What I find hilarious is that in my recent reincarnation in the business world, I hear mentioned a lot of the principles of my (what I thought was original) Loser Theory. The mantra of the Lean start-up philosophy--"Fail Fast, Fail Cheap"--is constantly being repeated to the point of being a cliché, not just in the start-up world but in traditional companies who are borrowing the Lean philosophy.
Beyond the idea of a bunch of corporate types talking about "failing," an idea that would have been totally unthinkable not too long ago, especially during the 80s, the pinnacle of American greed and materialism when being a winner was the only way, I love the fact that "Loser theory" is quietly catching on. It also makes sense that during our new gilded age--a time of such rampant greed for so few--that Loser theory is coming on strong.
We've always been a wildly optimistic nation--there was no way we could have settled the West without an optimism that bordered on extreme delusion--so it's crazy that we've so strongly embraced Losing recently. Wallace Stegner famously called the Western United States "The Geography of Hope," even while recognizing all of the rampant destruction we wrought in our path on our way to settling the West. Our current president so completely tapped into the American psyche and rightfully based his entire first campaign on "Hope" because we're a people that is always thinking about the future (and sometimes sadly forgetting about our present). An English Lord visiting Bismarck, North Dakota in the late 19th century rightfully wondered why the town was building the capitol a mile or 2 from downtown out in a woody wilderness on top of a random hill. And he got the most American answer you could possibly expect: "Because in the future the town's going to grow out 2 miles toward that hill."
Every week, my boss has me read the Monday Morning Memo, a column written by an"ad wizard," a copywriter with an impeccable ability to sell with the written word. And his organization has a contest looking for a story about failing and learning a hard lesson. And the picture is of Don Quixote. Don Quixote is the origin and pinnacle of my Loser theory. Everybody knows about how Don Quixote goes and attacks windmills, thinking they are giants, and everybody knows about the tragicomedic antics that Cervantes wrote about in the first 1605 edition of his famous work.
What people don't know about is what happens to our famous hidalgo in the second 1615 edition, which is truly the saddest (all tragic and no comedic) work ever written. Don Quixote isn't just about failing, but about losing your ideal. Losing your illusion. Or Losing your religion, like the famous REM song goes. And that's a lot heavier than failing in a battle against windmills and learning a hard lesson.
What all these business gurus talk about--even my favorite Sales/Marketing guru Seth Godin who brilliantly writes a number of posts on How to Fail--is failing on a project or in a business and how we can learn from those mistakes. Classic and ancient Japanese mantra: Fall down seven times so you can get up eight.
That's easy.
But what happens when you lose your ideal?
If you're looking for a pithy, uplifting answer, you're not going to find it here, because I haven't found the answer to that question.
But I can tell you what the characters in the novels I analyzed for my dissertation did: They got lost. They wandered. They daydreamed. They took strong drugs to erase their memories. They resorted to art to escape.
What the losers teach us is how to live. Rather than play it safe, they go deeper and further into the Infinite Abyss. You have to be not afraid to explore your Infinite Abyss. It's about going so far out that you lose the form. You have to lose the form for a bit. You have to make it safely back, but you need to go dangerously off the path. You have to get lost in order to find yourself. There's a movie, Garden State, that's really my generation--I'm really old to be a millennial and a tad on the young side for an X Generation--and it's about this guy who has been on lithium and all sorts of cocktails of drugs to "manage" his anger so that he basically has no feelings anymore (so my generation!) and he comes home (coming home is so wild, isn't it?) and he goes off his meds. And he starts to feel again. Well not at first. His old hometown buddy takes him on this wild quest. And they find the Infinite Abyss. And it's a beautiful scene. One of those scenes that makes me cry every time I watch it. He finds feeling again--you have to find the feeling again, both the happy and the sad.
 |
| The Infinite Abyss |
Another film that always reminds me of Loser Theory is Wes Anderson's (maybe) under-appreciated Darjeeling Limited. There's a scene where the 3 Loser brothers are on the Darjeeling Limited in the middle of nowhere in India and their train gets lost--always heavy when a vehicle on rails gets lost--and their guide says to them: "We haven't located us yet." And it's true. They hadn't located themselves (as brothers, as humans, as buddies on a quest).
 |
| "We haven't located us yet." |
You have to be Out There in order to come back and re-center and find yourself.
It's the age old human story: Fail. Go out on a quest. Survive the travails. Find yourself. Repeat. There's no "they lived happily ever after." It's a struggle that never ends. We tell ourselves these stories and have told ourselves these stories since the beginning of time--through religion, literature, music, film--so that we don't go completely insane along the way.
-----------------------------------
It took a while. I forgot the title of my dissertation and part of me would like to erase that grad school era of my life, like the memory eraser narcotics that I write about in one of the chapters on Loser theory (one has to lose memories, too, of course), but I found my dissertation and fitting with Loser theory it has been cited only once, according to the citation counter (I wonder who that lost soul was?). With it, regardless, I can say that I am one of the world's foremost experts on being a loser and getting lost.
