Joe tells two stories that illustrate how a single false failure narrative can cascade into life destruction. His father was CEO of Lumin Optics, was let go, and believed he’d failed. In reality, his leadership was so successful that the parent company shelved the product to protect their own competitive interests — the successor company later sued and won $100 million. But Joe’s father spiraled into alcoholism, shame, and rage that destroyed his family. “His whole life defined by a failure that didn’t actually exist.”
The second story: a man who’d rebuilt his life from meth addiction, created a loving home that took in neighborhood kids, and was a genuinely great father. When his eldest son asked to go to rehab, the father interpreted this as proof of his own failure — “my son is going to repeat the life that I had.” Within a year he was back on meth, living in a car, and his family had fallen apart.
“This one idea — one idea that he failed — where he could have been like ‘oh I succeeded’ and those guys tried to hamstring me because of the success I was having… everybody’s life would be different.”
Neither failure was real. Both destroyed families. The story we tell about our experience has more power than the experience itself.
Related Concepts
- Failure is just an idea, not a reality
- Shame creates the behaviors it punishes
- The story of brokenness is the problem