At my wedding, my best man, Zane stood up to give the toast and recounted the story of our bachelor party in Las Vegas a few weeks earlier. He told of my frustration at the blackjack table where I was really upset that I was losing my money. He reminded me that my luck would change soon. “Lady Luck will soon shine on you again,” he encouraged me at the casino. I retorted that what bothered me wasn’t watching my chips getting whittled down; it was that in not winning, I was a loser. At that point in my life, I hated to lose. I had read so many motivational books that I desperately wanted to remain a winner and be honored as such, the way I had been at IBM, so I went to great lengths to avoid losing. This pattern kept me working at IBM far past the time that I was satisfied with what I was doing there. Other people were called losers, but not I. I was one of the winners, and I was going to stay one of the winners . . . until I failed miserably. Why play unless we think we can win? My father - in - law always played the state lottery because, as he so often said, “Someone has to win; it might as well be me,” and he did win small stakes on occasion.
Now I’m not suggesting that you head to the nearest casino boat and buy some chips, but we can learn a lot from Las Vegas and lottery analogies. Whether you play the lottery or not, you don’t have to be a gambler to fail. No matter what you do (and don ’ t do) in business, eventually failure will show up. It might be big, it might be small, but failure will arrive. Over the years, I‘ve learned to regard it as no big deal. (All right, maybe not exactly no big deal, but certainly much less of a big deal.)
You and I are not the first people in business to fail. We have lots of company — and we’re likely to have more. If this book teaches only one thing, it is how to learn to recognize, accept, and embrace failure as part of the natural sequence of events. This is how we already think of success; can we think of failure this way, too, as simply a natural outcome? In business, certain odds are against us from the start. Since 80 percent of all new businesses fail within five years, you might as well learn to handle it. In fact, if you can start building this mind - set before you fail the first time, you’ll be ahead of the game. After I had gone out of business twice, the possibility of that happening a third time seemed easy to handle. If that doesn’t sound quite so crazy as it might have when you picked up this book, that’s a sign that you are making progress toward developing your own brand of resiliency and true business confidence before you have multiple failure notches on your belt.
It is good to be a competitor and not want to lose. An honest competitor gives every deal his all, is rigorous about preparation and training, and approaches each event with humility and without the fear of losing. I want to win. I expect to win. I celebrate when I win. But I can also accept when I lose. I learn what I can. I may wallow in it for a while, but then I move on. I escape to a new path. I try again. I view the outcome as an escape so I can now make a new choice. This is how my bounce acts.
Lost? Try the Escape Hatch
Anna Belyaev of Type A, a training firm in Chicago, knows that she will fail at parts of her business, but her resiliency makes it into a game where she really can’t lose. “The game I play around failure is that I try to make sure that when I leap or take a risk, it’s a big enough one that if I fall, I am just going to be so far ahead from where I started that it s not failure.”
Belyaev works at her life so that any potential failures are ones that she knows can move her forward. In this way, with very long leaps, she can see any failure as progress on the path toward her goal, and even if she doesn’t achieve what she wanted to achieve at a particular step, at the very least she lands a long way from where she started. From this new place, she then has a different view to make a decision that will yield the best possible outcome.
Deborah House knows that people are sad and disappointed when they fail, but she retorts that we need to “see how quickly you can come out of it. I view it as a process of elimination because even the best of plans have the option for failure, so by failing you ’ ve eliminated one of your options and you have a smaller pool to choose from.”
Failure thus can be viewed as an escape hatch for each step. Finding out what doesn’t work is as important as finding out what does — and there is no doubt that failure teaches us what doesn’t work. When we fail, we have eliminated at least one of the possibilities. Failure actually can be very cleansing. It gives us the ability to start anew with a modified or entirely new direction or outlook that has a new opportunity (and probability) for success. The moment we jettison what happened, we have a fresh chance to succeed (or to fail). We can get moving once again and begin a new streak.
