A few days ago I heard a fascinating interview that Paul Finebaum did with sports writer Don Yeager. Yeager said that years ago when he started his career, his dad realized he would be in a position to interview a lot of great athletes, so he told Don that during every interview he should ask that athlete a question that he could learn from. Even if their answer didn’t make it into the interview. Over the years, Don explained that he made a habit of asking the athletes he talked to what made them great. Why did they think they were able to consistently win, when other athletes that may have had more talent, could not.
He said that the most common reason that the great athletes he interviewed gave for their high level of success was that they personalized failures. If their team lost, they didn’t blame the refs, they didn’t blame their teammates, they saw the failure as a result of THEIR actions. As a result, these athletes learned to hate losing more than they enjoyed winning. Other athletes that didn’t or couldn’t do this might have one game or season where they won big, but they usually couldn’t replicate this success. Because they didn’t expect to win, and they were happy and even content with their success.
There are many different ways to look at this mentality:
- It seems a bit depressing. Because the athletes and coaches really can’t enjoy their success, because they are always pushing themselves to win the next game, because they feel they can’t afford to stop and celebrate the current victory (and in many ways, they are probably right).
- If you have the right mindset, this approach can be incredibly liberating and empowering. If you knew and accepted that your success was due to your own actions, then that can be incredibly inspiring. There’s an age-old adage that great athletes always want the ball in their hands when the game is on the line. They want the responsibility to make the play that will win the game.
- On the other side, if you consistently fail, believing it’s completely your fault could have a detrimental effect. Perhaps this explains why athletes get in slumps?
In a business context, how does owning failure translate into future success? I think back to Dell Hell in 2005. At first, Dell seemed to ignore Jeff Jarvis, and even at the time had a stated policy that they don’t respond to bloggers. Over time, the company not only realized it made a mistake in how it handled Dell Hell, but seemed to use that episode as a catalyst to become far more progressive in using blogs and social media to connect with its customers. The very tools that it shunned at first. Owning their failure in the Dell Hell episode put Dell in a position to be the social media case study that they are today.
But on a personal level, do we always own our failures? Should we? I could see a downside to this, what if a manager puts more blame on her shoulders than she’s due? Perhaps out of a sense or loyalty to her team? For some, owning failure could spur them on to future success, but what if the failures became a weight that sapped their self-confidence and in a way became a self-fulfilling prophecy?
How do you handle your failures?
1. Own it.
2. Mourn it (briefly – working on that brevity part!)
3. Learn from it.
4. Move past it (working on that part too!)
Steve good steps! I think it becomes easier to own your failures if you know that you will learn from them what you need to know in order to succeed next time. Making that transition from failure to success is crucial I think, because if you aren’t converting the failures into successes, you just have a string of failures, and they can almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy. ‘Oh no, here we go again…’
Of course, I think if we can move from failure to success, that makes the ‘move past it’ part in Step 4 a lot easier, right? 😉
Only someone who is very optimistic can own the team’s failure because he has the confidence that he can do something about it. A weaker person wd see failure as evidence that he cannot succeed.
When the great coaches burn out, they are often heard to say that the losses ate them up and the wins were shrugged off. They burnt out. There’s no way this is healthy, whatever the pundits say.
Ideally, I’d like to take the wins as a gift and the losses as lessons, and only care about the work, not the result, We are, in the end, only in control of one thing – what we ourselves do. We cannot control the referees, the other team, the market, the client, or most of the business factors that are part of the recipes for success. I think that trying to is an invitation to madness.
At the same time, we have an obligation to give the best we have regardless of the circumstances. It is possible, I think, to give up the illusion of control over the result without chalking everything up to luck and using it as an excuse to give less than our best. It’s hard. There are few who manage it, I think, and to this point I can’t say I’m one of them. But I’d like to be.
Chris all good points and I agree, especially on burnout. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Paul Bryant and Joe Paterno died within weeks of when they stopped coaching.
But to put this on a personal level, how do we handle it when someone who’s a peer gets a promotion, for example? Do we say they don’t deserve it, or do we think about how we could learn from them in order to get a promotion ourselves?
Or to turn it back to the Social Media space, think back to when Chris Brogan said he was charging $22K a day for on-site training with companies. A lot of fellow consultants said that was BS, that there’s no way he deserved that. A few consultants talked about how they were going to use what they’d learned from how Chris offered his service to improve their own efforts.
I guess the point is, how do we view the world, and setbacks (or perceived ones)? I think it also goes back to Steve’s point about learning from setbacks vs letting them drag you down?
I believe one of life’s lesson is learning how to fail, fall or stumble and owning up to the cause or problem(s) you may have created. Evaluating and understanding what went wrong allows you to learn and grow as a person (inside and out). Putting blame on others will get you nowhere quick.
As someone who hit rock bottom, I had to own up to my own mistakes. Learning to take responsibility and not push the issue under the rug is a hard thing to swallow. Once you accept the responsibility, you can learn to be a better person. Those around you will notice and life will improve. You and only you have the power to change your path in life. So take responsibility of your actions and create a “learning” life.
Thanks Rebecca, good advice.