WOLFPACK by Abby Wambach

Author:Abby Wambach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Celadon Books

FOUR

Make Failure Your Fuel

Old Rule: Failure means you’re out of the game.

New Rule: Failure means you’re finally IN the game.

When I was on the youth national team and dreaming of one day playing alongside Mia Hamm, I had the opportunity to visit the locker room of the U.S. Women’s National Team. Time stopped for me as I looked around and tried to memorize everything I saw: my heroes’ grass-stained cleats, their names and numbers hanging above their lockers, their uniforms folded neatly on their chairs.

But the image that stayed with me forever was something else entirely.

What I remember most vividly is a 5 × 7 photograph.

Someone had taped this small picture next to the door so it would be the last thing every player saw before she headed out to the training field.

You might guess that it was a picture of a celebration, the team cheering their last big win or standing on a podium accepting gold medals. But it wasn’t. It was a picture of their longtime rival—the Norwegian national team—celebrating after having just beaten the USA in the 1995 World Cup. It was a picture of their own team’s last defeat.

Five years later, I was called up to that national team. One day we were on the road with nothing to do but sit around a big table in the dining hall and pass around stories for hours. I mustered up the courage to ask about that picture. I needed to know what it meant to them, so I asked:

“Hey, what was the deal with the picture you kept on the locker room wall of the Norwegian team? Why did you want that to be the last thing you looked at before you went out to play?”

They smiled, and it became clear to me that they’d been waiting for the rookie to start asking the right questions. They began to explain to me that the first order of national team business is to win. But that when failure does come, the team isn’t afraid of it; the team is fueled by it. The team never denies its last failure. We don’t reject it. We don’t accept it as proof that we aren’t worthy of playing at the highest level. Instead, we insist upon remembering. Because we know that the lessons of yesterday’s loss become the fuel for tomorrow’s win.

I asked, “Do you think putting that picture up worked?”

Julie Foudy said, “Well, we brought home our first Olympic gold the following year. What do you think?”

I left that table understanding that in order to become a champion—on and off the field—I’d need to spend my life transforming my failures into my fuel.

Women haven’t yet accessed the power of failure. When it comes, we panic, deny it, or reject it outright. Worst-case scenario, we view failure as proof that we were always unworthy imposters. Men have been allowed to fail and keep playing forever. Why do we let failure take us out of the game?

Imperfect men have been empowered and permitted to run the world since the beginning of time.

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