FSS Spotlight: Learn How to Take Failure In Stride

By Harvey Mackay

Jack Welch, legendary former CEO of General Electric, discovered early in life that you need to learn how to fail in order to learn how to succeed. While he was playing high school hockey against his school's arch-rival, his team lost a heartbreaker in sudden-death overtime. In a fit of frustration, Welch threw his hockey stick across the ice and headed back to the locker room. While the team was changing clothes, the door flew open and in came his Irish mother. She walked straight to Welch and grabbed him
by the uniform.

"You punk!" she shouted in his face. "If you don't know how to lose, you'll never know how to win. If you don't know this, you shouldn't be playing." Welch, in his book, "Jack: Straight from the Gut," said this was a lesson that taught him the value of competition and how to learn from failure.

I remember hearing a story about Bjorn Borg and his parents when the tennis superstar was also in high school. He got upset during a match and threw his tennis racket. His parents took his racket away and said no tennis for six months. As a professional, there wasn't a more unflappable player.

In life you have to learn from your failures. I've always said that to triple your success rate, you might also have to triple your failure rate.

America has numerous examples of people and companies who have failed many
times before becoming successful: 

• Walt Disney was once told by a prospective employer to try another line of work. He said Disney didn't have any creative, original ideas.
• In 1962, a recording company executive turned down the Beatles because "we
  don't like your sound. Groups of guitars are on their way out." 
• R.H. Macy failed seven times before his store in New York caught on.
• President Abraham Lincoln was defeated in seven elections and failed in
  business twice.
• Singer-dancer-choreographer Debbie Allen was turned down by a dance school.
• Bob Dylan was booed off the stage by his classmates at a high school talent
  show.
• Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and Fred Astaire failed screen tests.
• Brooks Robinson, called the greatest third baseman of all time, was sent
  back to the minors after a disappointing first year in the major leagues.
• Ted Koppel, the host of the hugely successful "Nightline," spent years
  trying to get a job as a television news correspondent without any luck.

Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad in their book "Competing for the Future" describe an experiment they conducted with monkeys. Four monkeys were put into a room. In the center of the room was a tall pole with a bunch of bananas suspended from the top. One hungry monkey eagerly began scampering up the pole toward the bananas. Just as he reached out to grasp a banana, researchers hit him with a torrent of cold water from an overhead shower. With a squeal, the monkey abandoned its quest and retreated down the pole.

Each monkey attempted to get to the bananas. Each one received an equally chilly shower, and each one gave up without getting their fingers on a single banana. After repeated efforts and drenchings, the monkeys finally gave up on getting the bananas.

Then one of the original four monkeys was removed from the room, and a new monkey added. No sooner had this new, innocent monkey started climbing the pole than the others reached up and yanked the surprised primate back down the pole. After a few attempts, without getting close enough to the bananas to get a cold shower, the new monkey stopped trying to get to the bananas.

One by one, each of the original monkeys was replaced. The other monkeys taught each new monkey the same lesson: Don't climb the pole. None of the new monkeys ever got a shower; none understood why pole climbing was a bad idea, but they all respected the well-established precedent. Even after the shower was removed, no monkeys ventured up the pole. Just make sure you never give up and quit striving for your goal like these monkeys, or you'll end up hungry.

Mackay's Moral: Success has no rules, but you can learn a lot from failure.