If you’re having one of those days when you feel like a failure—and who doesn’t have days like that?—I suggest you do a Google search for stories of famous people who failed before they succeeded. The Internet is full of such stories, and they’re guaranteed to buoy your spirits. From Oprah Winfrey, who was publicly fired from her first television job as an anchor in Baltimore for being “too emotionally invested in her stories” to Steven Spielberg, who was multiply rejected from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, to Lady Gaga, whose record label dropped her after three months, to Arianna Huffington, who was rejected by 36 publishers at the start of her career.
Perhaps my favourite you-have-to-fail-before-you-succeed story is Walt Disney’s, whose newspaper editor told him he lacked imagination and had no good ideas. I could go on but you see where this is going. Everybody fails at something. The point isn’t that you failed. The point is what you learned from failure.
Think of Failure as an Opportunity
Failure isn’t just something that will happen to us all at some point in our careers. It’s a necessary stepping-stone on the road to success. Most highly successful people will tell you that they learned far more from their failures than they did from their successes. If you examine your own failures in life, personal or professional, I think you’ll come to the same conclusion. Henry Ford put it this way: failure is simply the opportunity to begin again —this time more intelligently.
I have certainly found failure to be an instructive teacher. When I was appointed VP Sales (an area in which I had zero background before I was appointed), I was in such a big hurry to implement changes during my first few months on the job that I moved too quickly and lost my team’s support. To me, losing their support was a huge failure and powerful lesson. Many leaders want to implement changes quickly when they assume a new role, but I learned the hard way that is exactly the wrong way to go about things. As the newbie, the only way to earn your team’s trust and respect is by listening to them and learning from their experience. So I stopped dead in my tracks and regrouped. I went on the road with them, held one-on-ones with my management team, and took notes on what they told me they felt needed to change. Then I implemented fixes the vast majority had told me were necessary. As a result, our employee engagement and morale went through the roof. The simple act of listening to and asking questions of front line staff made all the difference.
While I don’t like to fail, when I do, I reflect on why things went south. Then I forgive myself. If my team fails, we do a post-mortem to determine what went wrong, and implement strategies to gird against failure next time. Of course, I want my team to succeed. But if they tried their best and are open to learning the lessons of failure, I forgive them and move on. Indifference I’m less willing to forgive.
Fear of Failing is Worse than Failing
Failure can be humiliating. But if you want to succeed, you have to be willing to embarrass yourself. And nothing builds resilience faster than learning to rebound from a face-plant. Besides, if you’re not falling on your face at least some of the time, chances are you’re not taking risks. And if you’re not taking risks, you’re not growing. That’s why entrepreneurs, who tend to fail spectacularly before they succeed (often multiple times), consider their failures to be badges of honour. Their failures become part of their origin stories.
Failure Can Be Freeing
So yes, failure can be humbling. But it can also be freeing. Steve Jobs once said that while he was devastated when, at 30, he was very publicly fired from Apple—the company he’d famously co-founded, had grown into a behemoth and had served as his focus for his entire adult life—getting fired turned out to be the best thing that could ever have happened to him, although he didn’t see it at the time: “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” During the next five years Jobs started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, fell in love with the woman who would become his wife, and they began building a family together. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story and become the most successful animation studio in the world. Apple bought NeXT, he returned to Apple, and the technology that he and his NeXT team had developed became the heart of Apple’s renaissance.
It’s a good story to remember the next time you’re having one of those days.