It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
I am working on mastering failure. For a long time I wanted to avoid failure and what happened was I failed any way. I would avoid taking some risk or get stuck in a position of non-action and everything would fall apart. Whether "paralysis by analysis" or "mental mastubation", over thinking or procrastination, it always led back to fear of failure.
If a baseball player fails 2 out of 3 times per game he is an all-star and hall-of-famer batting .333.
If an NBA player misses half of his shots he is an all-star and hall of famer (only 127 players have ever averaged over 50% accuracy from the field)
So, what is the big deal with failure anyway? I've been failing since I was a infant. I had to fall down a hundred or thousand times before I could walk. If I had just sat there and been afraid to walk I'd still be sitting there and medically labeled ~ Failure to Thrive.
Somewhere along the way growing up I learned form the world that "failure" was bad or painful and as such it was something I did not want to experience. It makes sense that there are bad, painful things I want to avoid in general, like touching a hot stove. Failure doesn't always end up with me burning my fingers or going to hospital though.
At some point in childhood I failed and someone laughed at me, made fun of me, called me a loser or was upset with me. As a result, I either punched them in the face or shrank away and quit. For a long time in my childhood I would get angry and try harder, I would not quit, I would work to prove the naysayers wrong. Of course, this was always pretty much in the context of sports and the playground.
As I got older and life switched from the playground to the world of business, I had developed some subconsious programming which made me afraid to fail and disappoint others. I developed internal definitions of failure and success based off experience. I adopted viewpoints from the external world based on others' opinions and reactions to me.
Success became based on money, material possessions, making more revenue, increasing sales, making payroll, growing businesses, giving people raises and a ton of things I really have little control over. As the business owner it is believed I have all the control, the answers and know what to do. Most honest business owners and entreprenuers will admit - I really have no clue most of the time, I don't know what to do, I can't predict the future, I don't have the perfect answer and I have some level fear of the unknown most the time.
I knew I really did not have the answers and at the same time had definitions of success and failure which were not productive. What that resulted in was me analyzing situations over and over and over, running what-if scenarios, trying to predict reactions from all the parties involved AND ultimately I would do nothing. I was paralyzed by the fear of all the potential negative outcomes.
In the short-term, not taking some action like yelling at someone when I get angry was always a good decision. Restraint and patience when overly emotional all good qualities and that's not the type of non-action I'm referring to here.
Doing nothing when facing long-term problems always ended up in failure, a long drawn out torturous failure, likely 100 times worse than the quick and fast failure. I was living emotional failure day after day after day and the negative emotional state led to more and more fear. It ended up becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy ~ If I could fail 10 different ways and analyze them all, during the period of analysis I falied in some way I could never have imagined.
Obviously, my definition of failure was not serving me very well. I was filled with anxiety, worry and wasting an enormous amount of mental energy focusing on negatives. Sure, there were some potential negative results possible from certain actions, but sitting there doing nothing was a guarantee something negative would happen. I was also missing out of positive results and beneficial things that could have happened. Never had something good just happened out of the blue while analyzing the situation, never.
So, in order to deal with the fear which was causing the non-action, I needed to change my definitions of success and failure. Looking back to the example of learning to walk, it would be failure if I gave up after falling once or never tried to get up and walk. So, giving up and doing nothing is failure, not trying and falling down. Success is getting back up after falling on my face. Success is looking fear in the eye and taking an action, any action really.
I can across this from the Spartan Race yesterday:
Failure is Learning and Learning is Growth. The idea I want to teach my children is to never be afraid to Fail and Learn and Grow. If anything, Fail Often and Fail Fast! The faster you fail and learn and grow the better you can be.
Do not tie yourself to the definintions of success of the world. Success is not the amount of dollars in your bank account, the value of your home and car, the digits in your 401k, the watch on your arm or size of the diamond in your wedding ring. None of those say anything about who you are as a person and that's all I care about. As that's how I judge other people, that's also how I had to judge myself.
My biggest successes were all born out of my biggest failures. I had ended up in drug rehab after graduating college. That summer I watched the Ironman triathlon on TV and thought I would take the risk to do one of those. I made a commitment, did the training, ignored all the mistakes, problems, training, lack of education and the voices in my head which said I might fail. I blazed the trail and fought those negative voices on a daily basis to show up at the starting line. Just showing up at the starting line I had already succeeded.
Get in the ring, sign up for the race, open the business... Take the Risk, Fail, Get back up, Take another Risk, Fail, Get Back up... That is life, that is success.
Email me your successes at ~ douglashilbert@yahoo.com
For past blogs go to doughilbert.blogspot.com and askhilbert.blogspot.com
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