The Importance of Falling Well
When I was growing up, my elementary school required students to study Judo. My teacher was a meatloaf of a woman named Rena “Rusty” Kanokogi. She was a world famous Judo champion and tough as nails. She would use me for a lot of technique demonstrations because I was taller than a lot of the other kids, so I had a lot of experience being roughly picked up and thrown to the ground.
In Judo, players are taught to master a basic technique called “taking a break-fall”. A break-fall is a controlled fall, where the impact is spread out over more bodily surface area, thus decreasing pounds per square inch, and saving you from a broken neck, or worse. In the many years I played Judo, practiced Aikido, and generally horsed around with my friends, I took a lot of break-falls. Knowing how to fall was a fact of my life.
Then I got hit by a bus. I was biking home from work and a Peter Pan bus mowed me down. When I fell, I took a break-fall just like I’d always done, and it probably saved me from far worse injuries than I sustained. Frankly, if I hadn’t tucked my chin (part of taking a break-fall) I’d have been decapitated by the rear wheels of the bus. Falling well saved my life.
Similarly, when I was a 19-year-old student at NYU, I got fired for the first time. I was working at a shop in the village and a customer who, it turned out was just calling the catalog number for our operating hours, was misinterpreted by corporate as complaining that the store had not opened on time. Corporate reached down and fired me. It was heartbreaking. I’d had many jobs in the past, and I’d never been told so much as “poor job, man.” The job I lost was a nothing job that wasn’t part of my life’s great passions, but it was fun, and I made decent money. Still, I was sad.
A job is a kind of identity. You define yourself by what you do. Being fired usually feels like a step backwards. It feels like failure.
This is where knowing how to fall comes in. When you lose a job, it is time to take stock of your resources, and decide if that job is what you should have been doing in the first place. If you don’t want to land on your backside and feel sorry for yourself, you have to imagine for a moment that you quit and wanted to do something else. This is important because it allows you to engage your faculties and have agency. A lot of the pain of a job loss is around the emotions, the fear. If you can get past that, you will find you’re much more effective because you aren’t bogged down by feelings that get in the way of next steps.
In 2006, I was downsized from a job that I both loved and was great at. Thanks to my virtues as an employee, it wasn’t long before I was hired for more money at a rival company. Years later, I decided to leave the field altogether and follow my passions. Today, I do things I love, and never would have dreamed of back in 2006. If I had not been denied opportunities by layoffs or nepotism, I would not be who I am now. I’m proud of who I am.
So don’t let a job loss get you down. Take a break-fall, roll onto your feet, and get back into the fight.
