NEVER BE AFRAID TO FAIL!
Why is this the most difficult one to grasp, yet Ernst Gallo placed it as the most important?
Is it because our parents, managers, friends set into us an expectation of great success?
How many of us have been embarrassed by making a mistake, dropping a football, coloring outside the lines in grade school?
We were told to get it right! How could you be so stupid to do that? You need to tow the line and do it our way! Or this one, “I not paying you to think, I am paying you to do the job, so just get to work!”
The media always celebrates the winners, and chastises the losers or failures. Wall Street rewards the ones that can make the profit and loss statement look good, yet creates havoc with the ones that miss the target by a small percentage. We do not see or read about the amount of trial and error that makes the great successes, successful!
My good friend and mentor, Tom Dowdle told me to always do the inconvenient. If I had two choices at hand, and not able to make a decision as to which one to pick, he would tell me to pick the inconvenient one, because the rest of the world will pick the easiest one.
But Tom, I replied, if I pick the most inconvenient one, I might fail at the task. Tom’s reply was “That’s great”, but you will set yourself apart from the vast majority of people. Tom had the same philosophy as Ernst Gallo. Tom’s next comment was embrace that failure, learn from it, and do it again with the correction in place. No one else will do that.
Embrace the failure?
Most of us, once making a mistake, will run back to what is comfortable. The known commodity, the safe port in the storm. Yet, here are two highly successful people telling us to embrace failure. It seems that they are actually encouraging us to mess something up. Could that be true?
How do we teach our loved ones that failure is okay? How do we ackowledge that the only way to learn is to fail at times? The most important thing is to embrace the failure and make it right!
Could it be that we don’t want to see our loved ones fail, that it hurts us to see them hurt? Yet, could it also be true that the only way to truly succeed is to allow one’s self to fail?
Is that the message that Ernst and Tom want us to have?
Rest well, Tomorrow is going to be awesome!
Greg
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