I have to be honest, as a Star Wars geek and lover of Yoda quotes when I heard the little green guy say this in “The Force Awakens” I just about stopped breathing!
To give it real power you have to read and consider the whole quote :
“Pass on what you have learned. Strength, mastery, hmmm… but weakness, folly, failure also. Yes : failure most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is.”
Strive for failure!
I have always strived for failure during my career, and coached others to fail also.
When I make statements like that, most people look at me strangely.
In fact, a VP I worked for was at one of my team meetings when I told the team I wanted them to “lose more deals”! The look I got from him was priceless, as was the look of comprehension when I explained to the team I wanted them to lose more deals because I wanted them to get into more fights they thought they couldn’t win, looking for incremental but unexpected wins and always learning from the deals they lost.
You learn so much more from failing than you do from winning. It gives you an opportunity to change, to grow, and therefore in future succeed where you once failed.
Embrace failure!
If you are good at what you do it is quite rare that a failure occurs because you are doing something you know how to do – the failures normally occur when you are doing something outside of your comfort zone, something new – and that is how we grow in every aspect of our life.
My eldest son is a very accomplished sportsman, even at the tender age of 11. When he started playing cricket 5 or so years ago he got very frustrated when things didn’t go right for him. Even at that young age I coached him to embrace failure, to make it your coach by listening to what it told you. He would spend hours in the garden practicing something he couldn’t do, failing, changing something slightly, going again.
This year he has even started addressing the failures immediately. If he does something wrong – drops a catch, misses the ball, gets bowled out – the first thing he does before anything else is to think about what went wrong, visualize the whole process over again but this time mentally (and usually physically) rehearsing doing it right the next time.
This is a really powerful way of tricking the brain into remembering our failures as successes when that is needed.
But sometimes you have a catastrophic failure, be it personal or professional, and you have to strip it apart, piece by piece, in order to work out how to put it together again in a way that brings success.
In my next post I will discuss a personal failure of my own which only happened last weekend, but which I need to address in order to make sure it doesn’t happen next time (because as much as I embrace failure I still hate failing!). It also highlighted a flaw in the “formula for guaranteed success” which I had already looked to address at the very core of INTO THE WIND.