LESSON 6

ACHIEVING GROWTH FROM FAILURE

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

At this point you may be wondering about the old adage that failure breeds success, and what the implications of that are to your trajectory. Surely failure must involve a downward trajectory. However, before making such a sweeping assertion it's helpful to first understand the mechanisms that surround situations of failure. As long as you can take positive learnings away from a failure, you will be able to recover sooner than you otherwise would and in turn keep the situation from resulting in a sustained downward trajectory. In fact, if you use the lessons from your failure to build new knowledge and better prepare, it becomes constructive failure, which can lead to an even steeper upward trajectory thereafter.

Thomas Edison is often used as an example of someone who failed many times in his endeavors. When he did not succeed with one approach, he was a master of turning it into a constructive failure. He is well known for the positive and optimistic way in which he viewed failure. Whereas people say he failed hundreds of times in his quest to invent the light-bulb, he looked at it differently. From Edison's standpoint, something that did not work was one more approach that he could cross off his list as “proven not to work” for the light-bulb. Every time he could eliminate a failure he knew he was one step closer to success. His words of wisdom still apply today: “If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Put another way, he viewed every unsuccessful attempt as progress in his trajectory to invent a working light-bulb.

The way that you must view failure is very similar to what you learned in Lesson 1 in regard to the way you must view feedback: You have to depersonalize it. If you fail—and at some point everyone does in some manner—you must not take the failure personally. You should be introspective and learn from it, but you cannot let it drag you down for a sustained period of time. If you overly internalize it or take the failure too personally that is what will happen. You will ruminate on it for too long, which will affect your ability to use it constructively. And it is this result—not the failure itself—that will lead to your trajectory taking a downward path. In a world that moves and advances with such speed, you must be able to quickly learn from mistakes (not just your own, but also the mistakes that others make) in order to increase your chances of staying ahead.

History is littered with people who are famous for great accomplishments that were borne out of failure. Consider Christopher Columbus, who sought fame and fortune in his adventure on the sea. His goal was to find a path to the East Indies; instead he found a new land in the Americas. Despite proving unsuccessful in his attempt to find a western route to the Orient, history has judged him as a great explorer. Why? Because he changed course based upon new knowledge and events. This new course resulted in forever changing the world.

EVOLUTIONARY UNDERPINNINGS

If you are bothered by failure, you are not alone. Humans are hardwired to have an intrinsic fear of failure. In evolutionary terms this stems from a basic sense of survival. Failure in the most fundamental sense meant no food or shelter; failure came in not securing the necessities to survive. This same principle applies in the modern world. People want to succeed, and they generally want to be recognized for doing so. The opposite applies for failure. People want to avoid it, and when it happens they do not want to be continually reminded of it. When they are, they can quickly learn to feel as if failure is inevitable. When this occurs it becomes harder to persist toward your goals.

In a series of groundbreaking studies, the pioneering psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman explored the conditions that cause people to give up. In the most famous of his experiments he found that when dogs were given an electrical shock, different behaviors would ensue depending on whether or not escape from the shock was possible. In what he termed learned helplessness, a dog that could not find a way to escape would give up hope and stop exploring ways to get out. The dog felt that nothing it could do would change the situation and subsequently stopped trying. Interestingly, the principles behind this concept are the reason why the modern-day invisible dog fence can still be effective when it is turned off. Once a dog has been trained to know how far it can go before it is shocked, it will likely not try to go past that point even if the fence is turned off or broken.

When learned helplessness occurs, an individual has developed an expectation that certain outcomes are beyond personal control. This phenomenon is especially dangerous in humans, as it results in a surrendering of control. If you develop learned helplessness you have made a decision that other factors and people will determine your success. This causes you to deflect the source of your problem to others or to the situation you are in. In making this faulty attribution to external causes it becomes even harder to convince yourself to change for the positive. In reality, success is a choice. Your choice. Almost anything that matters is a choice. You should choose every day to be the best that you can, and in doing so will be able to control your trajectory.

The connection between learned helplessness and failure is based on the fact that success is a choice. When it comes to learned helplessness you can do one of two things: You can develop learned helplessness when conditions change and tell yourself that there is nothing that you can do about it, or you can do something about it and continue to evolve and build your skills to avoid failure. While learned helplessness is an area with a negative outcome, Seligman's research also addresses a positive outcome that can manifest instead. This phenomenon, which is known as learned optimism, results in a sense of belief within yourself that you will succeed in an endeavor. Just as you can learn to accept failure, you can learn to expect success. As you will see in Lesson 7, research shows that this expectation of positive outcomes will lead to more success.

As Edison did after each failure, you should reevaluate situations to see if circumstances have changed. Through reevaluation of a situation you can learn from your mistakes and not let failure prevent you from trying again. The fact that something did not work in the past does not guarantee that it or something similar won't work in the future. Sometimes conditions change. Something that was once met with skepticism may now be met with applause.

Humans are naturally disposed to “escape” from failure because of the fact that in evolutionary terms it could amount to death. While in most cases the consequences are no longer as severe, we still have a difficult time with failure and sometimes give up too easily. Because of the extreme outcomes that can result, our brains are wired in such a way that we process and store negative information much faster than we do positive information. This creates what is known as a negativity bias, wherein the effect of a bad outcome more powerfully drives our mindset than does the effect of a good outcome.

Based on the historically harsh consequences of failure, it is evolutionarily adaptive for bad events to have a more lasting impact on us than do good events. Because of this the effects of a good outcome generally dissipate faster than the effects of bad events. Put another way, bad will stay with you longer. Others also will remember it longer. It is therefore incumbent on you to undo your most severe failures as quickly as possible. It has been estimated that we need at least five positive situations to offset one negative situation. To counteract this you need to seek ways to create more good than bad to balance the outsized strength of the latter.

If you fear failure you will also begin to limit your creativity and risk-taking—your willingness to think big, which we discussed in Lesson 3. And when you fear failure you also will begin to procrastinate. All of this occurs in an attempt to try to delay or avoid what you view as a possible failure. While you can always learn from failure, not all failures are created equally—some are more severe. Failure can be broken into three categories: (1) preventable failures, (2) unavoidable failures in complex systems, and (3) intelligent failures at the frontier. The preventable failures will have the worst impact on your career. For example, your team was waiting to receive a file by the end of the day, and you forgot to send it. As a result, they were not able to finish their work and a key milestone was missed. The only lesson to learn from this is to not do it again; should you forget something like that another time you will quickly lose trust and credibility. The other two types of failures are trickier, and your positive response remains essential.

When failure is driven by complexity in an area of uncertainty you have a chance to pull very important lessons from it. Nobody could have fully prepared for the tremendous damage and loss of life that occurred when the World Trade Center towers collapsed in New York during the 9/11 attacks. During this chaotic event a very complex emergency response effort ensued, one that had no precedent. One of the major obstacles encountered by first responders was an inability to communicate with each other. Among the many problems were communications systems that were overwhelmed because of the massive number of people trying to use the networks, and a lack of interoperability across first responders (most were on different systems that did not allow communications across the multiple agencies). Even though progress has been made in making improvements based on this unavoidable failure in a complex system, even now there are necessary fixes that have not been made.

The third type of failure, intelligent failure on the frontier, is often referred to as good failure. The reason is that the area in which the failure occurred is so new that the lessons from it can be drawn upon to make large improvements. This type of failure is based on an event or situation that has not been encountered before. Experimenting with new medical drugs, trying to create a new product, or making a large shift in direction at your company into a new area (blue ocean) would all be examples. Because this is uncharted territory, sometimes even a success is initially disguised as a failure. Thomas Edison's efforts provide an example here too. Early in his career Edison struggled to invent a product that he could bring to the market as a commercial success. He thought he had finally found it after he created the first electronic method for gathering votes during elections. He was fairly certain that this would revolutionize the voting process and be the way of the future. The problem is that it was not seen as such then. People still had a general distrust of such capability and preferred to cast ballots the traditional way. Now, of course, all modern elections use electronic voting methods in some capacity.

UNCOVER THE POSITIVE

The most important aspect of failure is to do everything you can to pull out the positive from the situation and then set out to find a way to use it constructively. In fact, this might even lead you to do something that you thought was not possible, or think of something you had not thought of before. This applies whether the failure is self-induced or brought on by something outside of your control. Amadeo Giannini, the founder of what became Bank of America, experienced both failure and extraordinary success. He is a profound example of someone who had to look really deep to find the positive after a series of horrific events. One of his biggest “failures” was in fact based on events entirely outside of his control.

Giannini opened his first bank in San Francisco in 1904, at a time when it was very difficult for the common person to get a loan at a decent interest rate. At the turn of the twentieth century, loans with good rates were still something reserved for the wealthy. Giannini saw the best in people and believed that the lower and middle classes would be responsible and pay back their loans. He decided to chart a course into this untapped blue ocean, which is a concept we discussed in Lesson 4.

Many of you may be familiar with the earthquake and subsequent fires in San Francisco in 1906. These had a devastating effect on the city, killing roughly 3,000 people and wiping out nearly all of the homes and businesses. Included in the earthquake's destruction was Giannini's bank building. Instead of dwelling on this loss Giannini jumped into action and in doing so capitalized on what was a very difficult situation for his business. Just as he had taken a risk on a previously underserved population, he again took a risk after the earthquake and did something different. Unlike the big bankers, who wanted to remain closed to further evaluate the situation, Giannini realized that people would now more than ever need access to money. Recognizing this need, he raced to the ruins of his bank and was able to remove the money from the vaults before the heat from the approaching fire made doing so impossible. He then made the decision to set up his bank outdoors to provide customers much-needed access to money. Doing this built even more trust and brought in new customers to his bank.

Nobody is advocating that failure is optimal—simply that it does not have to be negative. This requires a strong level of understanding and resiliency. When Giannini considered the implications afterward of not having a banking system, he realized that banking could serve a positive function and be empowering to individuals. From this he decided to build a network of bank branches, which was a novel approach at the time. This enabled him to take what could have been a permanent disaster and turn it into a key launching point that resulted in his becoming one of the most successful bankers in history.

All too often a key step toward success is disguised as failure. If you do not seek to understand the situation better you may miss the hidden success within. Sometimes what seems to be a disaster can actually become the beginning of a strong foundation. What looks like a loss or failure is only seen as such because more time or insight is needed to understand how to grow from it. Silly Putty, penicillin, Post-it Notes, and many other products were actually inventions that came out of mistakes or failures. It was only afterward that these mistakes were turned into gems and became massive successes.

INTROSPECTION

Introspection is a critical component of learning from failure. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but it also serves as a point of learning. If past is prologue, then you must learn to use your past—including failure—to write what happens next. If you have the right mindset and choose to view the situation as an important event to learn from, you will be able to turn failure on its head. To make this happen you must seek to fully understand what led to the failure. And this will normally be difficult to do.

While failure is often inevitable, at times you will need to acknowledge that it may have resulted from your own shortcomings. The sooner you accept that fact the faster you can turn to seeking solutions to avoid it in the future. That is what matters. Can it be salvaged? Can you do better next time? Is there another way to approach the situation? Through asking yourself a series of evaluative questions such as these you will more quickly get to the root cause and create a new plan.

When failure does occur it is important to not dwell on it for too long. Once you have assessed the situation and determined a plan of action, put it behind you and move on. Ruminating over it can have severe negative consequences and lead your trajectory downward. Do not play the victim and look for nonconstructive excuses or lay blame with others. Do not waste time trying to redirect blame or find a scapegoat. Instead quickly learn from your missteps and move on. A misstep can be just that: You missed a step—you did not fall off of a cliff. Place your next foot back in the right place and you can continue on again. In fact, the further on you continue the less important the failure will seem. At some point you may even find yourself laughing at something you once deemed very dire.

You should also bear in mind that failure is not always incontrovertible failure, even though it may seem that it is. Sometimes it is just failure in someone else's eyes. At other times, as with Edison and his electronic voting machine, it is a success that just takes longer to manifest. In reality, failure is often nothing more than a temporary roadblock. John Grisham received a seemingly countless number of rejections for his first book, A Time to Kill. While he is now a globally renowned author, his first book was for all intents a commercial failure at the time it was published. It was only after the publication of his second book, The Firm, that his career took off. Incidentally, Grisham himself had a career trajectory that changed considerably based on events in his life. During a trial at the courthouse one day he overheard testimony from a twelve-year-old victim that stuck with him. He began to wonder what would have happened if the child's father had murdered those who assaulted her. From there he began to write his first book. He took a risk that had a chance of failure, and went from being a successful practicing attorney to becoming one of the bestselling authors of all time.

THE FALLACY OF INEVITABLE FAILURE

One of the worst things you can do to harm your trajectory is to avoid taking certain risks because of what you perceive to be the inevitability of failure. One of the greatest military successes in the history of the United States was chalked up in advance as a probable death sentence for those who were to take part in the mission. If the people involved had believed that failure was the only option, success would have been considerably less likely. I am referring to the Doolittle Raid on Japan during World War II. All of the crew members realized that even though the chance of failure was high, it was not a certainty. And the mission was the right thing to do.

The events transpired on April 18, 1942, when a total of sixteen bombers, each with a five-man crew, took off from the USS Hornet aircraft carrier in the western Pacific Ocean. This was the beginning of what would turn into one of the biggest surprises of the war and a key turning point in the United States’ involvement in it. Amazingly, every crew-member volunteered despite knowing that this mission would include a guaranteed element of failure, along with a high probability of dying.

The known failure was that the aircraft would not have sufficient fuel to return to the USS Hornet for a safe landing. Instead, the bombers would continue on to designated safe zones in China after the raid. A further risk developed when the task force that included the USS Hornet was sighted by a Japanese boat that quickly radioed its headquarters. As a result the bombers had to take off sooner than expected, which added miles to their trip. After dropping the bombs the crews soon realized that they were not likely to make it to the safe zones because fuel was running low and the weather was worsening. Rather than bailing out over China, fifteen of the planes crash-landed along the coast and the sixteenth landed in Russia; incredibly, most of the airmen survived.

Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle himself thought the raid was a failure after it was over because all sixteen aircraft were lost and only minimal damage was inflicted on the Japanese targets. But remember, failure is relative. Instead of this being a failure, it provided a massive psychological boost to the U.S. troops. And it had another psychological effect: For the first time, it caused Japanese military leaders to question their infallibility.

Unlike the Doolittle Raiders, all of whom were brave volunteers who disregarded the possibility of failure, people in the workplace far too often choose not to try something because they believe that failure is likely. I recall the disappointment in my coworker Ed's eyes one day when he walked into my office and sat down despondently. He proceeded to tell me that he couldn't believe someone else had just taken his idea and received a great response after sharing it with leadership. As he walked me through it I could easily see why the suggestions were received favorably. I then asked why someone else had presented it if it was his idea.

While it took him a while to get to the heart of the matter, the reason he eventually came around to was that he was not sure the idea would be accepted—he feared that it might be rejected. He feared failure and in doing so failed to act. Because we so strongly remember negative events, it is important to realize how long not acting will remain rooted in your memory. Trying something and failing tends to become a fleeting memory over time when you are able to follow the failure with success. When you don't even try something, however, you are left with regret over not knowing what might have happened. If you try but fail you know what happened, and you can learn from it and move on. Fortunately, Ed was able to play a key role in the project and felt that he was still connected to his idea. He even helped refine and improve it. All too often, though, you never get that chance and will wonder what could have been if you only would have tried.

THE HALF-EMPTY AND HALF-FULL GLASS

When you are considering whether to pursue something, you need to ensure that there is some realism to the pursuit. To maximize your likelihood of success it helps to consider the challenge from two perspectives. Looking at it from the lens of the glass being half empty will enable you to identify in advance those obstacles that could lead to failure down the road. Don't filter out information that is inconsistent with what you want an outcome to be; if you do you will likely overlook something that's important. Through identifying obstacles you can find ways to mitigate those challenges. You also need to consider your effort from the perspective of the glass being half full. As we will review in more detail in Lesson 7, this positive expectancy is critically important and will improve your chances of succeeding. When you view goals using this dual approach you create a situation in which you are able to change from a “yes, but” to a “yes, if” mindset. One of the worst things you can do is only focus on the glass being half empty, because all you will glean from that is a series of excuses and “yes, but” challenges.

For example, an effort is under way to send a two-person team (one man and one woman) to orbit Mars in January of 2018. This requires studying and learning from a whole host of prior failures and challenges with space flight endeavors. If this were the only focus, however, you would hear nothing but statements such as “Yes, it would be a great mission, but it's too far”; “Yes, we could build the right spacecraft, but it would be too expensive.” The organizers of the mission are aware of the risk and even embracing it because they know they can learn from the past and then hopefully do something no one else has ever done. As the organizers state, “These are exactly the kinds of risks that America should be willing to take in order to advance our knowledge, experience and position as a world leader. We believe the risks and challenges we have uncovered are well within the scope of our collective experience and can be overcome.”

When you also focus on the glass being half full you create the necessary positive expectancy and begin to hear statements like “Yes, we can do that if we are able to build an environment in the spacecraft that provides basic comforts for such a long journey”; “Yes, we will be able to do it by determining when Mars is closet to Earth.”

All of us have natural tendencies to which we are disposed when we act. This will in part determine how you view situations. In this lesson we can't dive deeply into the psychological profiles behind different style preferences, but you still can easily bring to mind people you know in some of the key categories. For example, some people are idea generators. This is the person who is always coming to you with the next “great invention” or idea. Others prefer to refine and improve existing ideas. When you tell these people about an idea they will immediately jump to thinking of ways to make it even better. Another type of person likes to sell the ideas and get people to buy into the mission. Yet another group of people likes to take ideas that are ready to go and find ways to execute and bring them to fruition.

To help you in your own efforts you should determine which of those categories most closely resembles your style. Then find people in the other categories to help round out your idea to improve the chance of it becoming a resounding success. For example, if you are an idea generator you will side toward a “glass is half full” mentality and should pull in a refiner (who will see the glass as half empty) to help you find ways to improve the idea. In doing so you will reduce your chance of failure by eliminating some of the potential issues up front.

CASCADING FAILURE

During August of 2003 more than 50 million people in the United States experienced a power outage—on the same day! What turned into a miserable experience for so many during the late summer heat was all started by what could have been a very manageable situation. In Northern Ohio an electrical line sagged due to the excessive heat, and a normal control alarm failed to trigger. With no place for the electricity to go, it was transferred to another line, and then another. Then those failed. The electricity had to be transferred to yet more lines, and the problem continued to spread. By the time the flow of electrical failures was halted, people across eight states and Canada were impacted.

A situation such as this is known as cascading failure, which occurs when failure spreads across a series of interconnected systems. Because electrical grids are physically connected, the discussion of cascading failure is often confined to networks such as that and computer systems. However, there are many other real-life situations in which one small failure is compounded by another and then another, and so on. These successive failures then lead to a massive failure.

The Air France Concorde disaster in 2000, in which more than 100 people were killed, is another example. Just five minutes before the Concorde departed from Charles de Gaulle International Airport in France, a DC-10 took off from the same runway and a small metal strip fell off of it—a metal strip that came loose due to sloppy installation by mechanics. During takeoff one of the tires on the Concorde hit the metal strip, causing the tire to burst. From the burst a piece of rubber flew upward and struck the wing in its weakest spot, rupturing one of the plane's fuel tanks. There is speculation that because the plane was slightly overloaded and the weight aboard the plane wasn't properly centered, excessive fuel may have been shifted to that fuel tank during taxiing, placing it under more pressure than normal. From the fuel leak a fire started that triggered a loss of power in two of the engines. Damage also prevented the landing gear from being able to retract. The lack of full thrust caused by the loss of engine power combined with the landing gear being stuck limited the plane's ability to climb or gain speed. It crashed into a hotel, killing all 109 people on board and four more on the ground.

The accident investigation revealed that in twenty-seven years of service there were fifty-seven prior recorded incidents of tire bursts on a Concorde, nineteen of which were caused by hitting objects on the ground. In none of these instances did the fuel tank rupture and catch fire. As is the case with cascading failure, one of the worst aspects of the Concorde disaster is that no single event by itself likely would have resulted in a crash. It was only the sequence of events—the cascading failure—that led to the tragic outcome.

While these two examples are used to illustrate cascading failure in an extreme sense, examples abound at work as well. One of the most recent ones that played out publicly involved Ron Johnson, the now former CEO of the retail chain J. C. Penney. In prior roles he was instrumental in the success of rebranding Target, and had served as a highly regarded senior executive at Apple. Johnson had the pedigree to succeed, yet he did not. In just a year and a half with Johnson at the helm the company dropped $4 billion in revenue!

His goal was to turn J. C. Penney around and reshape the retail industry with his new strategy, which was based on a store-within-a-store concept that assumed shoppers would want to hang out and buy merchandise that was not on sale. The problem was that it was his strategy. He was largely unconcerned with what others thought or the customer wanted. Instead of following the think big, act small, move quick strategy (Lesson 3), Johnson tried to do everything at once. He did not start small and then learn, adjust, and expand. His failure to do so compounded bad decisions, because once something was rolled out to all of the stores it was hard to make adjustments.

Business minds will be analyzing and creating case studies on this for years, but perhaps Johnson's biggest failure was his reluctance to listen to feedback, which as you learned in Lesson 1 is critical to success. He felt that because something worked in his past jobs it would of course also work at J. C. Penney. He made a cardinal mistake we discussed in Lessons 4 and 5: He assumed that something that worked before would continue to work. When he replaced most of the executive team with colleagues from his prior company who thought the way he thought, he compounded matters by creating a structure in which it was almost impossible to receive real feedback. When people did have a different opinion he rarely listened and referred to them as skeptics. What he wanted were believers. In effect, he let what could have been small, manageable failures turn into a large cascading failure from which he could not recover.

To avoid triggering your own cascading failure you need to treat failure as a finite event, albeit one that you learn from. If you can avoid committing a series of mistakes in succession, you will greatly limit the risk of the failure bringing down both you and your trajectory. Failure by itself, then, is not the problem. Failure is inevitable. Your response to it is not. The problem lies either in not learning from failure—and not learning from it quickly enough—or in allowing it to cascade until you are left with a massive problem. When you train yourself to learn quickly from failure you will move more rapidly into new successes, and then again into more.

The importance of following failure with success is supported by recent research that tracked 238 working professionals (across seven companies and three industries) for about four months. The participants were asked to keep individual work diaries in which they would record their responses to questions relating to various situations that occurred. At the end of every day each participant was asked to briefly describe one event that really stood out in his or her mind. It turns out that the best days people had were those days when they felt that progress—even if mundane—was made (i.e., a positive outcome occurred). Not surprisingly, the worst days were those during which a failure or setback occurred. The importance of the small wins is referred to as the progress principle. The researchers found that the most important indicator of good performance was the feeling of making meaningful progress. And they also found that the negativity bias again held. Minor failures were found to be influential and more powerful than were positive outcomes.

Creating these successes quickly after failure will make it immensely easier for you to recover from the event and put it behind you. Had J. C. Penney had more positive outcomes during its turnaround effort—even small ones—there would have been a better chance to gain momentum. Instead Johnson's strategy drove down morale and engagement, and the negative continually outweighed the positive.

TRY NEW THINGS

Through positive failure you will generate great insights and learnings. Ironically, those who are most open to new ideas are apt to have more failures over time. Those failures are not caused solely by personal mistakes, but more often by a willingness to experiment and try new ways of doing things. Research conducted by Lewis Goldberg delineated five core characteristics that can be used to define your general stylistic preferences and personality.

Briefly, the first of these is conscientiousness, which is based on a person's degree of thoroughness, reliability, and carefulness. The second, extraversion, relates to a person's outgoing nature, assertiveness, and desire to seek high levels of stimulation. The next one is agreeableness, which is based on being cooperative, kind, and generally trusting of others. The fourth characteristic, emotional stability, relates to managing one's reactions, remaining calm, and avoiding temperamental behavior. The last one is referred to as openness to experience. This is about willingness to learn; a desire to try new things; imagination, curiosity, and creativity.

In a study of 129 newly hired college graduates, openness to experiment was found to be a very important factor in determining their subsequent career trajectories. What the researchers found was that as the openness of the employees in the study increased, the rate at which performance declined slowed down. As you now know, almost everyone experiences a plateau at some point, and during this time performance diminishes. This is expected, and a career trajectory will likely not always point sharply upward. By being open to trying new things the employees were able to delay the onset of some of the inevitable performance decline. In other words, their trajectory remained higher for longer.

You will recall from Lesson 5 that Netflix found a blue ocean and became a dominant player in a new market. Something that the company is not as frequently touted for, however, is the way it responds to failure. While Netflix continues to break new ground, it has had plenty of failures, many of them public. The key is how the company reacted: It course-corrected. And in one very public instance it did something that is even harder for many: It apologized. When you make a mistake do not double down on it and further compound the problem. If you know you are wrong just admit it and then move forward as quickly as possible. Denying it or prolonging the issue will only leave you further behind.

CONCLUSION

Failure is often perceived as something that went wrong, something for which the outcome should have been more positive. In reality there is a worse failure: failing to try something important because of fear. When you learn to accept failure as a possibility it will open the door for massive success because you will no longer need to constrain yourself to small thinking. When you fear failure you hold back. The best way to not fear failure is to accept it and learn to identify the lessons within it that you will avoid in the future. Though it may not seem like it at the time, failure results in the acquisition of character if you can harness and learn from what went wrong. People remember character. Failure itself can be fleeting, but people will remember how you react to it and bounce back from it. In addition, when you bounce back quickly you will avoid stagnation. Unlike stagnation, which often becomes continual, failure can occur at a single point in time that you quickly move past.

Like pain from an injury, failure is not permanent. It is a temporary state. It certainly will not always feel that way in the moment, but when you look back you will realize that the magnitude seems to diminish over time. Consider that there is probably no failure that is more public than losing the U.S. presidential election as hundreds of millions of people are watching. Yet even these powerful individuals look back on the situation with a positive mindset once the emotion of the situation passes. Al Gore received more popular votes in the 2000 election than did George W. Bush, but because he had fewer electoral votes he did not win the tightest race in history. He could have withdrawn and sulked in his failure. He chose to pursue a different passion and trajectory by focusing on environmental causes. Not only did he find his cause, he made millions of dollars and found fulfillment in the process.

EXERCISE

NOTES