Never lunge for the ball.
If you make a bad throw, just let it drop. Then start over.
Learning to juggle taught me how to handle life: sometimes you make a bad throw.
Sometimes you take on one too many projects. Or Murphy’s Law derails your plans.
Don’t lunge to save things. Let them drop.
Reset, and begin anew.
An acquaintance of mine in Seth Godin’s Purple Space Community announced a new project. It was one I never would have thought of, yet still found fascinating and potentially life-changing for some people.
But he ended his announcement by saying, “I know it’s not significant or anything…”
Why do we do that? Why, when we embark on a new journey or start something new, do we diminish it from the outset?
Because we’re afraid it might not work.
Because we don’t want to feel a sense of letdown.
Because we equate “significance” with the size of the impact, not the impact itself.
Significance: the quality of being worthy of attention; importance.
Nowhere in that definition does it say anything about being worthy of attention to a large number of people. It just says “worthy of attention.” And if it’s worthy of attention to a few people, that makes it significant to those people!
I shared with him the Tale of the Starfish:
A young girl was walking along a beach where thousands of starfish had washed up during a storm. When she came to a starfish, she picked it up and threw it back into the ocean.
A man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? You can’t save them all. You can’t begin to make a difference!”
The girl picked up another starfish and hurled it into the ocean. Then she looked up at the man and replied, “Well, I made a difference for that one!”
These are the only two results of any endeavor.
My late mentor Dan Miller sent this to me in a message years ago:
“At the beginning of each year, I set goals and plans to do things that have the potential to not work. If they fail, I learn. If they succeed, I profit. Either way, I win.”
Whenever I find myself hesitating about a decision, I re-read this. I hope it helps you, too.
There’s a line on the History Major page at the US Naval Academy:
Effective leadership is applied history.
Leadership, more than anything, is decision-making—specifically decision-making that affects other people, not only you.
By studying history, you can examine the minds of other leaders and understand their actions and the resulting outcomes (good and bad).
You can learn lessons from other people’s experiences rather than from your own failures and setbacks. This will not only save you time, money, and emotional labor—in some cases, it might save lives.
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
Learn lessons from others by studying history. Don’t repeat their mistakes when you can simply read a book.
There is only feedback.
People who develop a growth mindset view every failure as a learning opportunity, not an end result.
Either you succeed or you learn. But you never fail.
Of course, something might not work out like you planned. But as long as you learn from the incident and improve, did you really fail?
50 years ago, you had to stage a grand opening to the masses to your event or business.
If you wanted to open a store, you banked a lot of money (usually borrowed), on the fact that you had to get a lot of customers right away, or you’d go bust.
So you’d hype everyone up. You’d send out mailers, run TV commercials, tell everyone you knew to spread the word to your friends.
Hype, hype, hype!
Then you’d hold the grand opening with those big scissors and red tape (metaphorical or otherwise). And it would either succeed—you’d make the money you needed to stay afloat.
Or it would fail, and you’d potentially go bankrupt.
We still have that “one-shot” mentality today. Whether it’s starting a business, writing a song, publishing a book, whatever—we still feel like we’ve got one shot to succeed.
That everything hinges on one big moment where either everyone hears about it…or they don’t and you fail.
The reality is, the internet has made the grand opening both unnecessary and obsolete.
If you write something that doesn’t perform well, so what?! You can show up and do it again tomorrow… and do it better.
If you start a business, but don’t get any traction, so what? The stakes for failing in a digital business are minuscule compared to what it used to be.
You don’t need grand openings anymore. You don’t need hundreds or thousands of customers and followers right away to be successful.
You now have unlimited chances to attract the people you want to serve. Failing is often free.
Start small, serve well, and let it grow over time. That’s the key to succeeding in the modern age.
Fear of rejection is normal. As a new freelancer, businessperson, or job-hunter, the thought of being rejected is terrifying. It’ll stop you in your tracks.
You don’t even have to try hard to imagine the feeling. You reach out, make cold contacts, and have (metaphorical) doors slammed in your face over and over. It’s enough to keep anyone from trying.
But there may be another reason you’re hesitating. A seemingly ridiculous reason you haven’t sent that email or finished that application.
You’re worried they might say yes…
Why would anyone worry about that? Isn’t hearing “yes” the best news possible?
And yet this fear is universal. Because if they say yes, you’re on the hook. You’re now responsible.
If you take on a freelance project, it’s all on you to deliver. If you take on a new job or move into a new career field, you have to perform.
And maybe…just maybe…you’re afraid you won’t be able to live up to the expectations. Maybe you’re worried you won’t deliver on the promise you made.
It’s not always fear of rejection that paralyzes us.
Often, we’re worried we’ll get exactly what we ask for.
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The best teacher in the world is failure. Nothing teaches us more or faster than trying and failing at something.
It’s how we learn to walk. It’s how we learn to speak.
What keeps failure from becoming success is a lack of perseverance. We fail once and assume we’ll fail if we try again.
Thomas Edison failed more than 10,000 times in creating the incandescent lightbulb. But he failed differently each time.
When asked about this by a reporter, Edison said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” He implied that each failure got him closer to his eventual success.
Had he tried making his lightbulb the same way 10,000 times, he would have been living out Einstein’s definition of insanity. But he didn’t. Instead he chose to keep trying 10,000 different ways.
Failure is a reality, but it’s also a choice. We can choose to learn from it, change things up, and try again. That option will eventually lead to success.
Or we can choose to fail and accept it as a permanent part of our lives.
You’ll find life is much better when you look at failure and success as learning experiences.
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What does it take for a Major League Baseball player to earn a spot in the MLB Hall of Fame?
It takes failure.
Not a little bit of failure – it requires failing almost two-thirds of the time.
The best baseball players who’ve ever played the sport only average a hit 3 out of 10 times they come up to bat. That means they fail at their job 7 out of 10 times. And yet we still regard them as the best.
Why then, in our own lives, do we strive so hard to avoid failure at any cost? What if the avoidance of failure is preventing us from succeeding at a level that would cause us to stand out from the pack?
We don’t learn how to succeed through books, lectures, or seminars – we learn through failure, the greatest teacher of all. The books and seminars can help us avoid mistakes committed by others who’ve walked the path before us, but we have to fail on our own, in our own way, to find what works and what doesn’t.
To paraphrase Seth Godin in his webinar a few days ago: success requires time and failure.
Failing not only teaches you lessons from which you can improve, it also makes you more resilient to future failures. Each time you fail, you build a reserve for the future, which grows your confidence and allows you to try bigger and better things the next time. It’s a cycle that only spirals up.
What could you do in your life where you would consider batting .300 to be Hall of Fame-worthy success?
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Don’t fear failure – fear never taking the chance of doing something great.
The only way to become a leader, or to improve as a leader if you already are, is to treat everything like one giant science experiment.
Start with a hypothesis: “If I do/try/encourage _____, then ______ will happen/change/get better.”
What are you positing? What are you already presuming? Start with an observation you believe to be true.
“My employees feel disconnected from the company’s mission.”(Observation)
“If I meet regularly with them one-on-one to discuss what they believe is most important, then they will feel involved, supported, and I might get some really good ideas about how we can improve things around here.”(Hypothesis and potential solution)
At this point the experiment begins. Set parameters: what do “regular meetings” look like? What sort of questions will I ask? Am I prepared to listen empathically, to really understand how they feel and what they think matters?
You’ll gather data and attempt to put the ideas into practice (another experiment, perhaps). Test the ideas; observe what happens; use the information gathered to make changes as needed; repeat the experiment.
If you think like a scientist, you don’t simply run the experiment and assume that it works. A scientist doesn’t hypothesize something, put on a blindfold, call the experiment a success, and move on to the next idea. The scientist tests, observes, measures, and solicits feedback. When you get that data, it will show either progress or regression – support for your idea or arguments against it. Use that data to adjust your hypothesis and experiment again, until it either works or becomes obvious that your hypothesis was wrong.
You are going to be wrong. Often.
There is only one way to avoid being wrong: don’t try to become a better leader. If you are willing to become a better leader, you must be willing to be wrong. Since you know you are going to be wrong, you need to become comfortable with honesty and transparency.
“This idea that I had, this new way of doing things, it didn’t work. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
A leader must be humble and emotionally mature enough to admit errors and missteps. If you attempt to hide your failure, if you put the blame on anyone or anything other than yourself, if you pretend it all worked out when it’s obvious it didn’t, you will lose the trust and respect of those who serve under you. It will be very hard to get that back.
Think like a scientist. Test, observe, measure, and get feedback on your ideas. Experiment.
Most importantly, don’t ignore the data, and apologize when you’re wrong.
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