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Chapter Seven

Lose to Win

Tom and Dana Larson were used to winning. Tom was an advertising copywriter in the Denver area, producing successful ad campaigns for McDonald’s, Safeway, and the Denver International Airport. He got the attention of the advertising world with his “Normal People Like Us, Too,” campaign for the Denver Art Museum. For his successes, he won the Denver Advertising Federation’s Best in Show award.

Dana Larson, Tom’s wife, led recruitment teams for accounting and high-tech companies in the Denver area. She had established herself as a skillful, and driven, head hunter. Dana got the employees she wanted and the deals she wanted.

The problem was, the Larsons were unhappy. Even the thrill of Tom’s winning the advertising award was short-lived.

“I went into the office that next Monday,” Tom said, “and there we all were, sitting around the table discussing accounts, just as we had every other Monday. Nothing had changed, and I realized it was never going to change.”

So he quit.

He wrote freelance advertising copy to pay the bills. He wrote a novel. Dana continued as a head hunter. But they still felt something was missing in their lives.

In church one weekend, the Larsons thought they had found the answer. Their minister told of his desire to send someone for a year to work with a small church in the Dominican Republic. That was the answer to their malaise, Tom and Dana thought. They volunteered and were accepted.

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Dana quit her job.

They moved to the Dominican Republic. Their Spanish skills weren’t great, the living conditions were harsh, they were sick much of the time, and the church they served was both legalistic and judgmental. They were miserable.

“As pathetic as this sounds, sometimes Dana and I would drive to the Santo Domingo airport, sit in the air-conditioned Wendy’s restaurant, and longingly watch people board planes headed for the United States,” Tom said, shaking his head in embarrassment. “We couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

They returned to the United States a year later, wondering why they had gone to the Dominican Republic in the first place. Two months after their return, Hurricane Georges swept through the Caribbean and devastated the area where the Larsons had lived.

“I watched the news coverage and called the Dominican people I knew,” Tom said, emotion rising in his voice. “I had this overwhelming sense of needing to help them. I don’t know why, but I felt they were my family.”

His Denver church helped finance immediate needs, including shelter for some of the residents. But Tom believed he could do more because he had been there. He just didn’t know what.

A local scientist approached Tom after church one day and said he had been experimenting to find an inexpensive way to purify water. The scientist wanted to know if Tom thought the people in the Dominican Republic could use it. The system included chlorine, carbon filtering, reverse osmosis, and UV light, and it could work with the existing water supply of the community.

“I had seen the need for clean water there even before the hurricane, but hadn’t really thought about it,” Tom said. “Come on, what could I do? I was an English major!”

Now Tom and his scientist friend took the system to the Dominican Republic and installed it in the church where the Larsons had worked the previous year. They tested it repeatedly and it had zero contaminants. When word got out there was clean water available at the church, people flocked to it. Soon the church was distributing a thousand gallons a day.

This church had formerly had such a bad reputation that drivers would stop to honk their horns and yell abusive language at the parishioners during services. The yelling stopped when clean water arrived.

“The response from the community was overwhelming,” Tom said. “They used to call the church names for being judgmental and elitist. This changed all that. In addition, it made the church itself look outward.”

Tom got to thinking. Years of neglect had made the municipal water systems unsafe in the Dominican Republic. In the cities and larger communities there is an underground infrastructure to supply water, but the pipes carrying that water are defective and porous. That, combined with an inadequate sewage and sanitation system, exposes the water to contamination that seeps through the ground. Well water in the outlying barrios is even worse. Hurricane Georges had further damaged the underground systems.

International health organizations say that contaminated drinking water is the chief source of many communicable diseases that are the leading cause of death in affected areas. Most people there have some kind of intestinal parasite. Even when the parasites don’t cause death, they cause other long-term health problems. One doctor said, “If we treated everyone tomorrow for their intestinal parasites, by the next day they would be sick again.”

Tom talked to the people of the Dominican church about helping install other purification systems if they could get the financial support. Then Tom returned to his Denver church and shared his idea with the elders. Soon he started a nonprofit organization called Healing Waters International.

Tom and Dana sold their home in posh Evergreen, Colorado, and moved to smaller quarters in Golden, living off equity while they tried to develop the organization and raise some money. They got financial backing quickly, mostly from individuals. They hired Dominicans, as well as a couple of Americans who were also struggling to find their place in the world. Tom worked on developing a lower-maintenance system and on raising money. Dana concentrated on logistics, finance, and incorporating the group as a nonprofit organization.

Within months, Healing Waters was installing systems in Dominican Republic churches at a rate of one per month.

“It had the effect of building bridges between churches and their communities,” Tom said. “I thought of it as an agent of healing, both physically and socially.”

Most of the sites now have a constant flow of people at the church distribution centers. People come with five-gallon jugs or whatever they can find. The churches charge a fraction of the amount charged in local stores. One church dispensed more than 60,000 gallons of clean water in one of its first months of operation.

A resident of a community where there is a Healing Waters site said that virtually everyone in her village gets their water from the church.

“We never had safe water before,” she said. “Our children were sick all the time. They drink this water and they are no longer sick.”

For Tom, the Healing Waters effort is the outgrowth of his frustration with his career and with the year he and Dana spent in the Dominican Republic as church volunteers.

“We are in the middle of something that is so much bigger than we are,” he said. He listed the former careers of his staff to make his point. “Just look at us. An advertising guy, a software consultant, a tailor, a waiter, and a used car salesman. What are we doing? What business do we have trying to pull this off?”

Healing Waters has expanded into Mexico, Guatemala, and other parts of Latin America. They plan to install purification systems in Africa as soon as possible.

“My dream is that a poor person will be able to go into any village church on any continent for clean, affordable water,” Tom said.

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Remember, Healing Waters started from the desire to have a more meaningful life, and that desire led to an apparent failure. When Tom and Dana thought they had found the answer, things didn’t work out. During their first stay in the Dominican Republic, they were spiritually in the place Robert Pirsig describes in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “This is the zero moment of consciousness,” he writes. “Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing. You should be ashamed of yourself.”²

They felt they had tried and lost. Which is the point.

Serving others doesn’t always turn into a big success story. Healing Waters may not grow any bigger than it is right now. It might not survive the next few years. But the Larsons tried something even though the odds were against them. Their efforts seemed pointless at times. But they weren’t after a result, they were responding to an inner need to serve others. When things looked bleak, they served anyway.

A few years ago I ran for U.S. Congress. The climate seemed right for a moderate voice, and I believed I had something to contribute to the dialogue in Washington, based on having started my own businesses and run a successful nongovernmental agency. I looked at politics as a different kind of service and a way to serve more people. My advisors were for it, and a campaign staff came together quickly.

Probably I was naïve, thinking I could run a campaign on the issues and on my experience. I didn’t know that to win a race like this I would have to demonize my opponents and have them demonize me. I didn’t even make it to the primary.

It was disappointing to have lost, but I wasn’t sorry I ran. It was worth the effort and expense because I learned so much. What would I have gained by not trying?

I learned that democracy is worth the effort. Trying to be heard, standing up for what you believe, is worth the effort despite the outcome. As that great philosopher/hockey player Wayne Gretzky said, “One hundred percent of the shots you don’t take won’t go in!”

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Democracy is about participation, not about winning and losing. Even though I met deceitful and self-serving people in my brief life in politics, I met many good people with good intentions. My work with Heart to Heart has shown me that there are many people in government who truly want to serve others.

Life is not measured by failures and victories. It’s measured by attempts and journeys. Thomas Edison tried for a long time to figure out how to make a successful light bulb. It took him years and many failed attempts. But he didn’t see the failed attempts as failures. “I have not failed,” he said. “I just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work!”³ The light bulb’s invention was a process that involved a lot of steps.

This is true when we attempt anything, especially serving others. At Heart to Heart we have tried many different kinds of programs, including a food grains bank that would work as a co-op for hungry regions around the world and a homeless services program, among dozens of others. They didn’t all work out. In fact, a lot of them didn’t work out, but I don’t see them as failures. They were worth the risk and the expense because they helped clarify what we do well and what we don’t.

Heart to Heart connects volunteers to people who need them, both locally and abroad, primarily through distribution of medicine and medical supplies. That’s what we do best. It took some unsuccessful efforts to find this out.

Robert F. Kennedy said “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”⁴ Running for Congress was a great risk to me, both personally and financially. I did what I felt I should do, despite the outcome. It put me on a journey for which I am grateful.

As if to put an exclamation point on my unsuccessful bid for Congress, shortly after the primary I was ordered to report to my Army Reserve unit, and within weeks was in a hospital in Kosovo, which led to my meeting the Shabiu family. It became clear I was much better suited to working in medicine to relieve suffering.

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Filmmaker Woody Allen said, “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.”⁵

Success is in the trying, not the outcome. When we serve others, it is useful to go beyond our routine to see what might happen. If we only went with the sure thing, nothing new would ever happen. We have to be willing to “fail” now and then.

Unexpected outcomes can lead to a clearer sense of purpose. This happened with the first airlift we tried to do in China. We had the medicine to fill a cargo plane. we just couldn’t get a plane. All of our previous success getting into remote regions meant nothing. We failed to deliver the medicine. But the failure suggested a new idea. What if we took medical personnel into China, instead of medicine?

We teamed up with some medical associations to do medical education in China. We trained Chinese doctors in modern surgical procedures in ophthalmology, and they trained us in their traditional medicine. We came back the next year and did training in neonatal resuscitation. More than 40,000 lives were touched because Chinese doctors were able to utilize the methods we taught them.

These were not babies whose lives were saved. These were babies born with challenges that would have made it impossible for them to live with their families. They were destined to live in institutions because of cerebral palsy and other severe physical disabilities. All of the medicine we could have loaded onto an airplane would not have saved 40,000 lives. We had to adjust our methods of trying to serve others because our original plan didn’t work—but because of this “failure,” something better happened.

Now we have FedEx planes going into China with our medicines, and we are still taking medical teams. Our training in emergency medicine went so well that Chinese hospitals are preparing to use it for the Olympic Games when they are held in Beijing.

Failure is what you decide it is. Sometimes it is a launching pad to something better. Losses won’t always become victories. But they are part of the effort, part of the journey. Just ask the Boston Red Sox baseball team and their fans! They waited from 1918 until 2004 to finally beat their arch-rival New York Yankees and go on to win the World Series! That’s a lot of losing!

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Howard Cutler, in his book with the Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness, told of Joseph, one of his clients who had become a multimillionaire during the construction boom in Arizona. Then, in the 1980s, came the biggest real estate crash in Arizona’s history. The client, Joseph, lost everything and declared bankruptcy. This put pressure on his marriage, and after twenty-five years of being married Joseph was divorced. He began drinking heavily, but was eventually able to quit with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Part of the treatment was for him to become a sponsor to help other alcoholics stay sober.

Joseph realized that he liked helping others. He began using his business knowledge to help people and organizations that were struggling financially. Joseph told Cutler that, despite going from a very rich man to a man of modest means who runs a remodeling business, “I don’t really want that kind of money again. I much prefer spending my time volunteering for different groups, working directly with people, helping them out the best I can. These days, I get more pure enjoyment out of one day than I did in a month when I was making the big money. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life!”⁶

Charles Colson is one of the best examples of someone who had to change his way of looking at failing and succeeding. His participation in the Watergate scandal landed him in jail, and led to the resignation of his boss, President Richard Nixon. During a television program that looked back on Watergate, veteran newsman Mike Wallace said to Colson, “Chuck, how do you now look back on Watergate?”

Colson said that his answer had Wallace scratching his head for some time.

“Mike, I thank God for Watergate,” Colson said.

Wallace looked at Colson with a startled expression.

“Through Watergate I learned the greatest lessons of my life,” Colson continued. “The teaching of Jesus is true when he said, ‘He who seeks to save his life will lose it. He who loses his life for my sake will find it.’”

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Colson’s quest for meaning and significance in life began as a child during the Depression, when he saw hungry people standing in lines waiting for bread. “The most important thing would be if I could ever go to college,” he thought to himself. No one in his family had gone to college. “I had that great sense of wanting security and wanting to find my meaning, my purpose in life, wanting to get a good education and a good job,” he said.

He went to Brown University on a scholarship and, upon graduation, joined the U.S. Marine Corps to fight in the Korean War. When he put his uniform on, he remembered thinking “This is my meaning. My security is as a Marine officer.”

After the war he went to law school, and recalled thinking “I’ll find my security, my meaning, and my purpose as an attorney.” Colson started a law firm, which grew quickly and made him very successful. He entered politics and became the youngest administrative assistant in the U.S. Senate. He reassured himself “I’ll find my meaning and purpose in law and politics.” By age 39 he was special counsel to the president of the United States, with an office immediately next door to the president.

When Nixon was re-elected in 1972, Colson said it was time to go back into private practice. “I figured I was a little burned out,” he said. “I had a beeper that went off at all times, a telephone beside my bed, the president calling at all hours, crises day and night. I decided that was why I felt so tired and empty inside.”

While in prison for his role in the Watergate coverup, Colson had a spiritual awakening that allowed him to identify with Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote from a Soviet gulag: “Bless you, prison. Bless you for being in my life. For there, lying on the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturing of the soul.”

“The maturing of the soul,” Colson said, “is the object of life.”⁷

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The way Colson’s soul matured out of this “loss” was to begin serving others. His Prison Fellowship organization has changed thousands of prisoners’ lives and contributed to significant prison reform around the world.

His early success isn’t the success Colson points to now. His education, military status, position, and access to power weren’t what ultimately gave him meaning. It was a failure that became meaningful when he began to serve others instead of himself.

Tom and Dana Larson, Howard Cutler’s client Joseph, Charles Colson, and I have something in common. We all tried something and it turned out different from our expectations. Some would say we have failed.

But did we? When the loss becomes something that points us to serving others, that’s a journey for which we can rejoice.

In The Art of Happiness, the authors write that behaviors like serving others despite the circumstances can actually change us from the outside in.

“Just going through the motions and repeatedly engaging in a positive behavior can eventually bring about genuine internal change,” they write. This has significant implications for the way we look at failure.

“If we begin with the simple act of regularly helping others, for instance, even if we don’t feel particularly kind or caring, we may discover an inner transformation is taking place, as we very gradually develop genuine feelings of compassion,” they write.⁸

Losing our expectations for a specific outcome, then, isn’t a loss at all. Serving others won’t have predictable outcomes. We’ll find our meaning in unexpected places. Tom and Dana Larson initially “failed” in the Dominican Republic.

But the Dominicans win every time they need a safe drink of water.