To Be Your Best, Suck You Must

Heather Sellers, in her fantastic little book for writers, Page after Page: Discover the confidence and passion you need to start writing & keep writing, (no matter what), offers the following advice:

"Writing is hard. It takes so much willingness to be bad at something. It's not fun to suck. And, if you are to write, suck you must."

I will admit that my Midwest grandmother's insistence on graceful language still makes me cringe at the crude sound of the word "suck" (along with "stupid" and "shut up"), but, in this context, the choice is perfect in its Yoda-like simplicity and can be paraphrased to apply more widely than to writing alone: To be your best, suck you must.

Poor Rory McIlroy

It's a lesson that we see played out over and over again in the world of sports. Remember Rory McIlroy's performance at the 2011 U.S. Open? At age 22, he won the tournament by eight shots ahead of the second-place finisher and demolished the former U.S. Open record by four shots. The old record was held by four players, including Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus.

But that's not even the most impressive part. Just two months earlier, at the Masters, McIlroy lost in what some pronounced "a breakdown of historic proportions":

"In the entire history of major championship golf we've rarely witnessed anything like this. We've seen any number of players choke, we've witnessed plenty more simply not having the skills to cope with the suffocating demands of a Sunday afternoon.

"But has a man in a position to win ever suffered three holes to match those that befell poor Rory McIlroy in the final round of the Masters on Sunday? Amen Corner they call it, and everyone had better say a prayer for the young Northern Irishman after this disintegration...

"McIlroy is only 21 and perhaps one day this might go down as a valuable learning experience. But deep scars in the psyche are left when final rounds are as dramatic as this one. So complete was McIlroy's torment that when he stood on the 13th tee and hooked his ball into Rae's Creek, he needed his driver simply for support. He looked close to tears." The Daily Mail

How many of us, after sucking in such a public way, would have picked up our bags and gone home for good? Or, more to the point, how many of us would have never risked this kind of failure in the first place?

Despite having turned one year older between the two tournaments, McIlroy didn't improve his golf skills enough in that time to go from "historic" failure to record-breaker.

What he did was to keep his eye on the ball and his head on straight.

Listen Up

After McIlroy's loss at the Masters, Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, rather than predicting "deep psychic scars," offered this refreshing and, in hindsight, perceptive analysis:

"The best young player anyone has seen in a long time came apart on the back nine of Augusta, but the way he pulled himself together when it was over was one of the more promising things he has done in his short career.

"McIlroy is only 21, so it's hard to predict how many major championships he has ahead of him. But we all know this much: When we hear a lot of talk from a guy who just lost big about how unfair life is and how he could never get a break, we can be pretty sure he won't win the next one, either. The real champions don't complain they got sand kicked in their face..They man up, admit a weakness - and join Charles Atlas.

"'I'll get over it,' McIlroy said. 'I led this golf tournament for 63 holes. Hopefully it will build a little character in me as well.'" Read More

Jenkins continued with this advice for how adults should explain to gifted children McIlroy's response:

"Listen up. That's what a future champion sounds like."

Whether in writing or golfing, in the world of business or family, what are some ways that being willing to miss, to stumble, or to fail completely can lead to later, more important improvement toward being our best selves, and how can we approach this necessary failure with the appropriate wisdom and grace so as to "get over it" and on to the next round?