Jon R. Becker - The Flunked-Out Professor: Six Steps to Turn Your Big Failure Into Bigger Success

PRAISE FOR
THE FLUNKED-OUT PROFESSOR

I went to college as an escape from the farm. While perhaps not a noble reason, it allowed me to fully accept responsibility for who and where I was. The Flunked-Out Professor provides much needed guidance I wish I had for that critical time of lifewhere decisions are made about relationships, careers, health habits and more. These six steps will gently guide you through those critical decisions and course corrections that can lead to your ultimate success.

DAN MILLER
New York Times bestselling author
of 48 Days to the Work You Love

Jon shows us that you can flunk out of college, make less than stellar life-choices, and still end up on top! From flunk-out to faculty member, Jons humorous story will show you that your big failure doesnt have to define your even bigger future!

KARY OBERBRUNNER
author of Your Secret Name,
The Deeper Path, and
Day Job to Dream Job

Successful people fail all the time. In The Flunked-Out Professor, Jon helps you understand that failure is a regular part of life and shares the six simple steps he took to go from a college flunk-out to an award-winning college math instructor. Along the way, he inspires us to reach for our own goals as well.

CLIFF RAVENSCRAFT ,
Business Mentor, Life Coach

The most successful people on the planet have failed too many times to count; the only difference is they use that to their advantage. In this book, Jon shows us that failure is actually a key ingredient to success, provided that we are willing to learn from it. Its true that success can sometimes be a painful process, but the rewards are worth the pain!

KRIS PAVONE ,
Business Mentor and Life Coach,
www.krispavone.com

J.K. Rowling describes the rejections she received before finally publishing her first Harry Potter book. Persisting in the face of failure can feel overwhelming. Jons personal story provides practical steps to learn from our failures and become successful.

DR. ROBIN MORGAN
Professor of Psychology,
Indiana University Southeast

The Flunked-Out Professor

Six Steps to Turn Your Big Failure Into Bigger Success

Jon R. Becker

Copyright 2019 Jon R. Becker

Printed in the United States of America

Published by Author Academy Elite

P.O. Box 43, Powell, OH 43035

www.AuthorAcademyElite.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-64085-435-2

Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-64085-436-9

Ebook: 978-1-64085-437-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956970

For Katie

I am so blessed!

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

When Jon Becker asked me to write a foreword for this book, I asked, You mean, tell everyone what a screwup you were back in high school? Because MAN, were you a screwup.

You cant pass up that kind of straight line with someone youve been friends with for four decades.

What makes Jons story useful, though, is not just the way he has overcome early disappointments to achieve success. Its how universal the first part of his story is.

Not all of us have flunked out of college. But all of us, at some time in our lives, have encountered failure. In fact, most of us, if were being honest with ourselves, have failed at something big, and for reasons that had everything to do not with our stars, but with ourselves. We fail to take a task seriously. We fail to think through the long-term consequences of our actions. We become too convinced of our own magnificence, too intoxicated with overconfidence to take note of the flashing warning signs around us. We tell ourselves the rules dont apply to us. We double down on bad bets instead of cutting our losses. And the next thing we know, were failures.

In particular, many of us have encountered failure in high school and college, because adolescence is a roiling cauldron of all those counterproductive behaviors. As Donald Rumsfeld would put it, we dont know what we dont know. Its the job of the adults in our lives to keep us from failing in truly cataclysmic, life-altering ways, but that still leaves teenagers free to discover for themselves some of the bad things that happen when you do what feels good in the moment because the future is unimaginably distant. We discover, in our immaturity, that we are not, in fact, the culmination of Gods plan, but vulnerable to the same flaws as all our ancestors back to Eden.

Theres a reason director Amy Heckerling titled her high-school reimagining of Jane Austen Clueless. It was in those clueless high school years that Jon and I met. We bonded over our fondness for music, theater, and the Chicago Cubs, which at that time was still an unrequited love. Its true that our teachers, if asked to predict Jons future, probably would not have picked Jon as the one who would go on to a teaching career of his own. But neither would they have predicted him as the author and central character of a book with flunkout on the cover. This isnt one of those stories where all the neighbors tell the media that they knew the guy was a time bomb and thats precisely the point. Some of our failures are easily foreseeable, but others creep up on us a step at a time a decision that doesnt work out, a spontaneous decision to blow off a responsibility, a bad break at an inopportune moment until we find ourselves flat on our back, wondering how the ground came up so fast to meet us.

Often, we react in those moments by cursing other people or our own rotten luck. Sometimes, thats even partially true. But it doesnt do a thing to get us back on our feet.

Jon has been there because weve all been there. We havent all succeeded in the same ways; in fact, since youre holding this book right now, perhaps youre still searching for reassurance that theres not just light at the end of the tunnel, but any exit from the tunnel at all.

Dont give up would make for a very short book, though its a necessary starting point. What Jon has demonstrated is how to make the next chapter one of triumph over our failures and flunkouts: taking stock of your abilities and maximizing them, recommitting to doing whats necessary to hold the line until you can begin to make headway, and surrounding yourself with supportive people who keep giving you encouragement along the way. Im happy Jon and I have been there for each other in our flunkout moments. I think youll be happy to discover Jon is there for yours.

Eric Berman

Indianapolis, Indiana

2018

INTRODUCTION

LOST

I never wanted to be a cruise ship janitor, a private investigator, or a truck driver. And I definitely didnt want to enlist in the United States Air Force. But at age nineteen, those were some of the options I considered. I never imagined that I would one day become an award-winning college math teacher. My future looked depressing.

I went off to college just eighteen months earlier with high expectations for myself. I set goals I wanted to achieve, but unfortunately, I hadnt thought through many of those goals. They were impulsive decisions based on what those around me were doing. They were unrealistic goals that didnt tie into my passions and strengths. And, as a result, I found myself in a recruiters office just one signature away from heading off to Air Force boot camp. What had brought me to this point?