Address by the Guest Speaker Mr T.D. Middleton How To Fail!
Address by the Guest Speaker
I
Speech Day
10
t is an interesting thought that Mr Fuller mentioned my achievements but he didn’t mention any of my failures! For nine months after leaving Zimbabwe for the UK in 2002 I could not get a job at all, though I applied for every position within schools at numerous schools; I could not even get a job teaching English at the government school in Scotland where I had started my teaching career over 20 years before; when I did do some supply teaching for two weeks at that school soon after (in exactly the same classroom as 20 years previously) there was one lesson where I realised with fi ve minutes to go that I had absolutely no control over what was happening in the classroom. And I could go on and mention many, many other failures. It is interesting too that there will be no mention of failures here at today’s Prize Giving – we celebrate, rightly, the successes and achievements of individuals and of the school as a whole. But we keep quiet about failures. A friend of mine told me how he had cruised through his top Independent school in South Africa, serving as Headboy, captaining the first team rugby, gaining excellent results and awards; how he had gone to Rhodes University and came out as top student each year and again served in positions of responsibility; how he had gone to teach at another top independent school in South Africa before being appointed the youngest ever housemaster at that school; and then how, after 12 successful years as Housemaster he had taken on the role of Public Relations/Marketing Officer for that school – and had a nervous breakdown. What struck me so vividly then, and ever since, was his comment: “No-one ever told me how to fail!” Success came so easily for him that he did not know how to fail – like so many others. So this morning I would like to teach you how to fail! Of course, we all know how to go about failing – sleep in late, do little work in class, party hard and long and so on. So, no, it is not so much about what to do in order to fail but rather what we should do when we do fail, as fail we will all do, at some stage or another, in one form or another. The short answer is really quite simple though perhaps paradoxical. We Mr Tim Middleton need to deal with failure in exactly the same way as we deal with success – or should deal with success. It was Rudyard Kipling in his well-known poem Then too we need to see the bigger “If” who wrote that “If we can meet with triumph and disaster and treat picture in the events that happen. these two imposters just the same” then we will be a man. We need to treat Often our failures are in fact the failure in the same way as we treat success. So how then should we treat prelude to something greater. them both? Very simply, we need to APPLY PERSPECTIVE to both. For many years I had on my desk a plaque on which were written the words “IT WILL PASS”. In one corner of the plaque I had written “The Praise” and in the other I had written “The Problem” while at the bottom I had written “The Opportunity” – each of these will pass. I realised very quickly as a Head that the praise of parents, staff or pupils can pass very quickly – you can be the saviour one day, the villain the next! The praise passes so that we do not become too big-headed. Equally that horrendous, allencompassing, massive problem that confronts us will in a few days or weeks pass and we will wonder what the fuss was about. The problem passes so we do not become down-hearted. We need to see them both in perspective, in the following ways. First, we need to see the bad things that happen, the failures, in perspective. Michael Jordan, the all-time great basketball player, once said: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” Thomas Edison, who is described as “deserving the lion’s share of credit for lighting up the world… with an incandescent bulb but more for his creation of the fi rst genuinely safe and economically viable system for generating and distributing light and power – worldwide” has the patent for over 1090 inventions but when he was asked about all his failures his reply was simple: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Both these men kept the bad things in perspective. The same can be said of the university student who wrote home to her parents. Dear Mum and Dad, It has now been three months since I left for college. I have been remiss in writing and am very sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down...Okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out of the window of my dormitory when it caught fire shortly after my arrival, are pretty St John’s College