#57: How should we be celebrating failure?

There might very well be a thousand motivational quotes about failure.

A large amount of them attributed to Albert Einstein 🙂

It’s a populist subject.

Probably because ‘fear of failure’ affects most people.

Evolution has wired us up that way.

And very often, right from the very first time we attempted something unsuccessfully …

Experience teaches us that failing can have emotional consequences that our fragile egos would rather we avoid in the future.

Success though – as every successful person knows – is born from failure.

Michael Jordan explicitly put his success down to failing:

“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. And that is why I succeed.”

Share that story with your people in a meeting and they’ll probably all high-five each other on the way out of the door …

And then continue avoiding failure by not taking the shots you want them to take!

If you want your people to take those shots, then you need to demonstrate that it’s okay to fail, by openly talking about failed attempts instead of just brushing them under the carpet.

Maybe you could turn failed attempts into a ‘weird’ KPI …

Require people to start meetings with an example of a failed attempt they’ve made rather than a ‘win’ …

Or even have a weekly ‘best failed attempt award’ with everyone required to submit an entry.

And if you really want to get people on board, you could try really hard to win the award yourself each week!