Category: Uncategorized

Today is dedicated to the f-word.

Failure.

* * * * *

When do we start fearing failure? Is it in school, when messing up brings low grades or looks of derision from our peers? Is it in early adulthood when we’re made to feel that one wrong decision could screw us up for life? Is it at work, when “just doing our job” is elevated above contributing something new and exciting that might not work?

I don’t know when this fear of failure enters our lives, but I don’t think we’re born with it. Why? Because when I watch young children, I just don’t see it.

* * * * *

If we don’t strap our 1-year-old Sam into his high chair, he will try to crawl out. He’s fallen from similar heights before, but previous failures won’t keep him from trying again. He has an indefatigable (my favorite word in the English language) perseverance; he refuses to let fear of falling keep him confined in that darn chair.

Abra, 2 1/2,  will happily jump across any span, whether it’s from a chair to the table or from the sofa to the floor. She’s not worried about getting hurt, even though she has in the past.

My older two children, Cade and Lucy, are starting to hear the whisper of Failure, warning them that they might not get it right. I see this most in their learning process, where they are sometimes afraid to try something a little out of their comfort zone. But, for example, when they write to their heart’s content, not worrying about spelling or grammar or punctuation, they exhibit a joy and excitement they wouldn’t have felt if they hadn’t tried.

I’d rather read their  stories about Pentsilvigo (instead of Pennsylvania) than come over to the table and see that they hadn’t yet started for fear of spelling something wrong.

* * * * *

When Maile and I lived in England, I had a incredible mentor named John Walker.  He and his wife Vicki took Maile in and treated us like we were their children, loaning us their car when we first arrived, inviting us to dinner when we would have spent otherwise lonely nights in our small cottage.

John was an incredibly successful business man, retired in his mid-50s but still buying businesses and turning others around. There’s one piece of advice from John that I’ll never forget – it was his mantra for life.

“Fail fast,” he’d tell me. “Make your decision and go with it. Use what you learn from the failures to make it better. If you sit there doing nothing, you’ll still encounter the same failures, except they’ll take you years to get past, instead of weeks.”

* * * * *

Feeling paralyzed by a decision?

Fail fast.

Just a few announcements today.

1) In case you haven’t seen any of the other announcements, the Fireside Writers’ Conference scheduled for October 22 and 23 has been indefinitely postponed due to low registration numbers. I am exploring the possibility of holding it in Lancaster in the spring at a much lower price (around $50). “Like” the Fireside Writers’ Conference page on Facebook for updates.

2) A huge thanks to those of you who donated to the charity:water initiative – we raised almost $12,000, which will provide clean water to nearly 600 people for the next 30 years. You guys are awesome.

3) I have a few leftover copies of my two books (“Twist of Faith” and “Think No Evil”) from my recent time at the Frederick County Fair. I am selling them now for $15.00 each (include shipping), so if you are interested let me know.

4) HELP! I need some good topics for future editions of “Tuesday’s Top 10.”  If you have any good ideas, let me know in the comments section below.

5) My fingers are going numb. It’s that cold in my workshop today.

6) I’ve been invited to speak to English majors at Messiah College this Thursday. I think I’m supposed to encourage them with my story…hopefully they’ll be encouraged to discover that an English major 11 years out of college can be married, have four kids, own two minivans with a combined 325,000 miles, work in sub-zero degree temperatures every day, live in a double-wide mobile home and still be happier than he’s ever been in his life.

Have a great Tuesday!

Have you ever pushed the pause button on your life for a few minutes and asked yourself a question?

Next time you decide to do this, ask yourself: What am I looking for?

* * * * *

Everyone spends their lives searching for things: money, relationships, meaning. Believe it or not, most people (unlike Bono), at some point in their life, will find what they are looking for. So why is there so much unhappiness in the world?

Because most of us spend the majority of our lives looking for something we don’t actually want.

Financial security. That next promotion. A bigger house. Relationships with people we can control. Retirement.

* * * * *

We had some friends in Florida, when we lived there a million years ago, whose dog ate the husband’s wedding band. They had a messy search on their hands, following the dog around the yard, retrieving its excrement, picking through it. But they were persistent, and the dog eventually passed the ring.

Are you willing to dig through the excrement of life to find that which is most important to you?

* * * * *

The other night a seemingly random question came into my mind: What is the first thing that Jesus said?

It struck me that this thing might be important, and as I happened to be reading the book of John, I opened it and began scanning through. John opens the book with his monologue on The Word, then introduces John the Baptist. Then Jesus comes on the scene. The first thing he says?

“What do you seek?”

What are you seeking? Before you spend your entire life in the pursuit of that particular thing, make sure it’s something worth finding. I’d hate to spend my life picking through dog poop only to find a cat-shaped Silly Band, or the the lego head of Darth Vader.

The man kept walking by our tent at the Frederick Fair, usually at a leisurely pace. His wife Susie was bubbly, friendly and talkative. But Jim often passed with his eyes to the ground, pushing a dolly loaded down with sugar or ice. When he did stop to say hello, it was in a melancholy tone.

He and his wife operated a kettle corn stand just up the midway from us – the best kettle corn I’d ever had. They also made a mean shaved ice. As the years passed I found myself enjoying Susie’s company, but around Jim I felt uneasy. He always seemed a little distant or removed.

Do you know someone like this? Someone who doesn’t respond in a way that makes you feel comfortable? Do you give them the benefit of the doubt, or do you make snap judgments on their character based solely on surface level interaction?

I’m terrible at this.

That person’s not nice – they rarely say hello.

Don’t they like me? Hmmm. Maybe I should just try to avoid them.

As our years passed at the Frederick Fair, we got to know Jim and Susie better and better. Frederick Fair is a funny place – you don’t see folks all year, but when you all come back in September, everyone feels like old friends.

Then, one year, I found out that Jim’s daughter had been murdered years before, in the fall of 2002, just after the fair.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle – Plato

One year ago Jim was kind enough to come over and buy one of my books, Think No Evil. The story of the Nickel Mines Amish shooting. We talked for a long time about his daughter, how he felt about it, how he dealt with it. Last winter Jim and Susie took me into their home in Florida, where Susie stuffed me with all kinds of delicious food and Jim was generous enough to tell me the story of his daughter Jeni. We’re working on including it in another book on the topic of forgiveness.

When you talk to someone about the most difficult things they’ve been through in life, friendship comes so much easier.

Fast forward to this year at the fair. Jim and Susie still ran their kettle corn / shave ice stand across from us. Each night as we closed up our respective tents we’d chat about how business was, how ridiculous the heat wave, how glad we were that another day at the fair was over. Then, on Saturday night, the final night of the fair, I walked over to say good-bye, at least for another year.

“You know,” Susie said, her eyes filling with tears for a split second, “tomorrow it’ll be 8 years since Jeni…” her voice trailed off.

Jim cleared his throat, and one of his classic smiles, filled with a little sadness, eased on to his face.

“You just gotta keep driving,” he said, looking at me, then at the ground (you’ll have to read the book to understand the significance of that phrase).

The three of us stood there quietly for a moment. A cool breeze swept through what had been an otherwise hot week. We hugged, chatted a little more, hugged again.

There are unlikely friendships waiting for you, if you will only stop long enough to hear the story.

A huge thanks to Jim and Susie, for their willingness to include me and my family in their story – if you guys are reading today, the entire Smucker family loves and appreciates you a lot. As for our rallying cry…next year in Frederick!

Have you ever read something and thought, “Wow, that person has just seen right into my soul?”

This happened to me yesterday, when Maile read a portion of Roald Dahl’s “Boy: Tales of Childhood.” She just finished reading it to our kids.  This is the portion that caught my attention.

“I enjoyed [working for a company], I really did. I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whiskey than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.”

It’s been almost a year now that I’ve been writing for a living. Dahl expresses my sentiments exactly.

What is the risk/reward with your vocation? What about it do you love? What about it do you hate?