Why Is It So Hard? – Part 3
David Freund, Chief Leadership Officer

This is my third installment on the topic of “Why Is It So Hard?” To refresh your memory, I had a lot of time to think after I broke my shoulder in a skiing accident and underwent a complete reverse shoulder replacement. All the nights I spent lying awake because I couldn’t get comfortable had me, as comedic thought leader Michael Jr., would say, “thinking about what I was thinking about and how I was thinking about it.” One morning, I was listening to Darren Hardy’s daily Darren video, “Your Secret Weapon Against Life’s Challenges” and he posed the question, “What if hard was good?” Darren then gave us three tips for dealing with hard. We’ve already covered the first two, “Win What’s Next” and “Entrench Your Support”.

This week, I want to dig into the final tip: “Embrace Your Failure.” We often view failure as a negative. We see it as something that didn’t work out, or as a mistake, but in reality the only way to avoid failure is to stop trying new things. What if we reframed failure so it was actually your friend? What if I told you that failure can teach us more than success? Thomas Watson of IBM once stated, “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” Ryan Leak, author of “Chasing Failure”, shares in his book that chasing failure can take you further than chasing success ever could. So why do we hate failure so much? Why is there such a stigma around failing? I personally believe it’s because, for so long, most people just failed and then quit. So what’s the alternative? Leverage failure and turn it into incredible growth.

There’s no version of leadership that isn’t risky. As leaders, we’re dealing with people and uncertain situations, and there will always be failures, but we need to realize there’s an equal risk of not trying anything new and not engaging with people. In fact, leaders risk irrelevance when they don’t try new things. Since failure is unavoidable, here are a few tips for handling it better.

1. Fail early and cheaply – Become more comfortable trying things that you’ve never tried before. You’re going to fail, but failing early is usually less expensive. In manufacturing, we always look at a “plan, do, review, and improve” cycle. Using that same process for when we have an idea: launch it, observe how it works, learn from what isn’t working, improve, and relaunch.
2. Failure loses its punch in community – I love that statement. Don’t go it alone; bring others with you as you try new things. Getting everyone’s input will make your idea stronger and when you fail, you’re doing it with others and learning together.
3. Take notes on what’s not working – This may sound very simple and yet it’s so important. Taking notes on what’s not working is a simple reflection cycle of the following: 1) What went well? 2) What didn’t go well? 3)What did I learn? 4) What will I change? These notes can turn our failures into opportunities and set us up for a much more successful future.

It’s helpful for us to realize that the ideal isn’t coming. There is no perfect scenario, so failure will always be part of our life. If we make it our friend, and learn from it rather than be paralyzed by it, we’ll realize that the more we fail, the more we learn, and the more we learn, the better we get.