Failure Is Good for You

JK Rowling gave the commencement speech to the graduates of Harvard in 2008. Her subject was failure. When she was a little girl, her dream had been to write novels. Here are some of her thoughts and mine on failure. "I was jobless, a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless," Rowling told the crowd of newly-minted Harvard graduates. It was during this time that she was able to reach for her goal of writing fiction because, to her, she had nothing left to lose. "Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged." As we know JK Rowling’s success – nearly 400 million copies of her books have sold worldwide, and her fortune is estimated at $1.1 billion. Her early life and forays into fiction were far more modest. Her failures, in fact, ended up as the catalyst for her tremendous success. "The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive," she said in her speech. "You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity." Failure is not something we look forward to, is it? In fact, failure is something we go out of our way to avoid. And once there, we determine to never mention it. Looking around the world, attitudes towards failure differ. In Asia, it’s a shame to be hidden from family and friends; many European countries have created social-welfare systems that protect their citizens from the most dramatic economic catastrophes. Here is the U.S., it can be a good thing, but only if you turn your loss into an immediate success, such as losing on American Idol, but getting your 15 minutes of fame. Although we may not seek out failure, it isn’t something to be ashamed of, either. As J.K. Rowling went on to say in her speech, "Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way." Failure may feel dreadful, and may even be shocking, but it can actually be good for you. When else have you heard that message? Yet some of history’s most impressive successes started out as failures. Ludwig van Beethoven’s teacher told the young musician he was hopeless as a composer; then Beethoven went deaf, yet he still managed to compose some of the most beautiful music ever written. Abraham Lincoln suffered a nervous breakdown and lost several Congressional bids. Then he became a U.S. president and abolished slavery. Business woman Carly Fiorina disappointed her parents by dropping out of law school after one semester, but went on to be vice-president of AT&T and CEO of Hewlett-Packard. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, flunked sixth grade, suffered a string of catastrophic defeats against the Nazis and was booted out of office after WWII, yet is still considered his country’s greatest wartime leader. He summed up his philosophy thusly: "Success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." The stories of the world’s most successful failures suggest that what matters most is not whether you win or lose, but how you fail. That’s a lesson basketball star Michael Jordan took to heart. Jordan, often described as the greatest basketball player of all time, was cut from his high school team the first time he tried out. He went on to lead the Chicago Bulls to six National Basketball Association championships. In a commercial for Nike, famous for its failure-defying tagline "Just do it," Jordan says, "I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot, and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." Failure, viewed as a learning experience, as an opportunity for self-improvement, can build and strengthen new neural pathways in the brain. New synaptic connections are formed every time the brain learns something new. So failure isn’t only a great teacher, it’s a great brain-expander. Failure in business is, in fact, more common than success. Capitalism, like evolution, is all about survival of the fittest. What’s different about the survivors is how they apply the knowledge gained from failure. To take a lesson from automaker Henry Ford, who went bankrupt multiple times before getting Ford Motor Company off the ground: "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently." The opposite of success is not failure, but mediocrity. British satirist Max Beerbohm once quipped, "Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best." Michael Raynor, a professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business in London, Canada, wondered why. To achieve big successes, you need to take big risks; if you take little or no risks, mediocrity is guaranteed. The key is to have a number of higher-risk strategies up your sleeve in case one or more of them doesn’t pan out. "It’s an indictment of what we’ve come to think of as the prerequisites of success," he says. "Failure can be beneficial, but you have to learn the right lessons from it." In other words, you can’t be a game-changer in the business world unless you try something risky, which might well result in failure. Sooner or later, failure is pretty much inevitable. In fact, a life devoid of failure is in many ways not a full life. As J.K. Rowling told this year’s Harvard graduating class, "It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default." So if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again—and learn the lesson. "So given a time-turner, I would tell my 21 year old self that personal happiness is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life. Though you will meet many people of my age or older who confuse the two. Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone’s total control. And the humility to know that, will enable you to survive its vicissitudes." J.K. Rowling You can conquer your fears. I can assist you to find your way and move on. If you are ready to take a risk and tackle failure in your life and tease out the lessons to be learned, call me. "What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality."* Coaching will allow you to think positively. Stop you from prolonging negative activities like bitterness and blame shifting and release your full potential. Don’t wait, contact me now. A dream with a plan is a goal. A goal without a plan is just a dream. Warmly, Elisabeth Elisabeth Adler-Lund Executive And Life Coaching Telephone: 916 • 803•1494 E-mail: eal@EALCoaching.com * Plutarch - famous dead white guy