My Favorite Failure

Introduction

A year or two ago I came across an article in an airline magazine or some such (probably a regular column) titled “My Favorite Failure” or “My Favorite Mistake.” I can’t find it now (Googling “Favorite Mistake” turns up a hundred variations on some Sheryl Crow song). The article concerned some famous pianist playing his first competition and having such a battle of nerves that he botched the opening notes and actually started over, which ruined his chances of scoring well. The judges, however, were impressed that he started over (something to do with the sanctity of the piece or something) and said so. He learned some valuable lesson and now he’s famous, so it’s a heartwarming story, etc.

Do I have a favorite mistake? For me, the chief problem with this exercise is choosing one among the many, but I’ve settled on a favorite (for now). If I were famous, you’d be reading this in some magazine.

My favorite failure

I’ve had some great failures, like when I tried to ride through a giant mud puddle during the warmup lap of a mountain bike race and ended up entirely submerged in mud in front of at least 50 people. Another time, I was at a party and barfed in front of dozens of onlookers, without alcohol being involved (or at least without it being prominent). Another candidate: as a dumb teenager unaware of the need to prepare his speeches in advance, I was laughed at by an entire roomful of people at a city council meeting in Boulder. These were all funny and humiliating failures, but I didn’t really learn anything beyond the fact of my being an idiot, which I’d known already.

The mistake I’ll focus on here: at age 14, I traveled 75 miles for a bike race and forgot my cycling shoes. Now, I know that’s not really remarkable—probably every bike racer has done this, or something like it. But that’s just a mistake. The real failure was how I reacted.

Did I melt down, and throw a tantrum, maybe break my hand punching the side of the car? No, actually, I was pretty stoic. In fact, maybe too stoic.

The facts of the case

This was the Buckeye Road Race, the first race of the 1984 season. I was inwardly miserable because I never trained much over the winter in those days and thus always sucked in those early races. I did better as the season progressed (though to be honest, I sucked to some degree all season long, compared to my pals who all improved way faster).

But poor winter training wasn’t my only problem. All races gave me a bad case of nerves; I was pretty much a basket case psychologically at every start line. Just seeing all the parked cars with the bikes on them gave me butterflies. I wasted so much energy being nervous, I never rode as well in the races as I did in training. At least, the fitness gap between my friends and me was more pronounced on race day. My mood would improve afterward when I could finally relax, even though I probably should have been more disappointed in my (generally poor) results.

You might be wondering: why did I even keep racing? Well, as slow as I was in my fourth year of racing, I was at least (gradually) improving. More than that, I just liked the culture of bike racing. I liked the people, I liked bikes, I liked the speed, and I liked the idea of racing. It got me out of the house and gave me a reason—almost an excuse, you might say—to train.

So: back to the Buckeye Road Race. I got there and was going through my stuff when I discovered my cycling shoes were not in my bag. They were Detto Pietro Art 74s, like these:

Back then, there was only one configuration for such shoes—there weren’t 4 or 5 different cleat types making compatibility difficult. The cleat was just a hunk of plastic with a slot in it, which fit over the cage of any pedal. We all had toe clips and in theory I could have raced in sneakers. My shoes were big clunky things, though, and I wasn’t going to do that.

Some adult on my team went running around trying to find somebody who could loan me his shoes (my race being before theirs). I was embarrassed, of course, and didn’t like the idea of anybody taking the trouble. I was well prepared to face the consequences of my neglect.

Too prepared, actually. When it became clear nobody could find shoes my size, I immediately felt a warm flush of relief wash over me. I wouldn’t have to race after all! This was a lot like the warm, cozy sensation of wetting your pants—in that carefree moment before you realize what you’ve done. No sooner did I recognize my emotion—relief—than I became deeply ashamed of it. What the hell was I? A bike racer or a poser? A driven athlete, or a fraud who wasted space in his teammate’s car? What was wrong with me that the pressure of the start line was so great I’d graciously accept being turned away from it through my own disorganization? Why was the embarrassment of a bonehead move like forgetting my shoes less painful than normal pre-race butterflies? Could there have—gasp!—been anything bordering on intentional about my utter lack of meticulousness when packing my bag?

My enlightenment

I can’t really say this shame represented an epiphany of any kind; I didn’t suddenly make any resolution that changed the trajectory of my life, or even my sporting life. But the recognition I’d had was the start of something: I now knew there was a problem somewhere in myself. I no longer just bumped blithely along, buoyed by my friends and my team and the comfortable delusion that I was an actual bike racer (who just didn’t happen to be very good). Up to this point I had bobbed merrily in the baby pool of poser-dom, but now the plug had been pulled. The cycling season gradually drained away and at the end of it, I seriously considered quitting the sport.

Rather than a bolt out of the blue that clarified everything, my failure—that is, the realization that I wasn’t truly committed—festered in my gut like a slow-growing infection. It was just this unpleasant awareness that I hadn’t had  before, that didn’t spur me to any specific action but also wouldn’t go away.

I put a rear rack on my mountain bike and attached cute little caddy to it haul stuff around. I asked myself: is it enough to be a guy who gets around town on a bike? A carefree bike path regular? Could I just bike around for the pleasure of it, without worrying about speed and strength and performance?

Sometime over the winter the answer materialized: no. It wasn’t enough to be a neat guy who likes bikes. I wanted to be a racer, a real one, who doesn’t make excuses and races every chance he gets and pays enough attention not to forget his damn shoes.

This new emotional, psychological commitment—the increase in will—must have changed my behavior in a hundred subtle ways. I trained more; I got more organized; I stopped finding excuses not to ride; I thought a lot less about the rote activities involved and just carried them out; training went from being something I could do to something that had to be done; I tinkered less with my bike. I raced more; my fitness soared; I started getting results. It was the real start of competence in the sport for me.

I was chatting with a pal recently, a fellow assistant mountain bike coach, and we were trying to figure out how many races we’d done. I guessed I’d done over 150, but just now I did a rough tally and it’s actually over 250. And not once, since the 1984 Buckeye Road Race, have I forgotten my shoes. That’s a pretty good track record … and I think it all stems from that one privately humiliating failure: not merely the failure to be organized, but a fundamental failure to commit.

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Middle School “Graduation” Speech ... From a Dad

Introduction

I am vaguely aware that there is, coming up, some kind of “graduation” ceremony for my older daughter’s middle school.  I’m still waiting to hear the details, such as when and what this actually is.  One thing I know for certain:  nobody has asked me to give a speech at the event.

The nice thing about being a blogger is that nobody has to ask.  Here is my unsolicited commencement speech for all eighth-graders—and their parents—everywhere.  I encourage you to give this speech at the dinner table tonight, like I’m going to do.

(By the way, this speech is not based on the performance and behaviors of my own eighth-grader, who is perfect.  Everything in here is completely hypothetical and/or archetypal.)

Middle school “graduation” speech ... from a dad

Of course I’ve never given a speech like this before.  I’m not even sure why middle schools have such ceremonies, since middle school is just a stepping-stone anyway.  But I could say the same thing about high school, which has itself become a mere waypoint on the way to college.

As I hope you’ve already heard, middle school (or junior high, as I knew it) is actually the hard part.  If you’ve done a halfway decent job of making the transition from largely irresponsible, clueless child to basically self-sufficient (albeit exasperated) teenager, high school shouldn’t be a difficult transition.  Moreover, kids seem to mellow out in high school, as their brains catch up to their hormone-ravaged bodies.  So, since you matriculating middle-schoolers are all going to be just fine, I’m going to focus this speech on what you can do for your poor parents over the next four years. 

There’s solid precedent for thinking of your parents on this momentous occasion, even when all the fuss seems to be about you.  I suppose at my high school graduation somebody must have given a speech, but I don’t remember it.  What I do remember is what my physics teacher said during the last week of school.  He gave what struck me as kind of the antithesis of a commencement speech.  Here is my best recollection of what he said: 

Look, a lot of fuss is about to be made over all of you. You’ll wear this fancy cap and gown and attend this big ceremony with all these people watching. But don’t get too excited. In the big scheme of things, graduating from high school isn’t that big an achievement. It basically means you showed up for four years. And if you really think about it, most of you could figure out a more fun way to spend your afternoon than dressing up and standing around through a bunch of speeches. Try to appreciate that this ceremony isn’t actually for you. It’s for your parents, and your grandparents, so please honor their ceremony by not decorating your mortarboard with stickers and whatnot, and justifying this misbehavior by saying it’s your ceremony. Instead, behave respectfully, go where you’re told, and try not to do anything to disturb the event. You have the rest of the summer to screw around and do as you please.

Of course, there aren’t any caps or gowns at today’s ceremony, and since kids your age aren’t organized or devious enough to smuggle in beer or inflatable dolls, like the students at my high school graduation did [wait for laughter], I’m going to give you some guidelines on how to advance your development as thinking, considerate, and mature beings in your day-to-day life.  If you follow this advice you might start to feel a bit less anxious about grades, popularity, life changes, and the ten other things that I, as a parent, could never understand.

Guideline #1:  Honor your commitments!  No excuses!

This does not mean “Prioritize your commitments and honor the most important ones.”  It means you should not commit to doing something unless you know you will have the time, resources, ability, discipline, and commitment to do it, as promised and on time.  You must honor every commitment you make, no matter whom you made it to.

When you’re in high school, you will have all kinds of distractions—some of them of the “hanging out” variety, but also a great number of worthy extracurricular activities.  That’s great—but you shouldn’t, say, skip practicing the piano because you have to write a student election speech.  If you cannot honor all your obligations, you are overscheduled and need to scale back.  Commitments come first; leisure comes second.  That said, before committing to something, ensure you will still have time to set aside for leisure.  It’s important, too.

Remember that extracurricular activities shouldn’t be sacrificed at the altar of good grades.  If you’re on a sports team, your teammates rightfully expect a certain level of participation, even if you have a big test coming up (and after all, who doesn’t?).  It is more important to learn to be reliable, balanced, and responsible than to get straight As.  Many great scholars totally wash out in real life, and not all successful people were top students.

There is almost never a good excuse for failing to honor a commitment.  For example, to say “I ran out of time” means a) “I did not manage my time well,” b) “I did not prioritize this commitment to you,” and c) “By making this excuse I am demonstrating a willingness to let this happen again.”  Remember, nobody wants to hear an excuse.  Often, an excuse functions as the opposite of an apology.  It suggests that you’re not holding yourself responsible for your failure.

Guideline #2:  “Own” your problems

You must recognize when something is your problem, and don’t try to make it into your parents’ problem.  Say, for example, you forgot to get up extra early for a student council meeting, and now you’re about to be late for it.  Don’t yell at your mom or dad, “You gotta drive me!  You gotta!”  After all, you made the commitment to attend that early meeting, not your parents.  It is unpleasant and offensive for them to be shrieked at by somebody who has made a mistake and behaves as though it’s his or her parent’s job to fix it.

Sometimes you will fail.  Everybody does.  Fail gracefully, without dragging down the people around you, particularly your parents who suffer (if only silently) whenever you do.  Yes, of course you can always go to your parents to be consoled, but resist the impulse to implicate them in your mistake.  Learn how to accept a setback as stoically as you can; try to learn from it; then move on.

Guideline #3:  Understand the role of your parents

Most of you kids probably dream of having the cool kind of parents, who are a combination of personal assistant, chauffeur, purveyor of booze, and ATM.  Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not what your parents signed up for.  And all those hundreds of loaded diapers you stuck them with have probably exhausted your parents’ patience.

There are all kinds of ways your parents can support your efforts, but not all of them are actually helpful.  Should they be available to help with homework?  Of course (unless it’s something like calculus that your parents put behind them decades ago).  Is it right for your mom or dad to bend over backwards to get you out of a tough spot, when you’re behind on an assignment due to procrastination and/or disorganization?

Perhaps not.  If they help you out of such a bind, perhaps they’re sending the wrong message, such as “It’s okay to fly by the seat of your pants, since you’ll always have a parent to pick up the slack.”  (You won’t.)  As important as that school assignment seems now, the bigger education is in managing your time.  This never seems obvious in the moment, but it’s better for your mom or dad to let you fail now—and thus learn self-sufficiency the hard way—than for them to leave you stranded later, when you’re truly on your own.

There is more to parenting than helping a child succeed.  A good parent strives to teach his or her child to be helpful to others.  Many of us parents are trying to instill character, which is rarer and more valuable than the ability to succeed. 

Of course this development takes time.  Infants are practically useless; grade-school kids are often clueless; teenagers often feel overwhelmed.  Self-sufficiency is an evolution.  You are now at an age where you can and should be taking on as much as you can:  setting and adhering to your routines, cleaning up after yourself, getting yourself where you need to go, and knowing what to do and when to do it without being reminded.

I hope that most of you have already managed to climb well into the purple tier of the developmental triangle I’ve presented here.  This is a simplistic schematic; the colors should blend m ore, to convey that even before being totally self-sufficient, a person can still be helpful to others. 

Remember that you are not yet an independent adult, free to pursue only what is important to you.  So long as you are dependent on your parents, you should expect them to be involved in setting your priorities.  When you set goals for yourself, work to keep them aligned with the goals your parents have for you.  And when you ask your mom or dad for support, remember that you do not have the big picture; gracefully accept it when the answer is no.

Not all the help your parents give you is solicited; for example, they are justified in giving you unsolicited advice.  That’s part of their job.  And even though you didn’t ask for advice, you’re expected to follow it.  It’s exasperating to your parents when you don’t, and then they have to deal with the consequences ... which brings me to my next guideline, which is a sore point with so many parents.

Guideline #4:  GET ORGANIZED!  STAY ORGANIZED!

Why don’t the greatest mathematicians do everything in their heads?  It’s because they need pencil and paper to organize their thoughts.  Why was written language invented?  It’s because oral communication is too imprecise, unreliable, and ungainly.  Writing something down frees your brain up for bigger, better thoughts, while keeping tasks from being forgotten.  As your life continues to get more complicated it will be impossible for you to honor all your commitments without systematically recording what is due and when.  So get a pocket calendar you can bring to school with you.  Record your commitments in it.  Keep it handy.  Look it over frequently.  Document deadlines well in advance.  Check things off as you complete them.

This calendar is only one of your tools.  Figure out everything you’ll need and keep it handy.  I’m talking about your wristwatch, your textbook, your homework, that permission slip, your house key, your gym shorts, your glasses, and the ten other things that I as a parent hope to be blissfully unaware of because they’re your problem, not mine.

Imagine if David had shown up to duel Goliath and forgot his sling:  “Dude, I couldn’t find my weapon, we’ll have to reschedule.”  That’s not gonna happen.  Goliath’s gonna kick your ass.  So, select a single best place in your home to store each of your life tools, and store them only in this place!  If you leave these tools lying around, they will be in people’s way, and they’ll get squirreled away and/or buried, and you won’t have them when you need them ... and then, if you complain to your parents about this, well, you’re in clear violation of Guideline #2 above.  (Don’t tell me you forgot Guideline #2!  Pay attention, there’ll be a test later!)

Guideline #5:  Figure out guidelines of your own

I don’t claim to be some world authority on all this.  Perhaps the most important skill for you to develop is a sense of being in charge of your own life, becoming self-sufficient, and figuring out—usually when something doesn’t work—what you need to do to become more effective.  Periodically step back, look at your life, and ask the question, “How can I make this work better?  What is falling through the cracks?  How can I keep that from happening?”  If you create the right habits and systems, you will get more done and avoid all kinds of strife as you go along.

I’ll leave you with this refreshingly non-didactic thought:  as systematic and prescriptive as all this seems, everybody is just winging it, and that’s okay.  You’re all amateurs.  There’s no such thing as a professional high-schooler, and if there were, we’d see all kinds of malpractice suits.

Flakage

Introduction

This post is about flakage. As in, flaking: standing somebody up when you had plans together. Fear not, this won’t be a gripe-fest—this blog is not a forum for me to complain about such stuff. In fact, I occasionally flake on people myself.

In this post, I’ll start by considering some of the common causes of flakage; the types of flakage; and the types of people who flake. Then I’ll unveil my Flakage Toolkit, perhaps our best weapon in the War on Flakage. (“What?” you’re asking, “There’s a War on Flakage?” Well, there is now.)

Causes of flakage

Of course there are all kinds of reasons that a person could fail to meet up with you as agreed. It would be pointless to try cataloguing all of them. But there are a few general categories that occur again and again. Here is my list of the top three:

Lack of inclination

Sometimes, a person will commit to something he or she really doesn’t want to do, because he or she just doesn’t know how to politely decline an invitation or reject a plan. I know this is a big problem because in my Health class in high school we did a whole unit on “Refusal Skills.” I went through a great number of drills practicing how to say no to drugs, alcohol, and sex (none of which, by the way, were ever actually offered to me). Those who didn’t pay attention in Health class as kids may now find themselves agreeing to plans they have not intention of carrying out. This buys them time to figure out how to wiggle out of the arrangement later. Often as not, they never face the music and never cancel the plans, and thus end up flaking.

Disorganization

Sometimes someone accepts an offer in good faith, only to discover that he totally forgot about something else he’d already committed to. He has every intention of letting you know, but never seems to be near the phone or the computer when he remembers to contact you. So he stands you up, and then tries in vain to remember to apologize.

Overcomplicated life

Sometimes your friend accepts an offer in good faith, and doesn’t have any scheduled conflicts, but hours or even minutes before heading out, something happens and there’s no wiggle room in his oversubscribed life to let him recover. For example, the toddler suddenly projectile-vomits and thus can’t go to his play date. Or the dog escapes and heads for the hills. Or your friend’s spouse suddenly has to work late and will miss the carpool.

Types of flakage

As an early participant in the etymological life of the term “flakage,” I propose that we break down flakage into four categories.

Advance flakage

Advance flakage is usually committed by person who is ambivalent about a suggested activity, and/or knows he’s disorganized and really isn’t sure of his availability, and/or or knows his life is too complicated to guarantee he’ll be able to keep any commitment. He’ll hem and haw and give you a less-than-certain answer when you propose the activity. That way, if he fails to show up, he didn’t really stand you up, exactly, because he never fully committed to the activity in the first place.

Last-minute flakage

This happens when, due to any of the three causes listed above and/or any of the myriad other possible causes, the flaker cancels at the last minute rather than actually standing you up. The telltale sign of last-minute flakage is when your friend phones you up shortly before the meeting time and instead of asking a very quick question like “I forgot to ask, what should I bring?” he just shoots the breeze for awhile. It dawns on you that if he were keeping the appointment, he’d skip the chitchat since he’d be talking with you in person very shortly. The chitchat is his way of easing you into the bad news.

Last-minute flakage doesn’t always involve chitchat, of course. Often it involves your friend making a lavish explanation, like his toddler projectile-vomiting on his fleeing dog.

Quasi-flakage

This is when somebody keeps you waiting awhile but eventually does show up. How aggravating this is naturally depends on how late the person is. Five minutes is a non-event. Twenty minutes is a bit of a problem, and so on. (Sometimes flakage will take a hybrid form. For example, quasi-last-minute flakage involves your friend calling to say he’ll be late.) In the worst case, your friend is so late that severe animosity develops, ruining the activity that you’re getting together for in the first place. Once, a friend of a friend was supposed to pick me up at Fremont Bart, which I can tell you is not a cool place to hang, and was like an hour and a half late. This person’s body was never found. Okay, I exaggerate—but we sure didn’t bond during the subsequent drive.

Of course quasi-flakage shouldn’t be confused with being “fashionably late.” (This term is a bit of a misnomer, I think. Appearing to be too busy to make it on time, or so popular as to be waylaid on your way to the meeting, will surely never go out of fashion.) There’s also what I call “mercifully late,” where it is assumed the hosts are behind in their preparations and the guests give them some extra time before showing up.

Complete flakage

This is of course when the person simply doesn’t show. There is very little chance of anything mitigating the obnoxiousness of this. The person may attempt a retroactive advance flakage, claiming that he had never actually promised to come. Or the person may later describe how the dog almost asphyxiated on the toddler’s vomit and had to be hospitalized. Or, worst of all, the flakage is never explained or apologized for.

Co-flakage

This occurs with spouses (or spouse equivalents) and can take several forms. One is that one member of a couple has gotten the time wrong and leads the other astray. Both parties are at fault because the person led astray should know by now not to trust his or her spouse. Another form of co-flakage is when a husband commits quasi-flakage or complete flakage because he does not know about the commitment his wife has made on his behalf. Both parties are at fault here, too, because surely the wife told the husband about it, but he wasn’t listening, and she should know better than to assume he was. (Of course either spouse can play either role here; I was merely avoiding “he/she” pronoun Hell.)

Types of flakers

Once again, I must be careful not to oversimplify. All kinds of people flake. But a thorough survey of flakage, which to my knowledge has never been conducted, would probably show that most flakage is carried out by one of four types of flaker. Here are those types.

The “pleaser”

By “pleaser” I mean the person who can’t bear to let somebody down, even for a moment, and who thus agrees to a plan he doesn’t have any intention of carrying out. This type of person is at high risk for both advance flakage and complete flakage. He has a tendency to suffer terribly after flaking, because admitting he let you down is terribly uncomfortable for him.

The Type B personality

The Type B personality actually means it when he says he’ll show up, but accidentally flakes because he’s literally unaware of what time it is and sometimes even what day it is. He’s not much for advance flakage because, not being the type to hold himself accountable for much, he doesn’t imagine that anybody else would hold him accountable either—so why hedge? This type also isn’t at serious risk for last-minute flakage, because he’s usually unaware that he’s even missing the rendezvous, so it wouldn’t occur to him to phone in the upcoming flakage. He is, of course, highly likely to commit quasi-flakage or complete flakage.

Note that the Type B flaker doesn’t always irritate the flakee: one Type B flaking on another Type B seldom causes any animosity. With B/B quasi-flakage, neither party notices if the other is late because time has almost no meaning for these people.

The friction generally develops when a Type B make plans with a Type A. For example, when I was on the UCSB cycling team, I made road trip plans with a Type B guy we called Sven (due to his utter lack of Nordic features). Sven was to pick me up at noon on Friday to drive to where the next day’s race would be held. At the stroke of noon I was waiting on the curb, bag packed. After twenty minutes I went inside and phoned him. No answer. For the next several hours I alternated between waiting on the curb and going inside to phone him. Finally I gave up and, around 3 p.m., while I was frantically going through my phone list looking for somebody else to get a ride with, Sven phoned me. I expected a litany of excuses for his being so late, but instead he simply said, “What’s up?” I asked if he was still going to the race. “Yeah, of course. How soon can you be ready?” I reminded him we’d agreed to meet at noon. He said, “Uh, yeah, so … what time is it now?”

The pawn

The full name of this flaker is “pawn caught in a deadly game.” It refers to the person I alluded to above whose life is too complicated to allow appointments to always be confidently made and reliably kept. Working parents with commutes and day care and trick knees and old cars and demanding careers can build up pretty bad track records, but I cut them more slack than other types of flakers.

I don’t consider myself a flake, but I often feel like a pawn, or maybe a rook, caught in a deadly game. For example, this weekend I promised my wife I’d take our younger daughter to her soccer game. But I committed advance flakage by introducing a caveat: if my bike ride took too long, I’d have to phone her and bail out (i.e., commit last-minute flakage). My wife understood, because I was riding with my bike club, so how early I could be home depended on countless factors: how far we rode; how late everybody got started; how fast we all felt like riding; whether or not anybody punctured; etc. I ended up making good on the original plan, but committed quasi-flakage by getting home eight minutes later than the time we’d agreed on. Now, suppose my wife suddenly realized that we were supposed to bring snack to soccer game, meaning I would have to stop at the store on the way: then we’d be committing quasi-co-flakage. I would be partially responsible for it, given the hardship my own advance and quasi-flakage had added to my wife’s already complicated morning: hers would be a classic case of a pawn caught in a deadly game. But my wife is no flake, and we weren’t on snack duty, and Lindsay and I made it to the game with minutes to spare.

The career flaker

Some people are just flakes, and they have no excuse, and no remorse, and in fact basically never make good on anything. They’re different than the Type B flaker because he at least he does show up sooner or later most of the time, and has good intentions. The career flaker turns flaking into something close to a passive-aggressive act.

The Flakage Toolkit

You might be wondering, what’s the point of all this classification? Well, that’s where the Flakage Tooklit comes in. The Toolkit offers four forms of assistance in the War on Flakage:

1. Some perspective, to ease the pain of being a flakee;
2. A technique for preventing advance flakage;
3. A method for dealing with Type B flakers;
4. A handy reference chart for predicting flakage.

The Toolkit doesn’t include tips for reforming the flakers in your life. Attempting to change another person’s behavior is as difficult as gathering water in a sieve.

Perspective for the flakee

When somebody flakes on you, you’re going to feel dissed. This person has wasted your time, shown a lack of respect, and may end up making you—yes, you, the innocent party—feel lame. It’s hard not to take it personally when you’ve made plans that aren’t kept. If the flaker is somebody you consider a good friend, this can be even more painful.

Now that we’ve examined the various flakage modes, you may be better equipped to handle broken commitments. For example, it may be helpful, when making plans, to keep an eye out for advance flakage that might, to the untrained eye, look like actual commitment. Meanwhile, this is the time to identify disorganized, Type B, or overcommitted people and set your expectations accordingly. And if you’re entering into a complicated plan with various parties, you can gauge your own risk of inadvertently co-flaking. Above all, an appreciation of the causes of flakage, the types of flaker, and the reasons for flakage may help you take things less personally.

A final bit of perspective: when a close friend has flaked on you, ask yourself, has this person flaked before? If not, you can console yourself that this is just a fluke occurrence, not a sign of ill will or disrespect. If the friend has flaked on you before, you might consider whether he is a disingenuous pleaser, an unreliable Type B, or a career flaker with whom you should consider not making future plans.

Preventing advance flakage

I can recommend two ways of preventing advance flakage. One is to remove the RSVP component of the planned activity. For example, I’ll e-mail my bike club and ask if anybody wants to ride at such-and-such time, and get a rough count of who’s showing up—but I’ll make it clear that the group will not be waiting up for anybody who arrives late. A person isn’t likely to commit advance flakage if his response is not required, and nobody’s time will be wasted.

The other technique is more difficult and can be applied only gradually over a series of planned activities. It is based on my Refusal Skills training from Health class and involves teaching the spineless pleasers how to get over their discomfort with declining your invitation (or declining to respond). What you do is invite your pleaser friends to activities you’re pretty sure they’d not even be tempted to commit to. For example, I’ve sent e-mails to my bike club saying, “Would anybody like to ride up Mount Diablo and then over Morgan Territory Road, returning via Happy Valley and Wildcat Canyon? It’s 125 miles, with 12,000 feet of climbing. We’ll leave at 6 sharp, and it’ll be surgical—no coffee breaks.” Just to further encourage the pleasers to speak their mind, I like end such e-mails with “You’re either with me or against me.” On one occasion I was delighted to get a single-word reply—“Against”—from a guy whose responses hadn’t previously been so definitive. If the pleasers among your friends get enough of these absurd invitations, they may be emboldened to begin declining other invitations that sound halfway (if only halfway) intriguing.

Dealing with Type B flakers

Type Bs abound. Given the number of people who haven’t dropped dead of a heart attack, we have to assume that Type Bs may even be the majority. So how do we keep them from flaking on us?

The answer is, try to make plans that put you in charge of the activity. Consider my tale of woe about the road trip with Sven: my anguish stemmed largely from being dependent upon Sven for a ride. He may have been Type B and unpredictable, but at least he had a fricking car! As a college kid with no car, I had three options for future road trips: a) try to be a little more relaxed and set my expectations appropriately; b) try to find a Type A to drive me next time; or c) get my own car, and tell the Type B I’m leaving at such-and-such time, with or without him. (If I actually held to this and left him behind, he wouldn’t hold a grudge, because hey, he’s Type B!)

Handy reference chart

I truly believe that the key to not getting overly disgruntled about flakage is to set your expectations appropriately. For decades I labored under the misconception that most people out there were just like me—that is, when they made a commitment they kept it. As you can see from this post, I’ve gotten past that delusion. (In fact, I’ve come to realize that I myself am not as immune to committing flakage as I like to think.) Over the last few years, I’ve put together, in my head, a flakage reference chart that I use whenever I’m making plans with somebody. Here is that chart, presented in print for the very first time:

Blue indicates advance flakage. You can see how rampant it is!

Of course, this chart is really only a jumping-off point. The real value of the chart involves assigning each of your friends to an overall flakage profile, which can shift the entries in the right column up or down. For example, a Type B friend with a lousy track record might get the right column shifted up, so his custom chart would look like this:

On the other hand, if your friend has a perfect or near-perfect track record, he might merit this rare and elusive chart version:

The only thing that never changes is that last row. There will always be those who like to keep their options open.

Did I miss anything? Do you have further insight to contribute? Post a comment below, or e-mail me at feedback@albertnet.us. I’ll be sure to respond. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’ll get to it. I’ll try.

dana albert blog