At camp, some moments don’t go the way we hope:

A camper drops a whole stack of plates in the dining hall. They crash and scatter everywhere.

A camper shoots an arrow straight into the ground, about four feet in front of them.

A kid forgets which direction they are going and kicks the soccer ball to the other team.

A camper stands up to lead a roll call they’ve been planning all day, their cabinmates forget the lines, and it falls flat.

And someone, mid-project in the Fine Arts Center, glues the wrong piece to the wrong thing.

I could keep going.

Got Failure?

Each one of those is a mistake, or at least a thing that did not go as planned.

Which is kind of the point, because that’s pretty much how life works.

There are always things that don’t go to plan, or that don’t turn out amazing the first, second, or third time. Life is full of dishes dropping and proverbial arrows not hitting the target.

Childhood is the single best possible time to start making mistakes, because the stakes are low. We have to give kids the chance to fall off the stand up paddleboard when it gets wobbly and climb up out of the lake and try again.

As Jonathan Haidt is fond of saying, “We must prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

One of the best things about camp is that it’s a place where lots of little things can go “wrong” and campers learn they can handle it (and still have fun).

Counselors are there to help when needed, and each day is mostly full of joy and friendship, but we’re also practicing courage and resilience in small doses every day.

And you know what campers start to learn?

All it takes is 59 seconds of resilience to get through most things that come up.

59 Seconds

That list from the beginning? It’s mostly small stuff.

And that makes it the perfect list to practice with.

In those moments, kids need about 59 seconds of resilience.

Something goes wrong, maybe everybody looks (or maybe not), you shake it off, and decide to try again.

When we dwell on a problem, it gets bigger. We worry what other people think. We worry about whether it will happen again. We worry about whether we will ever be able to hit the archery target.

But 59 seconds of resilience often solves the problem. Most of the time, if we take a deep breath, forgive ourselves, fix the issue or clean up a mess, it’s actually all good.

59 seconds of resilience turns “this always happens to me!” into “stuff happens, I’m fine, let’s try that again”.

Often it’s more like 10 seconds, but if you can do the full 59, that will cover 99% of situations that arise.

With 59 seconds of resilience, you can laugh off something that went wrong. You can work up up the courage to ask someone out. You can start that hard conversation you know has to happen.

The people who go the farthest in life mostly get there 59 seconds at a time.

The Second List

With that in mind, let me give you a second list. Same campers, often less than a minute later.

The kid who dropped the plates grabbed them off the floor, cleaned it up, and realized how many people immediately jumped in to help.

The camper who put the arrow in the ground got closer with the next one, and by the end of the period stuck one in the actual target.

The kid who kicked the ball the wrong way ran back on defense and eventually got the chance to make a better pass.

The roll call that flopped became the line the cabin quoted for the rest of the session.

And the project at the Fine Arts Center became a new way to do an old thing.

It all turned into good stories, more laughs, and an example of how to get up and try again.

All it took was one minute and a little bit of practice to get there.

Erec Sir