Essay From Edward: The Three Things You Must Do in Life

You must do three things in your life: fail a class, get your heart broken and get fired from a job.

You’ll learn that you survive failure. There’s a taboo against failure in our high-stakes society, a tendency to think of it as unacceptable and ruinous. But that’s why failing a class, getting your heart broken and getting fired from a job is so important. These events are incredibly painful, especially when we really wanted to succeed. They make you feel that YOU are a failure, not that you failed at SOMETHING. Afterwards you’ll realize that you’re still there, still OK, even with that F, even without that boy or girl, even without that job. But you won’t really know that until after you experience it.

You’ll begin to choose more wisely. From a very young age, you’re told by well-meaning parents that you can do whatever you want, if only you put your mind to it. That’s a crock. Most lawyers I know would have failed as doctors, even if they had “put their mind to it.” Most actors I know would have been terrible engineers and vice versa. We all have gifts and discovering where our gifts lay is part of our life’s work. Failing a class, getting your heart broken, or getting fired from a job means something about the situation was wrong. Even if we don’t want to admit it, we weren’t in the right place. Failure digs us out of our complacency and compels us to move towards our right place.

No one wants to experience those things, but to fear them may be worse. If you were successful all the time, what would you have learned about yourself? If you never took risks and only did things you were good at, what would you know how to do? Think of failure is part of your life’s work and learn from it. And for the folk curious about Edward Hicks, yes I've experienced two of the three.