? No matter what class gave you trouble, there were things you did right with regard to that class. Focusing on what you did right may also reveal that you did much less wrong. So, you donât have as much to correct. I like to play competitive golf – yes, even at my age. Sometimes I leave the course so upset with my game that day. But I always look back a day or so later to understand what I did right, what actually went wrong, and how to correct it. This is how I regain my confidence.
What went wrong? Make a list of your mistakes. If you donât identify your mistakes â not studying more (effort), not studying correctly (process), not asking for help (a little humility), not being sure you understood the rules (seeking clarity, assuming nothing), not saying no to that distracting activity the night before (discipline), even selecting a class you really did not like (judgment), or selecting a great class, but one you simply were not yet ready for (being unrealistic)â then you will not focus on them. Without focus, you wonât correct them.
Are you repeating mistakes? In golf, in fact in all athletic events, one of the great contributors to failure is thinking about what you want your body to do â your technique, your move. Hereâs the problem. The part of your brain you use to make an athletic move is different from the part you use to think cognitively about something. In big time sports, thinking makes doing impossible. I know this!! I have read two books about this: âFearless Golfâ and âThe Mental Game of Tennisâ. Pete Carroll, the former USC coach and now Seahawks coach, had the USC football players read the book on tennis. (No such book existed about football.) I know this!! I believe this! But I canât stop myself from doing it. I keep repeating this mistake. Sometimes I get away with it. Generally, I donât. So, my point, sometimes it is hard not to repeat mistakes. But you must try. My problem is that I simply donât have the confidence that my body will make the right move if I donât think about it. Unlike Tiger Woods, I donât have a repeat swing. But, the books say, hey dude, whatever it is that your body wants to do you must let it do it because if you think about it, your body will be unable to do it. So, prioritize your mistakes from hardest to fix to the easiest and destroy those easy ones right away. As you get to the hard ones, make a plan, think it out, and take your best shot â your very best â at correcting them.
What can you salvage? Failure is an end conclusion of something you pursued. It is not a measure of everything you did or accomplished. So, examine the last five months and identify the things you did that worked because these are the things you want to repeat.
There is also one more thing that can be said in this era of speed and technological change, an environment of which you long to be part. Tom Watson, who led IBM during my early days â the technology company most respected before the PCs and the Internet, equal to or better than Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or whichever, in its day â said to âdouble your rate of failure.â Why? Because failure is a great teacher, âa harsh one. perhaps, but the best.â So, the more you do, the more mistakes you will make, the smarter you will get. In short, there are different kinds of failures. There are times when you will line the balls up right and just get it wrong.
I guess I am comfortable writing all of you kids letters like this because I have made a lot of mistakes. But I will credit myself with this as well. I have also put a lot of balls in the air. Conservatism and risk avoidance were never my game.
This is what I know about you. You are a smart guy. You are inquisitive. You are a doer. So, no matter what setbacks you may have had in the Fall, I will bet on you before most anyone on any day.
Love,
Jack
