“Failure is only postponed success as long as courage ‘coaches’ ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.” – Herbert Kaufman
When you ask about the path to success, most people think, that a person just got lucky. Most often they do not see the road that took a person from the starting point to where they are now. In truth, we do not like to see the way, because on the way to success you find all of our failed attempts. However, what separates the people we see as successful, is that they persisted, no matter how many failures and they got others to continue solving the problems and improving.
Teaching and motivating others to endure is one of the most significant questions in leadership, but we have to start with ourselves. We have to learn to deal with failure and taking a risk.
Dealing with Failure
If I ever want to predict, how far someone gets in life, I would put them on an outside sales job. Having to make cold calls to people is the ultimate way to see, how they deal with failure. The average for successful cold calls is around 2%. Thus if you call 100 people, only two will buy from you. For me, that is the ultimate test of dealing with failure. Just shrug it off and try the next one is tough and requires a lot of persistence. Doing it day by day and not wasting a lot of time on self-mental games is what separates the successful seller from the average.
Often when I talk to other people about running a business, I see them doing things, which doesn’t advance their business but has no risk of failure. When I started, I loved to do taxes. They can take a considerable amount of time, have a low rate of negative feedback, and people admire you for doing it when you talk about it because no one likes to do them. Thus instead of the horrible task of being told “NO” over and over again by potential leads, I could quietly crunch the numbers.
Consequently, persistently dealing with failure is one of the most significant skills to learn. Not giving up, but doing it again and again, admittedly while learning from the mistakes, is what in the end leads to success.
Not Accepting the Impossible
When Henry Ford had his V8 developed, the story goes, that whenever he asked the engineers to develop it, they said it is impossible. Nevertheless, he persisted in telling them to invent a cheap, reliable, and compact V8 engine. In the end, they managed to do it. The only reason they did it, was because Henry Ford did not accept that it was impossible to do so. His resolution of demanding a V8 engine infected others and made them come up with a solution.
That is considerably different, then from the reaction, so many of us show. It’s impossible at worst equals no need to try. At best, we attempt it once and then give up. We often do not even question, why it would be impossible. Experts say so, and we stay in line.
Of course, there is the big brother of impossible. “We always did it this way.” Or to say it differently, “Never touch a running system.” All of these tell us that it is so much easier to accept a mediocre result than to deal with the chance of failure persistently. Thus, once a certain number of procedures are in place, our companies stagnate, because we get stuck in our ways.
Take a Leap
Accepting that risk and failure are part of our life and learning to deal with it are the two aspects, that separate success from average. Pushing the bounds of yourself and others is what turns a business into a victory. The faster we start teaching that, the quicker we can see extraordinary growth.