“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game
winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeeded.”
These memorable words, which have now become a
standard bearer to everyone who has experienced failure in his attempt to
succeed, were uttered by Michael Jordan, one
of the world’s most famous and most accomplished professional Basketball players
ever. He was reminding his audience of the fact that failure, rather than being
a hindrance to success, was in fact its most helpful ally, when it is used
judiciously. He first learned this lesson as a sophomore in high school when,
to his surprise he was not accepted on the Varsity team. He used this setback
to fuel a drive to learn more to prove his coach wrong, and unhesitatingly
credits this failure to make the team as the trigger that started his
successful career subsequently.
This story is neither uncommon nor is it limited to
a few special or gifted people in the world. The history of man throughout the
ages is overflowing with examples of people who have gone on to great successes
after suffering humiliating failures. To my knowledge, many highly successful people
have arrived at the top only after having travelled on roads strewn with
multiple rocks of failure, and they willingly credit their success from the
lessons they learnt while having to deal with these obstacles. That indeed,
appears to be the secret weapon that many successful people make full use of.
To them the risk of failure, like so many other intangibles, is just part of
doing business. Failure is merely a pause from which they will learn lessons to
help them to try again with a better chance of succeeding. It is only those who
are afraid of failure or do not learn from it, that end up in despair and
disappointment. Robert Fripp, the
very successful and prolific English musician and composer, neatly summarized
this in the following observation:
“There are no failures, save one;
the failure to learn from a mistake.”
In 2011, Jeff
Stibel, a very successful and enterprising American investor, venture
capitalist, entrepreneur, author and newspaper columnist who from a very early
age started, developed and sold a number of technology and marketing companies
and was one of the youngest CEOs of a public company, conceived an idea that he
hoped will encourage his employees to learn from their failures by writing
their biggest mistakes on a large wall in the office. He called it “The Failure Wall” and began by writing
what he felt had been his own mistakes over the preceding years. The idea
quickly caught on and before long, the entire wall was covered by the
contributions from the entire staff and colleagues. It was clear that this
experiment was a great success, as Stibel
himself subsequently noted two years later:
“Not only was it cathartic for individuals to
expose their mistakes, but it also contributed to creating a company culture
where failure could be openly acknowledged, accepted and used as a learning
tool.”
Unfortunately
the great majority of people in the world are so concerned about failing that
they approach any challenge with undue trepidation and caution. The thought of
failure weighs so heavily on them that many potentially successful ventures
never see the light of day. Most of the time, instead of taking the right steps
toward completing the task ahead, they become concerned with the fear of failing and the consequences of failure itself. They spend more time preoccupied
with what others will think of them for being failures, than trying to search
for ways to correct their approach and try again. People have a tendency to
blindly associate every failing episode as a defeat, forcing them to consider
abandoning their effort prematurely, if only to avoid a repeat failure and
further regret and embarrassment.
This attitude is further compounded by
society’s common and recurrent tendency to acknowledge and reward success
wherever possible, while rejecting failure at any cost. In all of the
‘advanced’ societies, there is in fact a culture in existence that openly honors
and praises success and frowns upon any type of failure, irrespective of the
reason for the failure. Society offers awards, recognition and advancement to
successful people but pays little attention to others, however hard they try. It
appears that only the result matters and no one is ever concerned about how
they were obtained. This inevitably leads to creating an increased caution
where no one is encouraged to accept and learn from his mistakes, and no one
bothers to show how to prevent repeating them over and over again. We have yet
to seriously take the advice of one of America’s most successful authors
and inspirational speakers, Anthony
Robbins, when he observed:
“If you do what you’ve always done,
You’ll get what you’ve always
gotten.”
But this should not come as a surprise since the
fear of failure has always been recognized as humanity’s greatest scourge and
the main killer of man’s dreams and hopes. From the very beginning, man has
used fear as a protective mechanism to avoid getting into danger. As a result,
fear has become an innate part of our genetic makeup of life, our DNA. Man,
after generations of having to survive in life threatening environments has
learnt to recognize the effects of fear and rather than challenge them, to
choose alternative solutions to escape them. This is as a result of acquiring a
basic instinctive response that ensures survival of the species at all cost, by finding ways to avoid the threat rather than to modify the environment.
Learning to do so only comes later with the development of maturity and the
realization that mistakes can only be corrected by a process of using the fear
to find the answers and avoid repetition.
Failure should
never to be considered deleterious to the individual since at one point or
another everyone fails. The real danger comes from falling to the fear of failing which inevitably sets
in motion a wall of resistance that prevents any attempt to try to learn from
the past experiences. Without this opportunity, any chance of finding or even
looking for a different direction is thwarted, and we end up doing what so many
people are doing on a daily basis, just
being afraid of the fear of failing even before it happens. They prefer instead of choosing the easy way of
embracing the failure rather than finding ways to fight it. And they continue
to do so, not because they are not aware of what needs to be done, but rather because
of the damage done to their psyche from years of living with the fear of
consequences. This explains why the great majority of humanity in any setting
however inconvenient, remains content to accept the status quo rather than
search for change.
But throughout
history, anyone who has achieved anything great enough to change the world or
even meaningful enough to change their lives could only have succeeded to do so
by embracing failure and learning from it, rather than running away or fighting
it. The very act of stepping back and facing failure induces very significant
changes in the mind and the attitude in the individual. It serves to redefine
the important priorities in life and identify the values that are really significant
to him and in need of defending. It makes the person aware of himself, his
strengths and his weaknesses, and gives him better insights of his self-worth
and his ability. He becomes more aware of his ego, his strengths, his
anxieties, his shortcomings and bad habits. This will give him an opportunity
to understand himself better and in so doing, improve his perspectives. It will
also go a long way to improving his relationships with others who he will now
be seeing as less a threat, and more a help to him.
One
of the most successful of the innumerable numbers of people throughout the ages
who have fulfilled the category of achieving success, fame and fortune by
learning lessons from their mistakes and failures and successfully applying
them, was the great American inventor, innovator and industrialist, Thomas Alva Edison. He is considered a
legend in the history of American industry and inventions. In his lifetime of
more than 80 years, he held more that 1000 patents in a wide range of areas
that included electricity, light bulbs, phonograph, telephone and telegraphic
communications. His work has been so influential on securing a better life and
living that he is considered by many, to be the greatest inventor of all times.
Yet throughout all this while, Edison freely
admitted that his successes came only after repeated trials and failures. He
openly confirmed to this in such statements as:
“Our greatest
weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try
just one more time.”
“I tried
3000 theories in connection with the electric light, each one different,
reasonable and likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiment prove
the truth of my theory.”
This indeed is the hallmark of dealing
with the failures of life. No one ever promised a life free from trials and
failure, nor freedom from pain and disappointment. These are as much part of
living as are the other benefits we so readily take for granted. But they are
all given to us as opportunities to grow and to learn and it is left up to each
individual to find his way out. Johnny
Cash, the great American guitarist, singer and songwriter whose life was
riddled with failures amid his amazing successes, summarized it very
effectively when he noted:
“I learnt from my mistakes. It is a very painful
way to
learn but without pain, as the saying goes, there is no gain.”
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