It's Okay to Fail. Swing Big Anyway.

“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”

~ Babe Ruth

Some of the fondest memories of my youth are of my brother and me playing catch in our front yard. We lived just three doors down from a minor league baseball park where we spent most of our summer nights chasing foul balls so we could turn them in for 15 cents, which was just enough money for a pack of cheap chewing gum back then. On the days when the team was playing away games, we’d jump the fence with our friends and play a few innings of baseball ourselves. While the other guys would choose to play as one of their contemporary baseball heroes (Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, and Reggie Jackson come to mind), I always chose Babe Ruth. You see, he and I have something in common.

George Herman “Babe” Ruth played professional baseball for 22 years from 1914 to 1935. He led the league in home runs for 12 of those 22 years, finishing with an astounding 714 in all (a record that stood until 1974). Let’s face it, even the most casual of sports enthusiasts knows that you can hardly have a conversation about the bests of baseball without including his name somewhere near the top.

However, being the best of something or another is not what he and I have in common. No, I never hit a single ball out of the park. Not even once. I’ve never been famous. I’ve never been wealthy. Heck, I never even had a cool nickname.

However, did you know that in his major league debut, the great Babe Ruth went 0-for-2, striking out at his first at-bat? What’s more, did you know that he led the American League in strikeouts five times, nearly a fourth of his career? Or, that his 1,330 career strikeouts was a major league record for 30 years?

See, this is the side of Mr. Ruth that I connect with. Well, kind of. I mean, I’ve had more than my share of strikeouts; with jobs, with girls, with friends, and even more than a few falls (I fell down a flight of stairs one time carrying a cake, but I digress). In fact, I feel like I’ve spent way more time falling down than getting back up, which isn’t physically possible, I suppose. But it sure feels like that’s the case.

The Babe was known for having an “all or nothing” batting style. When he got up to the plate, he knew that the batter’s box was sacred. He knew that as he stood there, he had the opportunity to do something really great; that, he had the opportunity to be something really great. That sense of calling or the notion that we just might have greatness in us, so let’s swing for the benches KNOWING that we might fail; that we likely will fail. That’s what I share with the Babe: the knowledge that we’re going to fall down but that the getting back up makes it worth it. I believe in a life worth living. I believe in living purposefully. Swinging for the fence is just about all I’ve got. So, there’s been plenty of hits and plenty of misses. I can live with that.

Maybe in the process of trying to sojourn this life with some amount of success, it’s okay that we fail from time to time. Maybe it’s okay that the laundry doesn’t always get done, or that dinner isn’t always a hit with the entire family, or maybe even that, embarrassingly enough, 4-year-old Johnny is screaming and crying while we walk through the store. Maybe it’s even okay that I haven’t lost all the weight I meant to this year, or haven’t (yet) run a 5K, or that my hair looks like the bad side of a raccoon on a windy day. Maybe what matters is that we muster up the courage to try. To dream. To put one foot in front of the other when often just getting out of bed is all we got. To get back up to bat – even though we struck out yesterday, and the day before, and maybe again tomorrow.

Maybe… Just maybe… It’s not the falling down that defines us. Maybe it’s in the getting back up where we write and rewrite the story of our lives.

At the end of the day, not a lot of us remember the great Babe Ruth for his record-setting failures. No, we remember him for his greatness, both of which – the home runs and the strikeouts – happened when standing in the same small, white box for 22 years. I believe that he would say that he couldn’t have had one without the other. He would say that every strikeout was worth it, because they brought him… “closer to the next home run.”