Failure as an Ingredient
Yesterday we talked about how people say the road to success follows three archetypes. Barry names and exposes them as myths in Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success.
But what about our failures?
Hi, Barry. I like that you find it important to take a moment to stop talking about our success in order to honor our failures. What do you mean by that? How do we honor a failure?
Well the first thing we need to do is stop letting our egos brag about our successes but instead Honor Our Failures. A year after leaving a 9 year career at IBM, I was fired from my new job. Then I was kicked out of business in my second company by my two partners. This was the first place where I learned I could actually fail in a huge way. This is the first place I diverged from the master plan of success my mother had for me.
Now unfortunately in our culture, business wisdom tell us that when we fail there is always something to learn
We are continually reminded by those around us that failure is an important ingredient in the next success, possibly even a prerequisite. We tell ourselves that failure “happened to us†so that we could learn some important lesson that would later propel us to even more success.
Let me tell you the truth, when we fail. Sometimes it just sucks. There is absolutely nothing to learn. When I lost my largest client because they were indicted by the SEC, what did I learn? That I wasn’t suppose to do business with criminals? I knew this… When my best employee left my company because her husband got a job in another state, what was I to learn? Not to hire people who are married?
Failure is valuable only when we realize it is a normal part of the business process even when there always isn’t something to learn.
And there can be a lot of fear involved in this whole failing process. We have all heard about being afraid of failure and more recently, we are supposed to be now be afraid of success.
The fear in this process is not brought on by our competitors or other outside people. It mostly originates within us. The biggest fear we have is that someone in our position would have done better than us, made better decisions than us and would have built it faster and more profitably than we did. We believe that that we should be in a different place than where we are right now, and that we would be, if only we had made better decisions. Nonsense. You can’t be anywhere except right here right now. Zen Philosophy says that we need to start from where we are.
Thanks, Barry!
Tomorrow Barry explains the upside of One-Hit Wonders. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com
–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com
Barry, I could not agree with you more. One of the major faults a person or a company is guilty of, is not realizing failure is part of the road to success. Most companies did not succeed on the first day they opened. they struggled through the hardships and they had to learn just as everyone does. When you rode a bike for the first time, I am sure when you fell down you did not just give up. You got back up and rode that bike until you were good at it. The same is true when trying to post blogs and articles. It is not something you can post once and be famous for it. One of the steps I would have liked to avoid or speed over was choosing the right keywords. I found that the glyphius software was helpful in this part of writing my articles and blogs.
Thanks for your thoughts. I think we honor our failures by learning what if can if anything from our failures. At the same time, sometimes there is nothing to learn at all and we have to move on. When my best manager left the company because her husband got a job on another state, what was I to learn? Not to hire married people? Failure is not a prerequisite to success. Sometimes we can learn something but ultimately we need to let go of failure or success so we can move on to the next decision that may bring a better outcome.
Who was it that said success was the result of a string of cataclysmic failures? Was it Henry Ford or James D Brausch. The chinese proverb is something like “Success is not the same as never falling. Success is always getting up after your fall.”
It seems you are presenting two ways of thinking about failure: 1) learn from it, barring that (because like you’ve said, there may not be anything to learn) 2) learn how to move on! Both very good points. Dwelling on those failures can keep us from having success. I suppose, ultimately, both failure and success are only stepping stones along the road of life; sometimes they are neither good nor bad, they just are. Haha, I’m sounding a bit more philosophical than usual here!
The Zen Say
“Life is about 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrow”. Same in business. Failure and Success are really just part of a cycle.
That’s pretty well the story of James Brausch, who went from homeless drug addict, to online millionaire who is now coaching others to online success.
Most people always take the easiest path, avoid adversity as much as possible… and wonder why they never attain success.