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It's Only Common Sense: 'Failure' is Exactly What You Need

It’s a shame to waste a good failure. Surprisingly enough, you can tell how great companies are by how many failures they experience. This is based on the idea that if you’re not failing, you’re not doing enough. In fact, you’re probably standing still and stagnating, which is the closest thing to death a company does—short of actually dying, that is.

Fact: If you do not grow, you will die. If you do not try, you will not grow…and you will die. That’s all there is to it.

Famous facts:

• Thomas Edison tried to find the right filament for his new invention, the light bulb, a thousand times before he discovered the right one. The first 999 times were not failures to him; they were lessons in what would not work.
• Wayne Gretzy never made a shot he did not take.
• Michael Jordan said, “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.” Yet he is considered the greatest basketball player of all time.
• Ted Williams was the greatest hitter of all time and the last man to bat over .400 in a season—a record that they say will never be broken. But the fact remains that he failed to get a hit almost 59% of the time he went to bat.
• I disagree with Apollo 13’s Gene Kranz who famously said, “Failure is not an option” (although in his case it was true.) Actually, failure is an option and a very important one at that.

Here are some other quotes on failure that might help illustrate my point:

"Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.” —John Wooden

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” —Thomas Edison

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” —Albert Einstein

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” —Winston Churchill

“A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.” —Alexandre Dumas

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” —Napoleon Hill

“You build on failure. You use it as a steppingstone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” —Johnny Cash

“It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.” —Zig Ziglar

When we fail, we learn what not to do. We learn what does not work and that gets us closer to what will work. An important distinction to remember is that “there is a difference between failing because you are trying something new and daring, and failing because you are not showing up, doing the work, or being responsible for your actions.”¹

As we have learned by now, often the road to success is filled with failure. Often, by failing to achieve our goal we achieve another more important one. Post-It notes were invented by someone who failed at making a strong adhesive for 3M. One of his failures was a very weak adhesive that he ended up using to make these things called Post-It notes. The guy at Proctor and Gamble who screwed up the formula for soap bars invented Ivory, the “the soap that floats,” and then mistakenly sent out shipment after shipment. Instead of getting complaints, the customers wrote in, demanding more of that soap that floats.

I am sure you are getting my message: To get anywhere in business and life, you must embrace failure. Take a chance on that new technology. You will not get it right away, but you will learn valuable lessons on the way to mastering it.

Try a new way of doing things. I guarantee that there will be some people who will not like it. Years ago, a company tried a new technique of putting more than one PCB part number on a panel and people (mostly their competitors) howled with laughter, coming up with the famous “50 reasons why it won’t work.” Even when it worked famously—a thousand-dollar panel of double-sided boards anyone?—people still clung to their “50 reasons why” and would not even try it for themselves.

Remember when everyone laughed at Jeff Bezos’ new company? What was it called again? Oh, yeah, Amazon. They shook their heads in disbelief at how he didn’t make any money, losing a fortune year after year before things turned around? Now that was a bucketful of failure right there, wasn’t it? Who’s laughing now?

If you want to succeed in anything, especially in anything important and earth-shaking, you must embrace failure with a full-armed bear hug. That’s a proven fact.

It’s only common sense.

References

1. The Mountain is You, by Brianna Wiest.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.