For successful high performers, actually for anyone, failure hurts.
Even in the “iteration age” where failure is reframed as a pre-requisite for success, it still stings when you fail, no matter how smartly you do so.
But do you really need to fail in order to succeed?
I don’t think so…
When you study failures closely, you can find opportunities to prevent the failure while still extracting the valuable lesson. There is usually an avoidable mistake that you can navigate around to allow you to grow without having to experience the pain.
Here are common avoidable mistakes to watch out for:
Didn’t Know What to Do (Awareness Gap) …
… so they did the wrong thing.
Great people become extraordinary because they constantly push their boundaries. Unfortunately, when you’re in uncharted territory, there are no guidelines or paths for you to follow. At the edge of your comfort zone, you fail when you step outside that edge.
If you imagine your abilities as the floor you walk on, when you’re at the edge, you can prevent yourself from falling off by either expanding the floor or stopping movement. The key idea is to grow your skills faster than you can move (pursue the next-level opportunity).
Look at your daily activities – how much of it do you spend moving and how much do you spend expanding your floor?
Whenever possible, get a guide who is already successful in what you’re looking to accomplish to help you decide on the right skills to build. If you don’t build the right skills, you’ll end up having to learn the hard way.
Example: You want to manage your own division and take on P&L responsibilities. You’ve never been client-facing and you don’t have a strong grasp of financials. Since you don’t think those elements are important to the role, you decide to take on P&L responsibilities without building these skills. In this scenario, you’ll most likely fail and learn the hard way that you need to influence clients and accurately analyze financial statements to succeed.
Couldn’t Do What Was Needed (Competency Gap)
Knowing what skills to build doesn’t mean you can successfully build it. Part of mastery, especially if you’re going from great to extraordinary, requires perseverance and purposeful practice. You have to come up with a plan and actually go through with it, getting feedback and monitoring your progress along the way.
It takes time to acquire skill and you need persist patiently.
Example: You’ve received feedback to work on your business development skills so you decide to take a course, shadow some successful salespeople and participate in client meetings. Despite all of this work, you still haven’t been able to make a sale. If you decide to take on P&L responsibilities before you become competent in the prerequisite skills, you’ll most likely fail and then learn that you need to sell successfully before you can run a division.
Didn’t Want to Do What Was Needed (Passion Gap)
The higher you go, the least likely you’ll be able to thrive unless you’re on fertile ground. In business, that means operating in your sweet spot. At this point, if you’re competent in the skills you need, failure is a sign that maybe you’re meant to head in a different direction.
Conan O’Brien expressed it perfectly in his commencement speech at Dartmouth in 2011,
“It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.”
Follow and do what you’re born and made to do. In my interview with the late and great American writer, Bill Zinsser, he gives advice on generating uniqueness. The more “you” that you become, the more successful you will be.
In any situation, know that failure is just feedback. Maybe you need to develop your skills or head in another direction altogether. The difference between those who succeed and those who don’t is what they do with this feedback.
It’s in your mistakes that you can figure out your next step. Failure is a method to help you gain clarity. If you slow down the process, you might be able to gain the clarity without the pain that comes from failure.
Be like a seasoned race car driver: Avoid crashes and still win the race by going fast on the straight aways and slowing down during the turns.
Photo by Matt Brown
