Failure Hurts But It Can Also Help Us
In life, failure is a certainty. At some point, we all experience it to one degree or another. Failure can break you or it can make you stronger. As much as it hurts to fail, and believe me I know, it is also an excellent teacher. Once the emotions subside, we can analyze the situation and determine where we went wrong. We can figure out the mistakes we made and learn how not to repeat them in the future.
I learned this at an early stage in my musical career. I joined my first band at age fourteen, only several months after beginning to play guitar. All the other members of the band were from my high school. We played (or tried to play) songs by The Doors, The Who and The Rolling Stones. We rehearsed in our parents’ basements and sometimes even at school in the hockey dressing rooms. We, of course, had no clue what we were doing but we loved it. Those Sunday practices were the highlight of my week. I lived for them.
Within months, we had our first show: the school talent night. We practiced hard for it. The day before, we thought we had it all down and we were really excited. The show was a disaster. One of our guitarists thought he’d do everyone a favor and tune all our guitars before we went on stage. The thing is, he tuned them to a piano but he didn't use the right reference notes (EADGBE). Since we were no longer in standard tuning, all the parts we had learned no longer worked. From the first note I knew that something was wrong. It was like a nightmare. Everything I played was wrong! As you can well imagine, our first song was brutal. Then we spent a good five minutes trying to re-tune our instruments at full volume on stage(!). We played one more song and then got off the stage. I was crushed. Afterwards, I seriously questioned whether or not I wanted to continue playing music. It was that bad.
Then, time went by and the hurt faded. I realized that I still loved music and wanted to continue playing. I even wanted to try playing live again. And so I did. The following year, I entered the school talent show with a new band. We played a pretty good set and this time, we were in tune.
