When success looks like failure
I’ve been thinking a lot about failure after I got my friends locked into a nightclub on Saturday evening.
Well, when I say evening, it was sort of tea time really, not a late night out, we’re all “of a certain age” and our evening ended at 9pm with a nice cup of tea.
OK let me explain. I convinced a group of friends to do an escape room with me. The premise was we were a rock band and our manager double crossed us, stealing our recording and releasing it as his own. Our song went on to be a big hit. Our mission was to break into his fortified nightclub and steal the gold disc that was rightfully ours.
Out of the six of us – I have completed TEN escape rooms with my boys – we are incredibly competitive and call ourselves The Incredibles – once we even made the top of a leader-board with a record time.
One friend had done an escape room as a work team-building exercise and everyone else was an escape room virgin and didn’t really know what was going on, at least to start with.
You can see where this is going – we FAILED to complete our task and got locked in. I was so aware there were many puzzles not even attempted, there was a locker still locked, a cocktail jigsaw not completed. It was so hard.
Was this because I didn’t have my usual reliable team with me? Was it the cheesy music blaring out which became a distraction? Or maybe it was because it was the hardest escape room I have ever been in.
I’m not entirely sure my sons would have enjoyed the setting and I still believe I picked the perfect team for the task. You see we have been friends for more years than we’d like to count – let’s just say we met at sixth form and I’ll leave you to do your own maths.
There were no recriminations, no finger pointing of who had let the team down, everyone had such a fun time and we are all up for doing one together again.
For me it’s a salutary lesson in humility – perhaps I am not the mastermind in our family team – actually I never believed I was. It was also me that pulled a padlock off the wall; I was too eager to get it undone knowing the time was ticking and I profusely apologised for my wanton vandalism.
All of us hate to fail but to use a motivational cliché that is how we learn. Next time we will all do better, learning from our mistakes.
As we went our separate ways, after a meal rounded off with a cup of tea, at least for half of us, everyone thanked me for organising a fun night out.
Failure really can be turned on its head, success to me is our long lasting friendships and for that I am forever thankful.