“It will be all right in the end. And if it isn’t all right, it’s not the end.”
– John Lennon
It’s common for us to label events in our life as good or bad, based on what we think is the obvious outcome. The criteria by which we judge good and bad, or success and failure, are usually related to the difference between what we hoped would happen in a situation and what actually happened. If hopes and reality match up, we define the outcome as “good”. If they diverge—if the reality falls short of our expectations or if things just don’t turn out the way we thought—then we label this as “bad”.
But here’s where things get interesting. The formula by which we interpret events is usually related to things in the short term. If the instant result of our actions is good, we call them a success. If not, they’re a fail. But if we extend the time horizon and look at things with a longer-term perspective, then good and bad become far less clear-cut. When we hold off on judging something’s success beyond the instant result, things can be turned completely upside down. Let me give you an example. I’ve changed the details of this example so the client can’t be identified, but the core theme of the story remains pure.
I once had a clinical psychology client who’d been kicked out of his university business degree program and was in a state of suicidal depression. He came from a family of high achievers where everybody had multiple degrees and had made names for themselves in their various professions. After a serious incident got him ejected from his university, he became the black sheep of the family, with no prospect of entering one of these high-status professions.
Since then, he had applied to other universities, but because of the incident, he had not been successful. It’d been 18 months since that time, and he was drifting into a very serious and dangerous depression. He couldn’t imagine being in a much worse situation, and his view was that his life was now going to be very limited. He couldn’t see any way his life could end up going in the direction he—and his family—had hoped, and the emotional pain of this was too much to bear.
He kept alive his dream of finishing his university education and eventually got to the point where he was willing to do any course at any university, just to get his foot back in the door. If he could just get back into a university, he thought, he could eventually transfer across to a degree that he and his family felt was acceptable.
As time went on and he approached many universities repeatedly, he was finally given a place in a creative arts course at a regional university. He had no background in the artistic realm whatsoever and was not entirely motivated to begin this process; he thought of it purely as a means to an end and a way to hopefully be able to transfer to a more suitable degree program. Even so, he felt that with his lack of skills in creative areas, he might struggle to achieve the grades necessary to make this transfer down the track. He struggled enormously in his first semester back, barely scraped through and failing a couple of courses.
However, something interesting happened during his second semester: he decided to take a photography unit. Up until that time, his experience with photography had been limited to taking snaps at parties with his iPhone. But as the course began and he started taking shots and doing assignments, he was shocked to have other students come up to him, asking how he took such great shots and how he went about doing what he did. Even the lecturer spent a lot of time talking to him and asking him about his technique. Initially he couldn’t make much sense of this, and his first impression was that he was being patronized, because in his eyes what he was doing was so simple, it was automatic. He couldn’t understand how anyone wasn’t able to take shots like his. It seemed so natural, even easy.
It turned out he had a natural gift that created this effortless ability to take great photos. Just like many people who are naturally very skilled at something, he couldn’t understand why this wasn’t a universal ability that anybody with a camera could replicate. As the course went on, one thing led to another, and a lecturer began connecting him with other people in the industry. Very soon he was doing small exhibitions at local galleries, which he found to be quite fun, and was amused to think that people would travel to look at his work, which he put no effort into whatsoever.
At one of these gallery meetings, someone connected to a world-renowned magazine asked him if he would like to do a photoshoot for them. He agreed, thinking it sounded like fun. As his network grew, one thing led to another, and before long he was travelling the world, going to exotic locations on interesting assignments, staying at wonderful places and meeting interesting people he never knew existed with ideas about the world that he’d never encountered. He found that photography—something he’d had absolutely no interest in until recently and which had been a powerful dormant love and skillset—was becoming an enormously enriching and financially rewarding experience. Since then, things have continued to go from strength to strength.
During a catch-up session a couple of years down the track, he reminisced about the initial incident of getting thrown out of his business degree, which almost led him to take his own life. He said that, at the time, it was unambiguously the worst thing that ever happened to him. Now, looking back, it was unambiguously the best thing that ever happened to him. Without being kicked out of the business degree, he would have never followed this path and come across this hidden passion for photography and the wonderful life it had created for him. He felt, of course, that if he’d not been kicked out of business, his life would probably have gone along well enough too, but perhaps would never have reached the heights of meaning which he currently found himself enjoying.
It’s an interesting experiment, philosophically, to look at this process. At what point do you decide whether things are going well or badly? How do you evaluate your actions when they can keep on having knock-on effects months and years later?
In fact, it is easy to reverse this thinking. If you examine anything in your life you define as a “success”, there were probably many times along the way that, if you had drawn a line in the sand at that point in time, you would have labelled the venture a failure.
It would have been easy for this client of mine to say that getting kicked out of his university course was an absolute disaster. His reality had definitely fallen a long way short of his aspirations. At pretty much every point for the next 18 months, things could have been said to be going awfully, from being kicked out of the course to drifting into depression, to the constant rejections, to the failing of subjects in his first semester, the sense of hopelessness, and the cold shoulder that he felt he was receiving from his family. But after that, once he started having his first photography exhibitions and his new life began to take off, he began to see that there was an opportunity hidden in the events that could have ruined him.
It’s easy to see things not meeting our hopes as being universally bad. And often in the short term, this is true. But if we can look past our immediate disappointment and not get fixated on how we’d hoped things had turned out, we can see difficult experiences in a new way. We can start to see them as turning points rather than as disasters. Not an end to your hopes and dreams, merely a change in direction. And once you have this mindset, you can face any difficult situation with optimism and look for the good that comes out of it rather than being swallowed up by the bad.
Nothing is ever finished, and you never know what unexpected effects can come from seemingly unbearable situations. And since nothing is ever truly done, there’s always hope that you can turn things around. And given enough time with new pathways taken, peace can be made with any apparent difficulty and that energy freed up. Assume there is no way to lose in the end.
You don’t know what you don’t know. Time is your friend. You have allies waiting in your future. Trust them. Don’t succumb to the apparent shadows of the present. The clouds don’t scar the sky. They just obscure it for a time…
