When you’re dealing with failure, all of the decisions you made up to that point come into pin-sharp focus. Could you have done something differently? Something better? What should you do next? But while failure can be horrendous, for many people it can be a time of learning and growth.
Tara Flynn, Colum McCann, Derval O’Rourke, PJ Gallagher, Templer Gardner, Mamobo Ogoro, and Pat The Cope Gallagher, talk about their relationship with failure, and a particular failure in their lives that changed things for them. Their stories show that no matter how successful you are, failure is inevitable – it’s what you take from it that counts.
DERVAL O’ROURKE
Former athlete, entrepreneur, co-presenter of Medals and Mics, three-time Olympian
‘I genuinely thought it was a foregone conclusion that I’d get the job’
My whole life I’ve done things that weren’t standard, so the chance of failing was significantly higher. I’ve failed at lots of things. One big failure that sticks out was when I retired from athletics. I’d been doing it for 10 years as a career, but also studying – doing a degree, a postgrad, a master’s. Athletics is a sport that’s really fickle, and you always know your career could end early. After retirement, I applied for the role of a lifestyle manager for Olympic sport athletes who were transitioning into retirement. I was so interested in the job, and I thought I ticked all the boxes. I genuinely thought it was a foregone conclusion that I’d get it. But I got a letter saying my application was unsuccessful. I don’t think I even got shortlisted for an interview. So I went from being in the system as an athlete winning medals to not even getting shortlisted for an interview within that world. It stung. I’d left as a competitor, but felt that I couldn’t even add value with my experience, and it felt like everything I had done off-track actually didn’t count. I was really, really upset by it. But within three months I was involved in loads of other projects. I’m 10 years retired from athletics, and I can hand on heart say it was the best thing that ever happened that I didn’t get that job. I had a lot of the credentials on paper, but what I didn’t have was enough life experience. I think I am really good at working for myself. If I had got that job, I would have been sucked back into a system I had just chosen to leave. It wouldn’t have been the right thing. It’s always about how you approach failure. I have no fear of failure, genuinely – there’s nothing I’m worried about failing at, other than at parenting because my kids are the most important thing to me.
PJ GALLAGHER
Comedian, actor and Radio Nova presenter
‘I can only describe the gig as a staring match with the audience’
The first time I ever died on my arse on a stage stands out as a failure. When you start doing stand-up or comedy, the thing you’re afraid of the most is silence. Getting booed off the stage is fine – you go, “Right, well they’re assholes”. But most of the time, gigs go well. So you get used to the laughter, and you get used to them being successful. When I was around 23, early on in my comedy days, I did a gig at the comedy club at the Ha’Penny Bridge pub. And honestly, I can only describe the gig as a staring match with the audience. It was this horrible, horrible death. I remember thinking: this is it now; it’s happening. You always feel you’re only ever as good as your last gig, so when you have a terrible gig, it means you’re a terrible comedian. It was a less than quarter-full room of people who probably wanted a quiet drink and then a comedy club opened around them. The most remarkable thing is that it goes badly, the next person gets on, goes really well, and the audience forgets about you. There’s great comfort in that. I was so afraid of things going wrong, but that was the first papercut that left me not giving a sh*t. You also realise that nobody cares about your good gigs in comedy; everybody wants to talk about the bad ones. Comedians literally sit around and swap war stories – you’re nobody without a sh*t gig.
[ The inner critic: how to stop it from dominating your lifeOpens in new window ]
TEMPLE GARNER
Chef patron of Bresson Restaurant, Monkstown, Dublin
‘I had just had a newborn son, I had a mortgage I couldn’t pay, and I had €25,000 in the bank’
I used to own a Dublin restaurant called Town Bar & Grill with my business partner Ronan Ryan. We opened it in 2004 and it took off like a rocket. We got a lot of things right about it. We were the right people at the right time. We’re still really good friends to this day. We were hugely, hugely successful. It was probably one of the top five restaurants of that decade. It was luck, and I think you make your own luck as well as luck comes to you. The two of us were very hard-working. And then the recession came along, and through a whole bunch of different things, seen and unforeseen, we were done. We were finished. It was over as quickly as it began. So he went his way, and I went mine. I had just had a newborn son, I had a mortgage I couldn’t pay, and I had €25,000 in the bank. That’s everything in the world that I had. My family don’t have money or property, or anything like that. But I didn’t cry into my cornflakes – I don’t do that. Because from a very young age, I was very self-sufficient and very independent. So I got some jobs doing different things. I worked for a friend of mine in Juniors and opened up Dillingers in Ranelagh for John Farrell. It took me two years to get back on my feet, and with some help, the money I had left, and convincing my builder to give me a bunch of credit, we opened San Lorenzo. I had a lot of friends in the business and a very good reputation for delivering. It’s something that has really only come to me in later life: how important your reputation actually is, even within failure. Because you can’t buy a reputation. You have to earn it. You earn it by working hard and genuinely. So we opened on a Thursday in San Lorenzo, and I didn’t have the payroll for the following Tuesday. So we did enough business to pay the wages on Tuesday, and we went from there and did really well out of it. Everything you do is one foot in front of the other, and in restaurant land that’s one dinner at a time. We just cooked one dinner at a time. And you convert one person at a time. Even within failure, you have to believe in what you do. You have to believe that what you do is good enough to make people happy, and that’s what it’s all about.
MAMOBO OGORO
Founder and chief executive of Gorm Media, presenter of Younified on Newstalk
‘Every application we put out in terms of support was just rejected’
My company Gorm is just under four years old, but at the start we had to pivot a lot because there were a lot of failures. I wanted to build a production studio/creative house that was specifically for stories around under-represented communities from an intersectional, migrant or black and ethnic perspective. Every application we put out in terms of support was just rejected. I thought: what am I doing wrong, and how can we overcome this? I learned there was a massive, massive skill gap, an opportunity gap for the communities that we wanted to tell the stories of. So we decided: rather than be a production studio or a production company just yet, let’s actually support these communities to tell their own story. So we developed a programme called The Wideshot [a series of educational workshops and events] and we put it out there and got funding from the Arts Council to start it. Today we have three times as many applications, which shows there was a massive need and want for these communities to be upskilled. No one wanted the productions we were trying to develop and create, but we had to learn that it was too early to have a production at the scale of, say, RTÉ. What we needed to do was develop the talent. One of my mentors constantly tells me that I remind her of herself because I’m a bit overambitious sometimes, and I want to go far ahead of what I’m ready for. So I think if I was given that funding at the time, it would have been a huge failure because I would have just dropped the whole project because I wasn’t ready. I also believe that if I don’t fail at anything, I’m not learning anything, and that means I’m not growing.
[ How to be self-disciplined: ‘Choose what you want most over what you want now’Opens in new window ]
COLUM McCANN
Novelist and founder of Narrative4
‘Each time I try to write a book I inevitably give up on it because it’s just not good enough’
Every book I write is, in essence, a failure. I don’t mean this in a coy manner, nor in an expediently humble way. I mean that each time I try to write a book I inevitably give up on it because it’s just not good enough. It has almost become part of my process. I have to tell my family and my close writing friends that I am finished. It’s akin to a break-up. I spend time apart from the book. I piss and moan about it. I call it a failure. And it always is a failure, because it doesn’t come close to my aspirations for it. Inevitably time brings me back to the book. I have to sigh and accept it. The Beckett quote on failing better is, of course, so perfect that it is almost now a cliche. But the vivifying air of failure is what gives breath to what has been abandoned.
Of course there are other types of failure – like getting an F in an exam – that hurt badly. My most prominent “failure” in this sense is when I did an exam at the age of 11 to get into Clonkeen College. I did so badly that I ended up in the lowest stream, the C stream. My teacher had to make a special argument to get me in the B stream. I was so shocked that I began to study properly and ended up in the A stream. So the experience was vivifying. I’m tempted to say that there is no such thing as failure because it feeds off itself, but then again there are certain realities that hit us square in the jaw. I recently attempted to fix an old car. I not only failed but I mucked it up so badly that it will probably never run again. So I had to buy a new car, one which I quite like. I guess my attitude towards failure is that of an optimist. Which leads me to believe that perhaps optimism is the ultimate failure.
TARA FLYNN
Actor and writer
‘We left London because the work we had wasn’t enough to justify being away from home’
I’m always late to the party, so I didn’t do what many Irish actors do and move to London – until I was 37. I know! Though there weren’t a ton of roles for my age group, and my agent of the time advised against it, in 2006, I had to give it a go. I did improv and stand-up comedy between acting jobs and learned an awful lot. Though there was more work there at first than at home, the gaps between jobs were longer than I’d have liked. Today I’m so glad I moved home from England in 2011, and I’m so glad that my husband, Carl, and I just upped sticks and went, “Right: this isn’t working, whatever about it, this isn’t working, let’s try something else”. But it was really, really difficult. We left because the work we had wasn’t enough to justify being away from home. Carl was starting to get work on Fair City as a writer. London was becoming completely unaffordable. Loads of our friends moved out of the city, English friends. It was a moment in time. It was just before the riots in 2011, so London was on a bit of a boiling point. While we miss it dreadfully, it was the right move, but it wasn’t without pain. It was tricky. But you do learn an awful lot, and it was very humbling. And I think being humbled is always good. It’s very humbling to be starting again, and especially when you’re older. But that’s why I always say to people: don’t be afraid to make changes when you’re older – but it will be very hard. People aren’t as likely to see you as the shiny new penny. Having a support system to get you through something is an amazing thing, and then you have the privilege of learning and looking back. But I also think that there’s something in resilience where we shouldn’t have to be resilient – it’s very, very tiring. Things that are failures, or lack of successes, or crises, they take an awful lot out of you. I think that sometimes gets overlooked. I’ve looked back at projects and they would have been bad for me, career wise or personally. In a way not getting them turned out to have been a stroke of good luck, because it’s something I wanted so badly I was blinding myself to the downsides. But overall, I’ve been very lucky.
PAT THE COPE GALLAGHER
Former Fianna Fáil TD, MEP and Leas-Cheann Comhairle
‘Losing my seat in the 2020 general election was a shock at the time’
I was a TD and leas-cheann comhairle from 2016 to 2020. Losing my seat in the 2020 general election was a shock at the time, but immediately afterwards I got up and dusted myself off. It became apparent when the tallies were being checked that I had dropped votes in my own area. I was told afterwards that it was an election in the middle of the winter, and a lot of the elderly did not go out to vote because their attitude was: Pat the Cope is safe, Pat the Cope can’t lose his seat. It was as simple as that. And had the election been the next day, I would have been elected. But that’s the reality of life. I wasn’t prepared for it. I think others from all sides of the political divide were surprised. But the week after I lost my seat, the phone never stopped, people kept ringing. They would sympathise with me and then the next sentence was ‘Well, I’ve a wee problem and you might look at it for me.’ Of course, I was disappointed not being in the Dáil and not being at the parliamentary party meetings, and not being involved in the rough and tumble of it, but the work rate hasn’t changed. I’m possibly busier now than I ever was. In West Donegal, people continue to seek my advice and I’m available to them seven days a week. That was my life, helping people. All that I lost was my seat – I didn’t lose my contacts. I didn’t take anything from the failure, and I didn’t feel angry in any way. I just took it that this was how people voted. I’m happy that I didn’t turn the key in the office or turn off my phone afterwards. I was happy just to continue, and I get a great deal of satisfaction from being in a position to help people.
