Your Greatest Failure-- An Active Rain Contest for June 2013

Your Greatest Failure-- An Active Rain Contest for June 2013

Last year, I read a book that captivated me:  ENDURANCE by Alfred Lansing.  It was a true story of the failed Antarctic expedition of English Explorer Ernest Shackleton.  

How could a failure be so engrossing?  Well, what Ernest Shackleton set out to do was ambitious enough, even for today, and this started in 1915.  He set out to sail to one side of the Antarctic, take a team by foot across it (the first time the continent would have been crossed by land) and take up with another ship waiting for him and his team on the other side.  What happened is hard to explain in a blurb, but involved the total loss of his ship, crushed by ice, in the Weddell Sea.  He and his team of mean survived living on ice floes for months, then made open boat journeys in an angry sea with little more than a compass and the night sky  to help them find their way to a blip of an island on a map.  That was the unforgiving Elephant Island, uninhabited by man.  From there, he took a smaller crew in another open boat journey to the whaling island of Georgia, where he and his men landed on the uninhabited side of the island and traveled by foot across treacherous terrain to make it to the whaling station for help.  From there, Shackleton went back to Elephant Island and rescued his men.  Despite living in life threatening conditions for well more than one year, under Shackleton's leadership, every one of his crew survived.  It's considered one of the greatest failures of all time, and to my astonishment, it took me until the age of forty-two to learn about it.  I encourage all of you to read about it in the book.  The movie just doesn't give you the sense of how long that journey took.  

Another, better known "greatest failure" is the story of Apollo 13.  When three of our NASA astronauts were stranded in the moon's orbit with a crippled ship, and faced issues like lack of breathable air (yeah..that's a problem) engineers on the ground beat the odds and brought the men home safely.

Our society is one that reveals in stories of success.  We love it when things go according to plan.  But life happens and not everything we do turns out how we expect.  In fact, sometimes the best laid plans go down in flames.  It's what happens when you are faced with that situation that can take a failure and make it great.  Your grace in handling a bad situation.  Your management skills in disarming difficult situations.  Your character is built in the way you hold your failures.

In this contest, we want to hear the story of your greatest failure.  Maybe it's a failed transaction that, in the way you handled it, ended up bringing you future business.  Maybe it's a failed career that brought you to real estate where you ultimately succeeded.  Maybe there is a personal struggle that had you emerging from failure with something to show for it.  Maybe it's just a story about an ending that didn't go as planned, but didn't end as bad as it could've.  Whatever your greatest failure, we want to hear about it.  It's easy to handle success.  It's much harder to keep things together when plans go awry and your goal is thwarted.

For this contest, our judges will be Jared Christiansen, Carla Muss-Jacobs and Erica Ramus.  They will help judge first, second and third place entries.

Here are the guidelines:

Contest starts June 1st and ends June 30th.

One entry per member.

All participants will receive 500 bonus points.

1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners will receive 2,000, 1,500 and 1,000 respectively.

Leave a link to your post in the comment section below.

Looking forward to how our AR community is emerging from those tough moments in life when things don't go your way.

Chris Ann Cleland, Associate Broker- Licensed in Virginia, GRI, SFR, Northern Virginia Short Sale Specialist. Affiliated with Long & Foster, 7526 Limestone Drive, Gainesville, VA 20155.  To contact Chris Ann, call 703-402-0037 or email chrisann@LNF.com.  Or you can visit her website:  www.nvarealestate.net.

Header photos taken by Chris Ann Cleland.

The opinions expressed in this post are those of Chris Ann Cleland, not those of Long & Foster REALTORS®.