My happiest year is full of failure and penny pinching
This year might be the most successful year of my life.
I published the book I’d always dreamt about and was named manager of the first Latin American nation to make a Rugby League World Cup – a confluence of deep-seated passions.
I also made the transition to a beautiful part of the world on the Sunshine Coast, where roughly half of my working life is spent in my sun-filled front room overlooking Noosa National Park.
More importantly and certainly inter-related, it’s also been arguably the happiest, most fulfilling year of my relationship.
When my time is up on this planet, it’ll be amazing to think so many life-defining things happened within months of each other.
But what you see above surface level only tells half of the story.
I have a relative who is prone to saying things like “I’m really happy for you, I just wonder when luck will come my way”, or “You’re a success at everything you do”, or “I wish things would come as easily for me”.
Except, well, this charade we call life is entirely about perspective.
This year has seen me earn less money than almost any other 12-month period in my adult life.
I had a day where I couldn’t purchase a few pieces of fruit for $2 because my card had maxed out.
I’ve been rejected by a swathe of publishers, employers and potential collaborators, most of whom were related to dream jobs or projects I sought after.
I’ve slept in my car, on couches, at my desk to do whatever needs to be done to put myself in a better position.
Now, the truth is that my relative who thinks fortune has abandoned them has almost certainly made more money than me this year, has driven a better car than me for years, and has undoubtedly more free time in their life.
I think I’m incredibly lucky in many ways that I’ve been raised to believe – and most times remain completely convinced – that money does not equate to happiness.
At some points that has probably seen me undervalue myself and under-capitalise on opportunities, but for the most part I think it’s allowed me to become a person who is increasingly content and grateful.
I’ve also had a strong streak of Bohemian infused into me, so whenever I sleep anywhere other than my bed, it’s viewed as ‘an adventure’ whether I get much sleep at all, or wake up sore as hell.
These attitudes have been with me since childhood.
But the one thing that has transformed is how I treat the notion of rejection.
Some of the knock-downs I’ve received this year would have completely crushed me in the early parts of my career.
In fact, I’d say even a tenth of the rejections I’ve had in 2019 would have rocked me back on my heels, resulted in unending self-doubt, led to abandoning ambitions in 1999, or even 2009.
You’d think a freckly, ginger kid would be quite accustomed to rejection right?
Rejection in my early 20s was linked to a sense of failure. I needed to be successful at everything I did, or I wasn’t successful at anything.
It was neurotic, unrealistic, all-consuming perfectionism.
I actually sat in a room with a counsellor one day and told them I wanted to be THE BEST at 100 per cent of things, of every person that had ever lived.
Yep, those actual words came out of my naïve mouth.
I wanted to be the best writer, the fastest runner, the most skilled rugby league player, the most ingenious musician, the greatest lover, the smartest scientist et cetera et cetera.
I honestly thought that anything less was a classic case of low expectations and settling for a diminished version of human potential.
When the counsellor said to me I was placing too much pressure on myself, I chortled inside. What did they know? They were just another cog in the system.
Now, I’m all for ambition. But that degree of it is crippling.
You don’t want to fail at a single thing, because that means you have failed completely.
And that prevents you from trying things and constrains you to very few activities or interactions.
I’m not entirely sure when I snapped out of this way of thinking, but I think it came in 2011.
Until then, by pursuing a limited number of fields, I’d seen myself as someone who set targets and had a near-perfect record of achieving them.
Then I undertook perhaps my biggest, most meaningful challenge.
I spent two years in northern England trying to look after my declining grandparents and convincing them to move back to Australia before they died.
I failed on most fronts. They never came home, they eventually died, I went broke and I don’t know if I was all that great at looking after them, although I like to think I at least kept them company.
Suddenly, this solid belief that I had the power to shape the world and its outcomes was reefed out of my hands.
Along with that, I had the added bonus of being thrust face-to-face with mortality and ageing in a way that broke something inside of me.
I don’t know what it was exactly that I lost then. It may have been my ego, it was probably parts of my motivation, it was elements of my identity, it was my perfectionism and confidence.
It was a weird mish-mash of negatives and long-term positives all at once.
When I came home to Australia from that experience, all I recognised was that something undefined had changed inside of me.
I applied for 60 jobs in the space of around four days when I came back. I kid you not.
I was a word processing machine, a templated resume king.
There was undoubtedly desperation and hunger driving me then. I had barely a cent.
Naturally, most of the job applications ended in rejection.
However, one of them came to fruition.
It was a well-paying job with the government working in innovation, science and the arts. The conditions and the people were very nice. I had been blessed to land on my feet after a turbulent period.
Then something else happened. A gym I used to work at offered me my old position back around the same time.
Rather than make a choice, I took on both jobs, working from 4.30am to 8.30pm five days per week.
Not only did the gym welcome me back, but my client numbers quickly swelled beyond expectation.
I don’t think there was ever a conscious realisation at that point, but in reflection that was the juncture where I can identify my perception of success not being measured by my failures.
I had just one job out of 60 that took me in, then an offer from leftfield that made me twice as busy as I expected to be.
My focus was on what I had, not what I’d missed out on – mostly because I was too preoccupied to bother worrying about the other stuff.
It’s no coincidence, I feel, that I also found love around this point. Actually, I didn’t just find it, but I made it work in a sustainable, concerted way.
By being less idealistic, I found the ideal.
Now, since 2011 there have been a whole heap of projects that I’ve been involved with that have included failure and rejection.
A lot of it has been just bare-faced nerve in approaching people to work together on different opportunities or asking for a hand.
In my youth I hated the type of person who was comfortable doing the things I’m now comfortable with.
But as someone who is finally happy, and has succeeded in doing the things that match his own ideas of success, I know each rejection is not the end of a story.
It’s a chance to keep busy, refine what you do and find either an alternative solution or alternative person to approach with your skills and concepts.