Several people throughout my life have said something like "Failure is the road to success". I even noticed a little ad in the Wall Street Journal this week that used that quote. So do we really need to lead a life of failure to succeed? Does that make any sense to you? How could you possibly want success if you knew that your life was going to be littered with failure.
Is this why so many people just accept where they are in life? Doesn't everyone want to know how to be successful? If not, why wouldn't they want to be successful? Don't you want to be more successful than you are now?
Since a big part of my work now is helping other people become more successful, I started thinking about failure and its role in life after reading an article in the recent issue of INC magazine. A few of you will know my success principle of "Be careful who you listen too". For those of you that don't know it, one of the principles I live by, one that I consider one of the keys to my success, is that I don't take advice from anyone who isn't doing better than I am at the thing they are advising me on.
Real Estate Agents are a great example. A big chunk of them don't own a home, and a larger percentage don't own investment property. So how can they give me advice on something I am pretty good at, and they aren't really doing? My opinion is simply they can't. I got my own license about two years ago to do better for myself and help anyone who is serious about buying or selling. Don't call me if you are a "looky lou".
The recent INC magazine article was focused on Jim Collins of Good to Great fame and his work at The United States Military Academy.
Most of you know the United States Military Academy as "Westpoint". Many who know about it consider Westpoint the college for the elite army officers. The list of high achieving alumni supports this view.
According to INC magazine, Jim Collins learned a little about leadership while working with the cadets. As the article points out, Jim Collins has spent his life researching organization success, not personal success. Westpoint should have realized, that Mr. Collins isn't an expert at Military Leadership either, and as he learned these are very different things.
Another question I had to ask about the articles perspective; Is there a difference between organizational success and individual success? Can you have highly effective organizations that we call successful without having highly effective or "successful" people running it? I believe that one is required to have the other. An organization can hold back great people, and a great organization can be destroyed by lesser people being at the top. What I have read in Mr. Collins books lead me to believe that he agrees with my premise even though he doesn't directly say it.
My thoughts are that at the core of all great companies is great people. Do you think you can build a great company with idiots? This should be common sense right?
Some companies are better at collecting a higher percentage of successful people to create a more successful company. Others do a great job creating successful people who in turn create successful businesses. This was really the legacy of Jack Welch during his reign at GE isn't it? He created a great management and leadership funnel, the people that made it through the funnel made great companies.
Tommy Caldwell, considered one of the worlds best rock climbers, is attempting to be the first person ever to climb the face of El Cap in Yosemite park un assisted. This means he is going to do it with no ropes, no nails in the rocks, no hexectric nuts or link cams, just a man climbing a rock. I am sure he gets to wear the shoes though.
So far he has "failed" four times, and according to INC, when Jim Collins asked him why he goes back after failing, Tommy Caldwell replied that he was getting better each time. Tommy Caldwell didn't fail, he tried and improved. Just as the Japanese use Kaizen in business, Tommy Caldwell uses it in rock climbing.
Right there was the secret to crossing a long section of the road to success. Failure is not the road to success. Failure is failure. Moving forward on the road is how you get you to success. There is no other way.
Some of this may appear to be semantics, some of this is in "The Mind", and the reality is still that failure is failure and progress is progress no matter how you define it. Success does not come from failure. Success comes from moving forward no matter how difficult.
This point of view was a frustration I have had with many business improvement and self help books. They would use the word failure when referencing attempts to move forward. I really didn't address this issue correctly in the book So Now What?
As a competitive marksman, there were two competitions at every event, a team competition and an individual competition. The best victories where when the team won, even though I wanted to win also. In 1989, both happened, and it is the best victory in my career. I won the overall event, and the team won the team event. When that happened our margin was so big, I could have been third on my team and we would have still won. Nobody carried the team and nobody held the team back, the entire team kept pushing that year. There was never a failure, only opportunities to improve.
Thomas Edison had it correct when he was asked how it felt to fail at creating the electric light bulb 10,000 times. He replied, "I didn't fail 10,000 times, the lightbulb was an invention with 10,000 steps." It was an invention worth the journey. The bigger the prize at the end, or the bigger the contribution, the more difficult the journey will be. There are no short cuts.
Those who don't really want success will see the steps as too difficult and therefore a failure. Failure becomes an excuse to quit rather than a step forward. When you say to yourself that you have failed, you give yourself permission to quit and seek a new road. You change your definition of success to fit your failures. Failure is failure only if you don't learn from it and let it choose your direction.
This may seem like a very subtle difference in language and it really is. How you view the steps will determine if you make it to your destination or not. When you look at high achievers, they are still real people just like you and me. The difference starts with how they view failure, and how big their goals are. When things don't work and people laugh and ridicule, high achievers keep moving. They don't quit.
So why do people accept failure as failure? Simply put it is comfortable. Since none of their peers have done it, they don't feel the need to do it, and not doing it keep them at a level they are comfortable with. This can happen to anyone at any level in life.
The times in my life I wanted to quit are few but they happened. I have lived through and proven both sides of this process of the mind as it relates to failure and success. The most memorable for me was in 1990. I was ready to quit Air Force Pilot training because of a letter stating that I did "not have the attitude conducive to fly a fighter". It didn't say I wasn't qualified or I had failed, but I read it that way and I accepted the letter as failure.
Ready to walk away and return to my "comfortable" life, a friend, classmate and Air Force Academy Graduate, Mike Leonas, convinced me it was simply an opportunity to improve. Thanks to Mike I ended up having a great time flying in the military for the next 14 years.
If you really want to get where you are going, get better with each attempt. Get stronger at the core skill so you can push a little harder each time until you get "there" and can come up with a new place to go. More importantly, as Mike Leonas showed me, surround yourself with friends who don't understand failure, and truly understand opportunities to improve.
The journey really is the thing. Why do you think Richard Branson keeps building companies? When he gets to one destination, he keeps moving to another one. When Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, he continued to move towards his destination. When he came back, he brought Apple with him. Life is about the opportunities to improve.
Think about Elon Musk starting a new technically advanced car company that only offers 100% electric cars. He already had a successful business and was a billionaire, why risk it all to get into the car business and build a car that no one else builds? Didn't anyone tell him about the Tucker Car Company? Clearly at that level, Constant Improvement works.
Failure is not the road to success, failure isn't even on the road to success. The road to success is paved with little cobblestones of success and then taking one step to place the next stone. Always pushing a little more each time than you did the time before and getting closer to the goal each time is the key. Failure is when you quit, nothing more. This is why a coach can be such a big help.
Making each step better than the last is the key to success. Failure is how some people will define a step that doesn't end at success. The problem, like Edison found, is that you don't know how many steps that will be.
As the proverb goes, You are closest to success, just before you quit.
Get better at what ever you do every day and you will be called a success before you know it.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your insights.