on success and failure

Tonight I decided to finally delve into Peter Jennings' biography, which I had been meaning to pick up for the past few days.

In case you don't know, for as much as I often deride the daily foibles of television news, there are a number of broadcast journalists whom I hold in extremely high regard, and Peter Jennings is chief among them. In fact, it was my childhood desire to emulate Jennings that first set me on the path toward my eventual career as a print and online journalist.

Anyway, I forget what it was that inspired me to move Jennings' biography to the top of my seldom acted-upon reading list, but by page 22, I was getting restless.

Now, I don't mean that the narrative — a patchwork of words from a whole slew of people who were mostly on a first-name basis with Peter, culled from transcripts of interviews and a memorial service that followed his death in 2005 — bored me or allowed my mind to wander. Rather, I was really getting into the story of Jennings' first stint anchoring on ABC, when suddenly my mind jumped ahead to what I knew would be the inevitable end of that chapter.

See, the twentysomething Jennings' time as solo anchor lasted just two years, from 1965 to 1967. As he left the anchor chair to move back into reporting, Peter Jennings with the News was seen as a perhaps novel but ultimately unsuccessful experiment of a last-place network with a fledgling news division. As Ted Koppel recalls in the biography, "(ABC) was fifth in a three-man — or a three-network — race." Jennings himself once called it "a little ridiculous" to pit a 26-year-old against the likes of Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley.

Thinking ahead to the eventual end of Jennings' first American anchoring job prompted me to think much farther back in history to another early-career epic fail — John Wesley's roughly two-year stint as a colonial chaplain in America in the 1730s. Norwood called the whole trip to Georgia an "unmitigated disaster" for both John and his brother Charles.

And yet, despite early false starts of sorts in America, both men became well-known and respected leaders in their fields. One became the face of a network; the other, the face of a movement.

Well, that got me thinking about my own life and how I've never really had a Wesley-style unmitigated disaster or a Jennings-esque assignment that comes before I'm really ready for it.

Sure, I have almost daily "epic fails," like just now when I spent a good five minutes scouring both my apartment and the downstairs laundry room for my phone, which was hiding underneath the Jennings biography that I had just put down. And I've certainly made mistakes in my personal and professional lives that I've learned from.

All along, though, I've been seen as this good kid who made good grades and did good work, and I've got an apartment full of awards, plaques and diplomas to attest to my general on-trackness, if you will.

Now, I'm not saying I want to fail at something. No one in his right mind sets out to fail for the sake of failing.

Instead, what I think I've realized tonight is that I want to set myself up for possible failure — or possible triumph — instead of too often sticking to safer paths that boast a narrower range of outcomes, which generally tend to be centered just north of mediocrity.

I've done this sort of thing before, you know. Among the awards and such, also hanging on the walls of my apartment in Palm Springs are photos and front pages from my time in Cape Town. It was a trip that almost never happened, but I thank God that it did. Over those three months, I not only saw and worked in a new part of the world, but I also made friends and discovered things about myself that I never would have back here in the States.

Although the result was decidedly more positive, my South African journey could be seen as one of Wesleyan proportions. Now, perhaps I need to seek out an assignment (professionally or personally) that I'm perhaps not yet fully suited for, much like the 26-year-old Jennings who took to the anchor chair for a short time ahead of a much longer and much more successful run as anchor that would begin more than a decade later.

Or maybe it's something else that doesn't hew quite as closely to the experiences of either of these two men whom I hold in such high esteem. Whatever it is, I know it's time for me to focus on at least one or two Big Things once again.

If I haven't led myself into unmitigated disaster or gotten in over my head by this time next year, I won't count that in and of itself as a failure. But if I've neither succeeded nor failed at something big, something important by next summer — all for lack, or even fear, of trying — that will be the worst kind of failure.

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8/17/2010 21:50