Failure Case Study

“There’s no such thing as failure, there are times where you’re not doing what you thought you’d be doing, you just have to switch gears and go another direction and make that path work” –Tim Sickenger, 74. Failure is not a complicated idea. It is a vague idea, so the only thing complicated about it is defining it. People tend to over simplify the idea. Many say that failure is only a setback to a goal. But, according to Sickengers definition, it cannot be considered a setback. I think of it as more of a sign that one path was not exactly the right one to achieve their goal. Imagine a motionless man who watched as a train zipped by him. But, from the reference point of another man who was on the train, the other man moved backwards. The problem

Lawrence alumni that reside in the same town. However, their experiences with failure vary greatly. Briggs Forelli, 64, is someone who never had to deal with a lot of serious failure in his early life. He ended up with a secure job soon after college at his father’s factory, and eventually took over the company. Although, he still experienced failure that happened to him out of his control. While he was running the company, one of his employees said he needed a kidney transplant that his insurance wouldn’t cover. He asked Forelli if he could pay the loan needed to complete the surgery, with the promise that he would pay the money back through the bank. Months went by and the loan never got paid back, the employee was lying and attempted to rob Forelli of over thirty thousand dollars. Tim Sickenger, 74, dealt with many failures, some that may have seemed impossible to rebound from. His first mortgage company went bankrupt and he had to pay expenses for fifty employees. He was able to bounce back from that, but only to have to quit another failing company at the worst possible time, his first child had just been born. Sarah Hartigan, 73, is someone who has an immense grit, the woman survived breast cancer. But, she did not flex her grit in the interview. She even began to question the point of the interview when she ran out of things to say about failure. She doesn’t think of failure as a big deal, but she does encourage embracing it.

Hartigan had a very good grasp on this concept early when she was searching for her career path. She was very passionate about art and design, but didn’t necessarily know how to make that into a career. After college, she floated around many different jobs, she told me, “At first I wanted to do archecture… Then I worked for a consulting firm in the computer graphics, and then a meeting planning company” (Hartigan). I asked he if she considedered any of her career changes to be failure and she said no. She chose paths that were not the right for her to be satisfied in life. But had she not done that, she would not know how to find the right one. She eventually found her passion in home design. But, there is an important distinction to be made, a passion is not the correct path if one goes about it the wrong way. Hartigan didn’t have the experience to be successful right away, and there was no one to give her the experience as she admitted to me “I can’t work with anybody” (Hartigan). But, she also knew her mistakes would show her the experience she needed to get on the right path. So, she had no fear and plunged herself right in the business. She talked about one of her first projects in home design: “I took on way more than I was capable of, I think it was a good challenge for me. I took on a whole house and didn’t hire any employees” (Hartigan). The home design was botched and many pieces of furniture were