LESSONS FROM "THE L"

"Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure." ― Malcolm X

As I write this, America is less than a month away from the second presidential inauguration of Donald J. Trump. Depending on which news outlet you choose to listen to, what is scheduled to happen on January 20, 2025 is either one of the greatest events in American history or it is the beginning of the end of America as we know it.

Or, if you’re not given to hyperbolic, reactionary political drama, January 20th will be the seventy-fourth time America has inaugurated the winner of a presidential election into the office of President of the United States.

Anyone who knows me knows I am not a fan of politics. Or, more specifically, I’m not a fan of what politics does to people, places, and things. Oh, I understand its place in American culture and even its debatable necessity from time-to-time. But generally speaking, my personal observation of the effects of politics is very simple: politics destroys everything and everyone it touches.

Disagree? Feel free to ask Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., or Bobby and John F. Kennedy what they think about the effects of politics on the human race.

I’ll wait…

My primary complaint about the effects politics has on society can be summarized by the losing party’s reactions since the 2024 presidential election results were announced. It seems that those who had put all their political, and even their existential, eggs in the losing party’s basket have wasted no time since November 5th in letting the world know their thoughts and feelings about the election’s outcome and why their candidate of choice, Kamala Harris, lost.

They lost the election because American voters are racist and misogynistic.

In other news, the Walt Disney company has spent most of 2024 hemorrhaging cash at an unsustainable rate. The main source of this fiduciary leak is the box office as nearly every movie Disney released in 2024 has flopped, hard. What should have been their most sure-fire, money-making intellectual properties, or IPs, have left some rather robust bomb craters in their box office ledgers. Disney has, of course, weighed in to explain why presumed blockbuster movies like The Marvels or Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (just to name a couple) lost nearly $900 million in combined box office returns. The short answer?

These movies bombed because American movie-goers are misogynistic and racist.

Speaking of entertainment news, several ‘Triple-A’ video games created by top-tier game developing companies like Ubisoft or Blizzard have “underperformed” in their projected sales expectations (marketing lingo for “they bombed worse than The Eternals”). Sure-fire million-seller games like Star Wars: Outlaw, Diablo IV, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard are reportedly losing their developers and publishers millions of revenue dollars. Of course, these developers and publishers are eager to reveal the reason for their underperforming bits and bytes of software entertainment:

American video game ‘fanbois’ are misogynistic, racist, and just plain hateful.

I could go on. The list of failing entertainment content, political campaigns, and even national governments is growing exponentially. In 2024 alone, the number of CEOs that left their respective companies in worse shape than they found them is staggering. If the 1920s are known in America as ‘the roaring 20s’, the 2020s may very well go down in the history books as “The Age of Incompetence”.

But ‘incompetence” isn’t in even near the zip code of the self-diagnosed reasons for why these industries are racking up losses at a record-setting pace. If you listen to representatives from Disney, Ubisoft, or the Democrat Party, you would absolutely believe their spin-doctored conclusions about their respective failures: the United States of America is the single most racist, misogynistic, [insert marginalized group name here]aphobic nation on the face of the Earth.

So, I’ve got a question in response to all the political pundits, entertainment shills, video game reviewers, and corporate news “journalists” and their collective “it can’t be our/their fault” post-mortem conclusions: 

Why are so many successful organizations incapable of “Taking The ‘L’”?

If you’re not familiar with what “Taking the ‘L’” means, it’s a clever way of saying “taking the loss and learning from it.” While you’d normally hear this phrase coming from the losing team at a post-game interview or press conference, the concept of learning from a loss is definitely not restricted to sports. It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of learning from our mistakes was viewed as an honorable, and even a wise, reaction to a loss, both publicly and privately. After all, everyone makes mistakes and there are a lot of educational opportunities that can only come from failing to achieve a goal.

Unfortunately, this “learning from failure” perspective is not something Western civilization, and especially American civilization, appears to be interested in.

For example:

In April 2023, Anheuser-Busch launched a marketing campaign for their Bud Light brand of beer that focused on selling beer to the LGBTQ+ community while simultaneously publicly insulting the brand’s existing “frat boy” consumer base. The response from consumers was as predictable as it was instantaneous. Billions of dollars of revenue evaporated as Bud Light’s ‘frat boy’ customers immediately went to social media to share their opinions of this marketing strategy as loudly, and in some cases as violently, as possible.

Anheuser-Busch’s response to the capital-destroying reaction to their marketing strategy was to quietly remove the people responsible for the marketing campaign, wipe away everything associated with the campaign, and release a press release that said everything except “we made a mistake and we’re learning from it”.

To be clear, the mistake Bud Light made wasn’t their decision to market to specific groups of people. Marketing companies have been doing that for eons. The mistake was committed when their marketing executive publicly insulted their decades-old consumer base on a podcast. A first year marketing student could’ve easily predicted the outcome of that marketing “strategy”.

As of this writing, Bud Light is still working to recover from this debacle. Recent commercials for the fallen “king of beers” have taken a few steps to returning the brand to its frat boy roots. But since their marketplace freefall, Anheuser-Busch has done everything except publicly admitting they made a mistake insulting their customers. And, instead of learning from this colossal failure, organizations like Disney, Ubisoft, and the Democrat Party have decided to double and triple-down on the strategy of insulting their large and vocal fanbases when their sales expectations are not realized.

It seems that America’s corporate, political, and social culture has collectively agreed that publicly admitting to making a mistake at any level is the greatest form of weakness known to man. Obviously, this “I can do no wrong” mentality is fully immersed in a suicidal level of arrogant hubris. And it is this hubris that produces individuals, organizations, and/or corporations that are the textbook definition of “unteachable”.

Of course, you don’t have to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation to be arrogant and unteachable. Every human being from every culture and walk of life has the potential to embrace these incredibly unhealthy perspectives. As someone who has pastored very culturally, racially, and socially diverse groups of people, I can tell you from experience that arrogant pride and unteachable hubris are hardly indigenous to the rich and famous. Every group, institution, and organization from churches to prisons are populated by people who refuse to look in the mirror and admit to their mistakes.

It is our innate arrogance and unteachable pride that produces most of the perpetual problems in our lives. What is the most ironic twist in the entirety of the human condition is our inherent reluctance to learn from our mistakes.

It is our mistakes that are designed to keep us humble and teach us to do better. It is our failures that provide the most meaningful educational opportunities that we will ever face. I can honestly confess I’ve learned more from my mistakes, failures, and sins than I’ve ever learned in a classroom setting. Honestly, I value my diplomas and degrees from the University of Hard Knocks far more than any other educational accomplishment I’ve ever earned.

You see, there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained from ‘taking the L’; knowledge that absolutely cannot be learned by any other method. Some of America’s largest corporations and most tenured political organizations are facing some of those lessons right now. Those that choose to admit their mistakes and learn from them will eventually find success again.

But for those who choose to ignore the inherent educational value to be mined from their losses, they are going to learn the hardest lesson that corporations like Enron learned the very hard way: there is definitely no such thing as ‘too big to fail’.