Fall Forward

Pick a subject with something to fall back on. Keep a safety net. It sounds like care, and it is. But a net behind you means you spend your working life facing the wrong way, and sooner or later the fallback quietly becomes the plan.

Denzel Washington's answer, given to Penn's graduating class in 2011, was to change the direction of the fall rather than the odds of it.

Reggie Jackson struck out 2,600 times, more than anyone in the history of baseball. You don't hear about the strikeouts. People remember the home runs.

Thomas Edison is said to have run a thousand failed experiments. You don't hear about those either, because number 1,001 was the light bulb. Every failed experiment is one step closer to the one that works.

You will lose. You will embarrass yourself. You will be bad at something in public. It is not a risk to be managed, it is a certainty to be embraced.

Early on, Washington auditioned for a Broadway musical despite not being able to sing. He handed over sheet music for a Temptations song, got through one verse, and was cut off: thank you, you'll be hearing from me. He didn't get the part. He went to prepare for the next audition.

Auditions kept coming and kept going badly. He kept turning up anyway, on the old principle that if you hang around a barbershop long enough, sooner or later you'll get a haircut.

In 2010 he won a Tony for the play Fences. It was staged at the Cort Theatre — the same theatre where that first audition had fallen apart thirty years before.

A clean record is rarely evidence of skill. More often it is evidence of a narrow range: you have only ever attempted things you already knew you could do.

Washington quotes an expression his wife gave him. To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did. Failure is simply what that sentence costs.

Washington borrows an image from the speaker Les Brown. Picture yourself at the end of your life, and gathered around the bed are the ghosts of your unfulfilled potential: the ideas you never acted on, the talents you never used. They are angry. We came to you because you could have brought us to life, they say, and now we go to the grave together.

How many of them are going to be in the room?

Sometimes failure is the best way to work out where you are going. Washington started pre-med at Fordham until a course called cardiac morphogenesis defeated him. Then pre-law. Then journalism. His grades fell to a 1.8 and the university suggested he take time off.

At twenty, at his lowest point, he was helping in his mother's beauty shop. That summer, working at a camp, a fellow counsellor watched a talent show and asked whether he had ever thought about acting. He changed his major that autumn, for the last time.