Failure Day 2025

 At The Forty-Five, besides the usual sorts of holidays that I as an American and Christian celebrate, there are a couple that are the equivalent of a regional holiday that no-one outside of the town or province celebrates.  One of these is Failure Day.

Failure Day commemorates the day on 02 August 2005 when myself and my business partner officially decided our real estate business - The Firm - was no longer tenable. In effect, we fired ourselves.

If you have never had the privilege of firing yourself, I do not recommend it.  It comes not only with the baggage of being laid off or fired, but all of the added baggage knowing that in some form or fashion you are the one that got yourself there; if nothing else, you made the choice to leave a perfectly good job and head out on your own.

Those were dark days, that period between the beginning of August and the Middle of September 2005 when I was looking for a job.  Income had been scant - I think the last time we had gotten a commission was in early June 2005 and there was no sign of another one coming in.  And of course I had made a series of other decisions, like moving to a new house to support my lifestyle, that played very poorly in retrospect.

The failure was total and complete, at least for me:  I never went back to real estate and had to essentially start over in the Biopharmaceutical/Medical Device Industry.  The financial ramifications reverberated for years after;  by my count our losses were in the six figure range, up to and including our inability to build a financial buffer so that when my first layoff, Hammerfall, happened, I had to take the first job offer that came which was halfway across the country and ended up selling the house not quite at a loss, but with all of our equity gone.

So what do you do when you find yourself year after year living out the consequences of that decision?  You make a holiday of it.

And so, Failure Day, the day that I celebrate every failure large and small in my life.  Some of them are by my own hand and foolish, others were not my fault, and some were by my own hand and not foolish - but I went down swinging anyway.

It struck me as I wrote this that this, the 20th Anniversary of Failure Day, takes place within a month  of my 20tn anniversary of this blog. I had not thought of that until now; I suspect the combination of the two is more than coincidence.  Perhaps Failure Day, in its way, led to more writing.

And so, I invite to you raise a glass or mug or horn filled with your beverage of choice.  Celebrate your failures - which, as Governor Seymore is quoted in Orison Swett Marden's Book An Iron Will:

"If I were to wipe out twenty acts, which should they be?  Should it be my business mistakes, my foolish acts (for I suppose all do foolish things occasionally), my grievances?  No; for after all, these are the very things by which I have profited.  So I finally concluded I should expunge, instead of my mistakes, my triumphs.  I could not afford to dismiss the tonic of mortification, the refinement of sorrow; I needed them every one."