Chodron Pema - Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better: Wise Advice for Leaning into the Unknown

Also by Pema Chdrn

Books

How to Meditate
Practicing Peace
When Things Fall Apart
Start Where You Are
The Places That Scare You
The Wisdom of No Escape
Taking the Leap
Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change
No Time to Lose

Audio

Walking the Walk
How to Meditate
Unconditional Confidence
No Time to Lose
Getting Unstuck
Pure Meditation

Sounds True

Boulder, CO 80306

2015 Pema Chdrn

Foreword Seth Godin

Sounds True is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author and publisher.

Cover and book design by Lisa Kerans

Cover image Shutterstock.com

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chdrn, Pema.

Fail, fail again, fail better : wise advice for leaning in to the unknown / Pema Chdrn.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-62203-531-1

1. Failure (Psychology) 2. Uncertainty. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. Title.

BF575.F14C474 2015

158.1dc23

2015003010

Ebook ISBN 978-1-62203-557-1

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Ani Pema Chdrn was invited to give the commencement address to the 2014 graduating class of Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

This book contains the full text of that speech, plus a Q & A with Tami Simon, publisher of Sounds True, on the topic of failure, regret, and leaning in to the beautiful mystery of life.

To my granddaughter Alexandriawith love and appreciation

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel Beckett

CONTENTS

FORWARD

My first book was published thirty years ago. Finished manuscript in hand, I eagerly sent it off to a famous author, a respected entrepreneur whom I had met a few months earlier. Would you be willing to write the forward to my new book? I asked. My editor and my co-author were both counting on my connection to this man to transform our book into the bestseller we hoped it might become.

Two days later, the response showed up in my mailbox. I would have been happy to contribute to your new book, Seth, but since you spelled foreword wrong, Im afraid I have to pass.

As a first-time author, everything was at stake, and this very personal, very careless failure resonated with me for years to come. I had blown it, really and truly.

A few years ago, I began to think of this differently. What Andy had inadvertently taught me is that forward is far more powerful and important than foreword ever could be.

In the years that followed that book, I got more than a thousand rejections to the book proposals I sent to publishers. I launched projects that didnt work the way I hoped they would. I wrote blog posts that didnt resonate and spread, told stories on stage that didnt hit their mark. All in an effort to go forward.

To use a phrase from Pema Chdrn, to go forward is to give up on getting all the frogs in the bowl.

Perhaps your job in life, your purpose, is to get all the frogs in a bowl and keep them there.

As soon as we get a few frogs in the bowl, they jump out, and we have to start all over again.

Wouldnt it be great, we wonder, if we could just find stability, if everything would work out just the way we hope, if finally, finally all the frogs were in the bowl?

And then what would happen?

If youve signed up for the job of frog trainer, its worth understanding that the only way to actually end up with an entire bowl of stable frogs (every single frog) is to euthanize the frogs. And wheres the joy in a bowl of dead frogs?

No, the jumping frogs arent merely an unfortunate hassle for the frog tamer. They are, in fact, the entire point.

James Carse, author of Finite and Infinite Games, taught us about the infinite game, the game thats not played to win (like soccer or the stock market) but the game thats played to be played. Every move in the infinite game is designed to help our partners, to keep the game moving, to enable the dance to keep moving.

In this powerful essay about failure, our teacher Pema Chdrn connects the frogs and the game. She helps us see, once and for all, that failure is part of success, and that both are essential elements in forward motion, in playing the infinite game.

The generous and irrepressible Pema Chdrn has given us here, in just a few pages, a chance to go forward. We all know that the mire and the muck is just outside our door, waiting to get us stuck, yet Pema teaches us to dance instead. Dance while the frogs continue to jump.

Seth Godin

The Naropa University
2014 Commencement Address

I said to my granddaughter in her freshman year, If you graduate, I will give the talk.

So, apparently, she is graduating.

I have never given a graduation speech before. When I asked for advice, they said, Short. Keep it short.

I thought a lot about what would be helpful to all of you who are about to go out there, not knowing what is going to happen. And you could say that this is true for all of us.

No one ever knows what is going to happen next.

But these transition timesbetween something being set (like being a student and coming back to that each year) and things being uncertainare times of enormous potential.

Anything is possible.

So, now what? Will you be able to get a job?

Big question.

Whats it going to be like to try to support yourself without any help from anybody?

Thats a good question.

I was shown a cover of a book from the 1980s, and the book was called, What Are You Going to Do after College? And on the cover of it was this man graduating in cap and gown, and he was looking out, full of promise, but he was stepping into a vast void, a spiraling-downward vortex. And I thought, gosh, that is a pretty accurate picture of what it is like to graduateeven more now than in the 80s.