Disappointment can have shades of success

Years back, I owned a market-research company. It must have been that life was too easy and I was making too much money, because I decided I'd sell my thriving little company to better experience the humiliations of being a writer. As I prepared to sell my company, the business broker told me that I needed to do projections, including a worst-case scenario.

I tried, but eventually came back to him and said: "A 'worst case' is just a failure of imagination. No matter how grim a picture I envision, I can see ways that it could be even worse." As it happened, even though I'd contemplated myriad ways the company could fail, the new owners went wrong in ways I didn't imagine. I thought I had made the company idiot-proof, but then one should never underestimate the creativity of idiots. The result was the slow, painful death of a once-vibrant company, and we all learned something about disappointment.

What got me thinking about the wisdom of disappointments was a story from the book "The Nature of Leadership," by Joe White, who writes that his grandson Bernie was given the role of Joseph in his nursery school's Christmas pageant. Bernie's dad was surprised to see that his son was downcast by the prospect. So he did what we parents do and gave the kid the old parent's pep talk, telling him how proud they were to get to see him play Joseph. That's when Bernie just looked even more morose, then eventually said softly, "Dad, I wanted to be the donkey."

Ah yes, good old Mr. Dis rarely misses an appointment. Joe White certainly knows how his grandson feels. He'd been the dean of the business school at the University of Michigan, then interim president. He'd fallen in love with the job, was acknowledged to be succeeding at it, and wanted to get the "interim" out of his title. The regents instead chose the president at the University of Iowa.

He wrote, "I found myself quite alone in figuring out how to cope with my intense feelings of disappointment, anger, and embarrassment at not having gotten the nod." Instead of sulking or pretending he didn't mind, he decided to give a speech on his feelings, delivered at a dinner where the regents were among the guests. He opened by telling the group: "It's no secret to anyone in this room that I'm disappointed not to be able to serve the university as president. Now, just before you think, 'My gosh, I can't believe he's talking about this,' let me assure you that my message about disappointment is a fundamentally positive one."

That was in 2003. I recently asked White to reflect on what he described as his "intense feelings of disappointment, anger, and embarrassment." He said: "Being honest is liberating. You don't have to manage a difference between the internal self and the external one." He added: "I remember as a young faculty noticing some of the older faculty were bitter. I said to my wife, 'I don't ever want that to happen to me.' And when I didn't get the job, I recognized that it had the potential to make me bitter. So I decided to engage the emotions and go the other way."

If White had let his resentment pull him down, he would have taken a job in industry and stayed there, speaking darkly of academia for the rest of his days. Instead, he took a job in Manhattan for a year, had a great time at it, then became president of the University of Illinois, a job he loves -- perhaps loving it more for having been toyed with by fate. He'd been liberated from bitterness, freed from his failure by refusing to pretend it wasn't one.

I don't know about you, but I'm not one of those bright-siders who handles every dark turn with "It happened for a reason." However, I can own up to the disappointment, saying, "Hey, it happened," and then shrug, which is halfway there and halfway Zen. Sometimes you get to play the donkey, and sometimes you're stuck being Joseph. But there is always learning to be had in disappointments, and there is always the wisdom of the shrug.

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.