I only played a small role in this project — the vast majority of the work was done by Susan Mernit and Kwan Booth – my Oakland Local cofounders and partners in the House of Local media consulting group.

Yesterday, Susan, Kwan & I participated in a one-hour live chat hosted by J-Lab about this learning module. You can replay the complete transcript. We got really great interaction on this. J-Lab told us that this live chat attracted far more readers and participants than its other live chats. It was fun, and I’m glad it was a success!

(For more context on failure, see this consummate resource.)

Perhaps more than any other She’s Geeky session, this one resonated with me. Right now, I’m in the process of ending my marriage, relocating from a community I’ve loved and called home for nearly 14 years, entering midlife, and dealing with much emotional backlog that has accumulated while I’ve kept busy busy busy for so many years.

That’s a lot of stuff to handle, on top of work and ordinary life. Frankly, it’s been hard for me to admit to myself — let alone anyone else — that because of all these issues I am not currently operating at the 1000% (not a typo) level I typically expect of myself, and often deliver.

So first, here are my tweets from this session, followed by some results of my mulling on this. Note that I deliberately did NOT identify speakers, except for prompting questions by Susan Mernit. Discussing failure leaves people vulnerable, and the attendees of this session agreed to make it a safe space. Everything appearing in quotes below is from an attendee…

Now at @susanmernit’s epic #shesgeeky session on failure… A topic I know well….. Big taboo on discussing it, though!

@susanmernit: It’s important to understand what caused your failure and what kind of failure was it, and what you learn.

Lesson from failed startup in a tech incubator program: “I realized that I was not the best fit for my own company — thankfully before I got too committed.”

“The problem with deciding to pull the plug on a project is that I was worried about what folks would think/say. Was my reputation at risk?”

Depending on how you define success: What’s failure, really? Success can = maturity/objectivity to admit something’s not working.

“Often when I’ve had failures, it’s when I ignore my gut, try to just work harder instead of admit what’s happening.”

“Women tend to be very hard on ourselves, and the possible consequences of failure loom larger than reality warrants.”

“In Silicon Valley, when a man’s startup fails, it’s a one-off. When a woman’s startup fails, it’s treated as normal, expected.”

“Because women are expected to fail in business, you feel guilty about failing because you think you’re feeding that stereotype.”

“Men tend to have more mentors. That helps cushion failure and encourages risk-taking. Women fly without a safety net more often.”

“Men often act like they’re doing their ventures on their own, but they really have much support. Women usually ARE on their own.”

“Men are socialized to compete within their brotherhood. Adolescent girls usually don’t experience healthy competition.

Author and podcaster Dan Sawyer noted here via IM: “Great stuff you’re tweeting. Tell Susan it’s got me shouting and cheering over here. It’s very true, and women need to hear it. Particularly the part about doing ventures on their own — that’s a social camouflage, and it’s complete bullshit. The thing is, all of us guys KNOW it’s bullshit — we usually don’t realize that women DON’T know it. And yes, we are trained from birth to compete with each other like boxers — enemies within the ring, friends once the bell is rung. Men who can’t keep that collegiate spirit are not well regarded by other men, even if they’re successful. Actually, reading your tweets on this REALLY helps me understand a couple female friends who had hereto baffled me.”

Recommended book on women’s attitudes toward failure & competition: Peggy Ornstein, Schoolgirls

Susan Mernit asks the group: When you do have a failure, how do you process it?

Attendee mentions Julie Wainwright, CEO of Pets.com: her company failed the same week that she got divorced. Great essay by Wainwright on getting stronger.

“We all have hindsight on how we could have avoided failure. It’s hard to really own that you just made a mistake.”

Susan Mernit asks: Why do we always think failure is always “wrong?”

“If you don’t take the opportunity to learn when you hit problems, that’s probably more a failure than anything else you can do.”

One attendee keeps a running list of every time she took a list and it paid off: motivation tool.

Retweet @senia: Doesn’t one need the time to step back in order to learn from failure? If always running, no time to analyze.

Me: Especially in online/social media, you can get excoriated very fast and very publicly for failing. You need to be able to deal with that without freaking out.

Susan Mernit asks: When you have a big failure, how do you move forward than that? What’s the next step?

“Immediate coping skill for big failure: ask for help right away. Don’t close yourself off.”

Some attendees disagree, prefer to process failure alone/internally first.

“When you fail a team and feel personally responsible, it’s important to remember it’s not ALL on you.”

“I now know that when I’m going in a wrong direction, I need to speak up right away. I can’t depend on other people to be my voice.”

“What’s weird in tech community is that sharing failure is uncool. It only happens in small private circles an limited ways.”

“No one in tech really wants to talk much about failure because it’s such a perception-based business.”

Important context for failure: “The lousy economy is happening. Everyone’s vulnerable. Have some compassion.”

“I feel like if I grieve a failure, I’ll be weak — even though it’s a natural process. I know that’s stupid, but I still do it.”

ReTweetTrends asked me: Doesn’t one need the time to step back in order to learn from failure? If always running, no time to analyze.

I reply to ReTweetTrends: Yes, it can help to step back, take time to process failure. But sometime, that option doesn’t exist.

“For women, it’s easy to take one failure and pile on: ‘I’m fat. My company failed. I burned this potroast.’”

INITIAL RESULTS OF MY FAILURE-RELATED MULLING

Failure is inherently energy-sapping. When you (by which I mean “I”) have an experience that gets consciously or subconsciously labeled as a “failure,” that just sucks the wind right out of the sails. I suspect this is part of what makes it so difficult to move past failure. It’s a definition that halts momentum.

Is the concept of failure a problem? It does seem that the essence of “failure” lies mainly in the labeling. After all, it’s just another experience — and all experiences have positive and negative aspects and connotations. Since it’s inherently energy-sapping and problematic, would it help to just ditch the concept? Are there any benefits to having a concept of failure?

The disease model of failure. The taboo about discussing failure intrigues me. We act as if it’s contagious, that it spreads via admission, not commission. As scared as we are of failing, most of us (especially women) appear even more scared to discuss it — similar to how people used to whisper “…cancer…” Even trying to listen compassionately to someone else discussing an experience of failure makes many people squirm. Do we think it’s “catching?”

Not talking about failure is a bigger problem than just failing. Failure is a deeply emotional and social experience, and humans are social creatures. Most people seem to need to do at least some emotional processing to get through hard experiences and learn from them. Simply talking things over with a compassionate listener can help us handle the emotions, process the experience, and move on. It also helps others by giving useful insight, information, and validation of feelings that otherwise might leave us feeling isolated and powerless.

Group failure is harder to discuss. When you fail by yourself — or you’re in a position to assume all the blame — it can be much easier to process the failure by discussing it. But when others are significantly involved, it gets harder to discuss the failure because you run the risk of transgressing their desired privacy boundaries or otherwise making them vulnerable or putting them at risk. The litigious nature of business and the competitive nature of tech make it especially difficult to openly discuss failure in these spheres.

Gender differences in failure experiences/discussion? The attendees of this session seemed to agree that women and men experience, process, and weight failure differently. I’d be curious to see a group of men, and a equally mixed-gender group, engaging in a similarly themed discussion to see whether the points and mood are different. I do believe, however, that in U.S. society women are expected to fail and are more likely to be “punished” or “blamed” for failure — and thus may have more reason to fear failing, or discussing failure.

…I’m still mulling all this, but thought it was time to write about it. In the meantime, what thoughts does this spark in you? Please comment below.

Two tweets from Wilson especially caught my attention:

crash

Mike Wilson's first post about the Denver plane crash he survived

And then, a couple of hours later…

crash2

Mike Wilson reflects on a similar bullet he dodged earlier

…Next I was making breakfast, listening to Colorado Public Radio, which was (of course) reporting on the Denver airport accident. They followed that with a story that stopped me cold for a bit: Witnesses, Families Remember Lockerbie Bombing. Yes, today is the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 — a terrorist attack that killed 259 on the plane and 11 on the ground.

On the evening of Dec. 21, 1988, I was a 22-year-old journalism student packed up and ready to head back home to NJ after spending a semester in London. I’d been at the office Christmas party for the business magazine where I’d been interning. When I entered the house I’d been sharing since August with five other students, my housemates who hadn’t yet departed for home were sitting in the living room, crying. Mindy said, “Diane’s plane crashed”…

My onetime college housemate, Diane Rencevicz, on the victim’s list of Pan Am flight 103. She was 21 when she died.

Diane Rencevicz was a fellow Temple University student. She was the quietest heavy metal fan I ever knew, and I didn’t know her well. We merely shared a house for a few months. But I liked her well enough. And I was stunned to think that, at 21, she was suddenly dead.

In fact, she’d died taking exactly the same flight that Linda (my other housemate) and I were slated to take the very next day: Pan Am 103.

The next few days happened in slow motion.

In the morning I visited a local hospital to get tranquilizers for Linda, who was so distraught she could barely speak. I remember dropping my key through the mail slot of the lovely terrace house we’d rented on Moscow Road in Bayswater. Linda and I took a cab to Heathrow airport, where we bid Mindy farewell. While we were waiting at the gate, there was a bomb scare and everyone evacuated briefly to the parking lot. Really bad timing.

Eventually we got on the mostly-empty plane and flew across the ocean to JFK. My legs trembled the whole flight, I kept getting up to pace, and the flight attendants kept making me sit down. I remember their expressions, they’d just lost several friends and had to keep functioning. I didn’t argue with them, and they weren’t angry with me.

My family met me at JFK airport. My mom was crying. Lots of people were crying. I was exhausted. They took me home to NJ. Christmas happened. I attended mass with my family at the Catholic church down the street. The priest mentioned the bombing and I felt numb. Even though I was a news junkie, I avoided the news for weeks.

A few days later, Linda and I attended Diane’s memorial service. There, I was stunned to learn that Diane had an identical twin sister. Maybe I’d known that before, but I’d forgotten. Never in my life did I have such a strong feeling that I was seeing a ghost. That really shook me, more than anything else about that experience.

WHY NOT ME?

I dodged that bullet for the most mundane and human of reasons. Linda is a methodical person, and she made our flight arrangements. I didn’t want to depart for London on my birthday, so we agreed to fly out the next day, on Aug. 22, 1988. We were staying in London for four months. So Linda scheduled our flight home for exactly four months later, on Dec. 22.

And that’s really why I’m here today.

I have very strange, mixed feelings about this experience. Not getting killed in that bombing did not change my life in any dramatic way — except that I continued to live, and I felt more aware of others who don’t get to do that. I became very aware of chance, and randomness. For a while, flying made me very nervous. Then that fear wore away.

Soon after I returned home I was introduced to Stacey, who’d be my closest friend for several years. She introduced me to her ex-boyfriend Tom, whom I married a decade later. I worked for a bad book publishing company in Philly, then a business magazine on the Main Line outside Philly, and then lived very briefly in north Jersey, and then moved to Boulder in 1995.

Since then….

Some of my sisters and cousins had kids, and one of my nieces now has kids of her own. My brother survived leukemia. My grandmother died. My parents aged, sold the home where I grew up, bought a smaller home nearby, and are doing well.

My career took off in interesting, independent, entrepreneurial directions. It’s been feast or famine, but never boring. I’ve done work I’m proud of, and made some humbling mistakes. I’ve helped, inspired, frustrated, confused, and annoyed people.

I’ve backpacked on the Continental Divide and camped under buttes in the Utah desert. I once got a 2-hour foot massage in a Beijing hutong, I left an Amsterdam Indonesian restaurant at 10:30 pm while it was still daylight, and I grazed breakfast at a farmer’s market in Rome. For a few days I lived blissfully on tapas, tempranillo, and flamenco with a friend in Barcelona.

I have many friends around the country and in several parts of the world. I learned to kickbox, and I learned how to live as a polyamorous person in a monogamous world. I’ve seen my body and mind change, for better and worse. I’ve generally gotten much stronger and more flexible, in almost every way. I’ve laughed a lot. I’ve hurt a lot.

And I just kept breathing. By chance, because Linda was methodical enough to make four months mean exactly four months.

WE ALL DODGE BULLETS

This isn’t the only bullet I’ve dodged. I remember at least two occasions when I was nearly in bad car accidents. And who knows about the near-misses I never even knew about. It just so happens that in my life I dodged one particularly famous bullet that warrants public remembrances in national media. I feel sadness for the people who died in and above Lockerbie that day. And I feel anger for the people who willfully took those lives.

But mostly, it just feels weird. Surreal. All the stuff I’ve experienced and done since that day, my place in the overlapping ripples and flow of life… it could have ended, right there.

And someday it will end. That’s certain.

I just didn’t happen to be on the plane that blew up. That’s all. I dodged that bullet. It doesn’t feel like a miracle, or grace, or even that I was “saved” by chance. It’s just how things happened to go for me. And it reminds me how very different life can become, very quickly.

Each moment is its own world, and one moment does not always determine the next. We have no choice but to roll with that. But we can choose to be aware of the ubiquitous possibility of instant, drastic change.

When I tune into that awareness, my life is much richer. It doesn’t necessarily make more sense, but it feels more meaningful.

The growing number of citizen journalists (of various flavors) obviously are willing to do at least some of this work — but they don’t always know how to find what they’re seeking, or have sufficient context to even know what might be worth pursuing beyond the narrative line chosen for a packaged news story. Also, lots of people who have no desire to be citizen journalists still occasionally get interested enough in some news stories to want to check them out further first-hand. They just need encouragement, and some help getting started.

Therefore, it helps to consider that news doesn’t always have to be a finished story. In some cases, or for some people, a launching point might be even more intriguing, useful, and engaging. Here’s one option for doing that…

For several years, one of my steady freelance gigs has been writing for the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Tipsheet — a biweekly e-mail newsletter that gets distributed to thousands of journalists and is also archived online. Tipsheet presents ahead-of-the-curve or under-the-radar environmental journalism leads with background, sources, resources, and angles to consider.

One of this publication’s strengths is that we include specific links and contacts. We don’t make Tipsheet readers hunt around for, say, the correct government scientist, or the correct report document, to begin their research or independent verification. We list names, e-mail, and phone numbers (when they’re already publicly available, or with permission). We link to specific Web pages and files. We offer access to a diverse array of sources. We recommend discussion forums and provide details on upcoming meetings or events. We also link to existing coverage and commentary that illustrates interesting approaches or provides unique insight.

This approach goes far beyond the “what you can do” toolboxes. Already included with many news stories. It’s about helping people find and define their own stories. Here, engagement is the main event — not an afterthought. It’s about storyfinding, not just storytelling.

To see how this works, check out a couple of recent SEJ Tipsheet articles: Supreme Court Case Affects Nearly 550 Power Plants and Eco-Packaging for Wine: Bottles and Beyond

In short: Even though SEJ Tipsheet is intended for an audience that knows how to find this stuff (professional journalists), we give them a significant head start by doing much of the initial legwork and synthesis. That’s the core value of our Tipsheet — we don’t just give journalists ideas; we make it easier and faster for them to get started.

Perhaps the tipsheet approach might appeal to more than just journalists. Perhaps it might also prove compelling to schools, concerned citizens, businesses, and more? Maybe, in some cases, even more traditional mainstream news audiences such as voters or cost- or health-conscious consumers?

For instance, instead of (or in addition to) writing a story about a school board meeting, a tipsheet piece might offer context and leads to help citizens explore, understand and engage in a thorny local education issue.

Or, rather than write a story about a change in the local crime rate, crime statistics could be presented in context with related statistics (especially economic) and diverse sources to help people discover potentially meaningful patterns and various possible interpretations.

Or, rather than interview one or two sources for a radio piece on a new museum, a tipsheet could help people understand how the museum relates to the local community — including who paid for it, and who is likely to visit.

Would most people want to explore the news on their own? Probably not. But then, “most people” don’t care about any particular story you can find in a mainstream news venue. The “general audience” is a myth. When you get down to the story level, news has always been about niches. Every piece of news has its own community of relevance — and every news topic offers myriad potential stories.

What do you think of this idea?

(NOTE: I originally published a slightly different version of this post on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)