Failure… the Road to Success
“I have missed over 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 succeed.” — Michael Jordan
Most people agree that learning from failure is an essential element of development, but it doesn’t mean it is fun or without pain. It is the reality of the pain that accompanies failure that keeps most people from truly learning from their failures. These emotions don’t get much air time, because they are uncomfortable. Part of the problem is we often feel like we are the only one who has this experience of failure. However, that just isn’t reality; we all feel these emotions no matter how well we have learned to push through them or how many successes we have experienced. When failure occurs, typical responses range from hiding to blaming to deflecting responsibility. How do you feel when things go wrong and failure becomes reality?
For me it feels like everyone is watching and all I want is to crawl into a hole or use Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak to go unnoticed until the failure fades. For a long time, I coupled hiding with blaming. In the moment, it feels great to know exactly whose fault it is that things went wrong and that person was never me. I slowly started to realize that while it felt great for a moment to blame any failures on someone else it left me without recourse to fix the problem and do better the next time. That left me stuck and I don’t like being stuck. I had big goals and hiding and blaming were not helping me reach those goals. It was time for a change.
Fortunately, I love to read and found a deep love of reading books on leadership and learning. Two of the most impactful books empowering me to embrace a new way of looking at failure were John Maxwell’s Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn and Leif Babin’s and Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership. Maxwell’s book helped me to see that everyone and I mean everyone fails and it is our choice how we deal with that failure. I also learned that the only way to move past a failure was to learn from it and to do that meant I had to take the time to examine what happened and why it happened. From Babin and Willink I learned that leaders who are effective not only learn from their mistakes they take responsibility for everything in their world. When I first read their theory, I thought they were crazy, but they make their case so compellingly that I had no choice but to accept it as true. I have since adopted it into my leadership philosophy and have seen how it bears excellent fruit. Now when I fail, I push through my emotions, take responsibility for the things that went wrong so I can learn from my failures. I have gone from a victim of circumstances to an empowered director of my future. As I have practiced making this reality consistently part of my response to failure it has benefited me as I no longer focus only on the things I know for sure I will be good at. I have demonstrated to those I work with how this approach can work as they see my response differs from others around me.
You have likely heard the quote from preeminent basketball player Michael Jordan regarding how many shots he missed in his career. Frequently, all you see is the first part of the quote and that is enough to remind people that even the greatest fail.
“I have missed over 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.”
In my mind, though, it is the close of the quote that carries the most power.
“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
I think that many people discount the power of this statement because they assume that MJ feels safe to share his failures because his successes are the thing of legend. His point is that his epic success is a direct RESULT of his failures. He doesn’t hide from his failures or blame others for them, he learns from them and they propelled him forward.
What steps are you willing to take to learn from your failures? How will you push past the boundaries you have set for yourself?
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