“Freely chosen, discipline is absolute freedom.” Ron Serino
As we end the, i must admit audacious and almost “who do you think you are?”, success series with the constant feeling of an impostor through the month of January, it is a great time to reflect on some of the concepts and bring to an end this series.
We started in early January with the idea to define success and through George Moriarty’s poem and John Wooden we can agree that true success requires that you give your all everyday to a given pursuit and only you would know if you have given all of you or not to the given activities and opportunities. We then with the help of Anders Ericsson discovered that a wide range of areas have to come together over a long time for anyone to be considered a master performer in any given craft. Deliberate practice with a master coach and developing mental representations you can draw on in the complexity of performance were two central themes. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly then introduced us to flow and its components for a happy life. Clear goals, constant and immediate feedback, balancing the challenges and skills of each individual or team, led to deep concentration, a immersed focus where everyday worries disappear, a sense of control and autonomy, the loss of self-consciousness and finally a transformation of time are the results of flow. This allows you to flow from moment to moment fully absorbed in any given daily activity.
Furthermore, we discussed failure and its benefits once perceived positively, by facing it head on, using it as growth and an internal as well as personal development tool constantly and iteratively making minor adjustments to any daily routine towards success. We also through Jim Collins’s book Good to Great discussed the hedgehog concept of being deeply focused and disciplined to an almost narrow and clear path. Answering the following questions:
What can you be the best in the world at? What are you deeply passionate about? and What is your one performance or economic driver?
Our last post revolved around the first journey to the South Pole by two adventurers who embarked on the challenging journey simultaneously in 1911. where Roald Amundsen and his team succeeded by overcoming all the challenges and Robert Scott fatefully failing, losing his and all his crew members lives to the treacherous conditions. Our hope for you on your journey is, to like Amundsen, get great returns on the inevitable good and bad luck events by deeply and almost obsessively preparing for the inevitable challenges ahead and knowing that every activity, every meeting, every relationship that you embark on over time will speak for you in the big moment or event. My wish to all who have read these posts over the past month and a bit, despite the inevitable uncertainty, challenges and chaos ahead, are to experience true and meaningful success in their everyday lives by adopting and practicing one of the concepts to their benefit, discussed in all our previous posts. Please do share true feedback, it would be appreciated and help us into the future. Bless you all!
“Victory awaits him who has everything in order- luck people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.” Ronald Amundsen
In October of 1911, two teams of adventurers made final preparations to be the first to reach the South Pole. The first team was led by 39 year old Ronald Amundsen, who won, and the second team led by 43 year old Robert Falcon Scott, fatefully lost.
The second team experienced devastating defeat, reaching the South Pole finding their rivals flowing Norwegian flags, who had made it 34 days before they did. This was then followed by a race for their lives which they lost as the winter overcame them. All five members died, staggering from exhaustion and freezing to death while writing their final journal entries and notes to their loved ones at home.
Amundsen on the other hand led the first successful journey to the South Pole through the Northwest passage, Amundsen and Scott started their journey’s within days of each other with both facing a round trip more than 1400 miles in an uncertain and unforgiving environment 20 degrees below zero in summer with gale force winds, also keeping in mind this is 1911 with no modern technology or communication, no radios, no satellite signals and definitely no cellphones, making rescue at the South Pole close to impossible. One leader led a team to victory and safety, the other to defeat and death. What separated these two men? Why did one experience such spectacular success in such an extreme set of conditions, while the other failed to survive?
In his late twenties, Amundsen traveled from Norway to Spain for a two-month sailing trip to earn a master’s certificate. It was 1899 and he had a two-thousand mile journey ahead of him. How did he make the journey? He bicycled all the way. He then experimented with eating raw dolphin meat to determine its usefulness as an energy supply. He reasoned, that someday he might be shipwrecked, finding himself surrounded by dolphins, so he might know if he can eat one. Crazy i know.
These were the years Amundsen built a foundation for his never been done before South Pole quest, training his body and learning what practically works. He even made a pilgrimage to apprentice with Eskimos. What better way to learn what worked in polar conditions than by spending time with a people who spent hundreds of years of accumulated experience in ice, cold, snow and wind. He learnt the Eskimos use of dogs to pull sleds and that they never hurried, moving slowly and steadily to avoid excessive sweat which would transform to ice in sub-zero temperatures. He also adopted the Eskimos loose fitting clothes to evaporate sweat and keep him protected. He systematically practiced the Eskimo methods and trained for every conceivable situation he might encounter en-route to the South Pole.
Amundsen’s philosophy was that you do not wait until you’re in an unexpected storm to discover that you need more strength and endurance, or you do not wait for a shipwreck to determine if you can eat raw dolphin. Don’t wait until you’re on an Antarctic journey to become a superb skier and dog handler. Prepare with intensity all the time, so when conditions turn against you, you can draw from a deep reservoir of strength and equally when conditions turn in your favour, you strike hard.
Robert Falcon Scott in complete contrast to Amundsen, leading up to the race for the South Pole could have trained like a maniac on cross-country ski’s and take a thousand mile bike ride or lived with Eskimo’s but he did not. He could’ve practiced more with dogs and known how to chose the correct dogs but he did not. He chose ponies which did not match the polar conditions and “motor sledges” which cracked in the first few days on his teams quest and the ponies, they failed early. The team then slogged through most of the journey “man hauling” by harnessing themselves to the sleds, trudging across the snow, pulling the sleds behind them.
Amundsen stored three tons of supplies for 5 men, where Scott stored one ton for 17 men. One detail that clearly displays the contrast between Amundsen and Scott is that Scott brought one thermometer, an altitude measurement device and when it broke, he exploded in a rage, lamenting his bad luck. On the other hand, Amundsen brought four such thermometers to cover for accidents.
Amundsen did not know what would lie ahead of him and his team, the tough terrain, altitude, mountain peaks, barriers and unfortunate events. He did however, systematically design his entire journey to reduce the role of big forces and chance events by vigorously embracing the possibility of those big events and chance events happening. He presumed that the bad events would occur and prepared for it even developing contingency plans for the team to continue without him should he die.
Scott in complete contrast was unprepared and complained in his journal of bad luck. “Our luck in weather is preposterous”… “It is more than our share of ill fortune”… “How great may be the element of luck.”
On the 15th of December 1911, Amundsen reached the South Pole in bright and sparkling sunshine and temperatures 10 degrees below zero. They then planted the Norwegian flag and dedicated it all to the Norwegian king. After all this, they went straight back to work, erecting a tent and attaching a letter to the Norwegian king describing their success. He even addressed the envelope to Captain Scott as an insurance policy in case they met a fatal bad event. He presumed Scott would reach the Pole next.
More than a month later, at 18:30 on 17 January 1912, Scott found himself staring at the Norwegian flag at the South Pole. In his diary he wrote, ” We have had a horrible day” … ” add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature of -22 degrees”….. “Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”
Amundsen and his team reached their home base on January 25th, the precise day he marked in his plan. Running out of supplies, Scott stalled mid-March, depressed and out of energy. Eight months later, a British reconnaissance party found frozen bodies of Scott and two of his companions in a Snow filled tent, just 10 miles short of his supply depot.
Amundsen displayed great, almost fanatical discipline in the years prior to his journey, whereas Scott did not. Amundsen also was productively paranoid planning every eventuality or confronting brutal facts that somethings might go wrong by planning for events way beyond the necessary, it is reported that he still had supplies for 100 more miles, Scott underprepared and missed his markers, timing and ran out of resource. Finally, prior to the journey to the South Pole, Amundsen ran experiments to know what worked and what didn’t, displaying creativity based on his own observation and through practical experience by living with Eskimo’s and learning that dogs are of great support to pull sleds, whereas Scott did not and made errors using ponies that did not suite the conditions and untested “motor sleds” that broke within the first few days. On a journey into the unknown where uncertainty, luck and chaos are a part of the journey, much like life today, having fanatical discipline in preparation on the journey, productive paranoia in anticipating the worst possible outcomes and finally displaying empirical creativity through self experiments to know, through personal practical experience, what works and what won’t.
Reference:
Collins, J & Hansen, M.T, 2011. Great by Choice. Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck- why some thrive despite them all. Random House Business Books, 13-17.
We all practice activities daily, whether willingly or unwillingly. In the last post we touched on purposeful practice, where the individual pushes themselves hard to improve and we realised this had its limitations. This post will be about Anders Ericsson’s theory of deliberate practice in his book Peak: The new science of expertise. Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and improves performance over time.
The 7 principles of deliberate practice are as follows according to Anders Erricson:
Develops skills that have already figured out how the skills are done and for which effective training techniques have been established. The practice routine must be created and overseen by a coach, teacher or mentor familiar with expert performance and how it is best developed.
Deliberate practice takes place outside an individuals comfort zone where the performer constantly tries things beyond their current ability. This demands near maximum effort and is rarely enjoyable.
It involves clearly defined, specific goals and often focuses on improving some aspect of the target performance. It is not directed at some vague overall improvement. Once the big goal is set, the coach, teacher or mentor designs and develops a plan making a series of small changes adding too the large change. Improving aspects of a large performance allows the performer to see improvement with the training.
Further, as its name suggests it is deliberate, meaning, it requires full attention and conscious actions.
It involves feedback. The coach first provides the feedback, monitoring progress, pointing out problems and offering ways to address problems, alternatively with time and experience the performer monitors themselves, spots mistakes and makes adjustments. This requires effective mental representations.
Deliberate practice produces and relies on effective mental representations. Improved performance and improving mental performance go hand in hand, when mental representations are more detailed and effective, improvement is made possible even more. Mental representations allow for self monitoring in practice and performance to asses how one is doing.
Finally, it always builds on or modifies previously acquired skills, focusing on specific aspects of those skills and improving it specifically. This step-by-step improvement over a long time leads too expert performance.
Applying deliberate practice we would need to clearly identify expert performers by figuring out what they do that makes them so good and then developing training techniques that allow you to do what they do. It is important to find an expert coach, teacher or mentor who knows what it will take to build on and improve your perfromance.
Critically, being aware that determining expertise would need objectivity and is easier in fields with direct competition, clear rules and measures like score and time. Subjective judgements are vulnerable to our bias and expertise has often incorrectly been assigned to people with experience, seniority, friendliness, attractiveness, race, sex and a lot more biases we aren’t aware of. It is important to think carefully about what objectively characterises expert performance.
Then it is important to figure what separates experts and why. Why does the one teacher always improves his or her students performance? Why does the one salesperson consistently exceed targets? It is important to consider these performers mental representations by how they approach their tasks and why, as well as, what sets their cumulative training over a time, apart.
It is important also to inject feedback in a program. Effective feedback is like a good math teacher looking at more than the students final answer but how the student got to the answer as a way of understanding the students mental representations.
If you can’t find an expert coach due to geography or that their work is to expensive, read, research and apply by finding what works and then leaving what doesn’t. It is critical to always look at yourself as the performer or the performers you are working with from the head down to the feet and not from the feet up. Know what to do, how to do it and determine as well as develop effective and rich mental associations or representations.
Reference:
Ericsson, A & Pool, R. 2016. Peak: A new science of expertise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Why are some people so amazingly good at what they do? Competitive sports, musical performance, science, medicine and business. There are a few exceptional sorts who dazzle society and we all tend to assume simply that they are born with something extra. We oversimplify their genius by saying they are “Gifted” or “you either have it or you don’t!” I seldom buy this idea that these people have luckily won the genetic lottery.
In Anders Ericsson’s book, Peak, secrets from the new science of expertise, he highlights an interview between Ray Allen, a 10 time NBA all star and considered the greatest 3 point shooter in history and and interviewer who alluded to his innate talent, Ray was quoted as saying the following in a deep American accent, ” I’ve argued with a lot of people in my life. When people say God has blessed me with a beautiful jump shot, it really pisses me off. I tell those people, don’t underestimate the work i have put in everyday. Not some days. Ask anyone of my teammates from Seattle to Milwaukee, who shoots the most? The answer is me.” Furthermore, they then interviewed his high school coach and it was identified that his jump shot was not noticeably better than his high school team mates, in fact it was poor. This shows that Ray Allen took control and over time with hard work and dedication transformed his jump shot into a graceful and natural skill that people assumed he was born with.
The myth that people are born with extra is not based in fact. These people of expertise know what is required to develop the extraordinary skill they have because they have experienced it first hand. There is, however, one gift we all are born with…
The brain and bodies adaptability to create, through the right training and practice over a long time, abilities not otherwise possessed. The brain and body are extremely adaptable. Potential is an expandable vessel and is not fixed, it is shaped by the things we do in our lives. We as society tend to overestimate innate talent and underestimate opportunity, motivation and effort.
The great question is how do we take advantage of this adaptable gift? People can improve and improve a lot with practice.
The principles of purposeful practice have in them:
Well defined and specific goals. Putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer term goal.
Is focused by knowing where you are in your growth and what the next step is.
Works outside one’s comfort zone. It is hard and very rarely fun.
The opposite of purposeful practice is naive practice where we just practice for the sake of it. ” I just swung the bat and tried to hit the ball,” “I don’t know, i just played it,” are naive practice statements. However, there are limitations to purposeful practice when we reach plateaus or blocks in our improvement, leading to an “acceptable” level of performance and no need to improve. Another limitation of purposeful practice is that improvement varies across individuals. Just working hard and pushing yourself outside your comfort zone is not enough. Repetition on its own does improves performance to a limit. To get to the next level will require the mind and it’s processes. . There is another level beyond purposeful practice.
Harnessing our human adaptability will require mental structures or maps and the difficult part of this part is that you can’t directly observe your mental progress or development. You don’t develop abs on your forehead or you don’t have to buy bigger hats for the growth of your head. Mental representations developed by deliberate practice needed for performers who have reached a plateau or acceptable level of performance and are on a journey toward expertise. An example of a mental representation is, mention Table Mountain and many people will immediately see the mountain in their minds; that image is our mental representation of Table Mountain. Some representations are more detailed and accurate than others and improve the more time you spend at Table Mountain.
Developing mental representations through deliberate practice would require a master coach in the specific field to design solitary individual practice activities to overcome specific levels, challenges or steps closely associated to the real context in which the relative skills will be used. It is important to answer the question, what do we want the potential expert to be able to do? what skills do we want them to have? and then design step by step challenges for them to overcome to develop the quality and quantity of mental representations needed for expertise. The human brain and body responds to challenges by developing new abilities developed through deliberate practice.
These mental representations are preexisting patterns of information – facts, images, rules, relationships etc. held in the long term memory that can be used to quickly and effectively respond to certain situations. Without mental representation we couldn’t walk, we couldn’t talk, we couldn’t live any life, we all have it, what sets experts apart is the quantity and quality of their mental representations. With decades of practice they develop highly complex and sophisticated representations of various situations they encounter in their field. This allows for faster and more accurate decision making and to quickly and efficiently respond to a given situation.
The thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialised mental representations, making possible incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving and other advanced abilities. These people journal, train for a very long time, gain constant feedback, have a master coach or mentor and consistently overcome challenges with the quality and sophistication of their mental maps developed through deliberate practice.
Reference:
Ericsson, K. Anders & Pool, R. Peak: secrets of the new science of expertise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
Have you ever been so immersed in a task that you lose track of time, forget everyday worries, nothing else matters and the experience is so enjoyable you do it for the sheer sake of doing it? Have you ever had so much fun or ever been so deeply immersed into a conversation that you lose total track of time and hours felt like minutes. Sports, video-games, dancing and a group of friends provide opportunities for flow, however flow conditions can be designed for the inevitable drudgery, mundane, boring and stressful tasks of life, provided you create the conditions for it. Flow can be experienced at work, in leisure, in relationships and in everyday mundane tasks like washing or driving in traffic to work when your consciousness is harmoniously ordered.
The opposite of flow, which is a common experience emerging for so many individuals and groups, are split attention across many activities with feelings of stress, depression, self-consciousness, worrying about how you are doing and how others are judging you.
In Mihaly Tsikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow Living at the peak of your abilities, he describes the 8 components for flow and happiness:
Developing clear goals with major goals and sub-goals. An example can include running a 5km below 25 minutes with one of the sub goals being, running every kilometre below 5 minutes per km.
Secondly, instant feedback to show that you are getting closer to the goal. The feedback has to be related to the goal. In a conversation the other persons response is feedback, for example.
Maintaining a balance between skills and challenges with a feeling that what you do matches your ability. If the activity is to easy it produces boredom or on the other hand if it is to hard produces frustration. The designed or chosen activity must meet the challenge and skill balance and has to be positioned between boredom and frustration where there is a feeling that the task is attainable but challenging at the same time.
The first 3 components are design elements and can be put into any daily activity. The following components are outcomes of the flow experience.
A deep concentration is experienced with a single beam of concentrated energy and you achieve more because of this. You feel a sense of ease and harmony. A further outcome is deep focus, where you feel the normal worries and problems of everyday life fading away as you disappear into your work or activity. The normal everyday frustrations are removed from your attention and you feel a sense of great relief as you operate fully in the present moment.
There is also a feeling of control over your actions and the experience. You sense that the outcome or goal is attainable and possible and you are at the edge of possibility.
Another benefit of flow is a loss of self-consciousness. Thinking and worrying about yourself consumes a lot of psychic energy. In flow there is no room for relentless self-monitoring, you are so involved, committed and concentrated that you forget yourself and become a part of all that surrounds you. You move beyond the boundaries of your self concept.
The final experience in a flow state is the transformation of time. Time adapts itself to your individual experience, a minute can feel like an hour or conversely hours can feel like minutes. You do not notice time passing. Some of us have experienced it while having fun, the time literally does fly by or are in a conversation where you have lost track of time it has been so absorbing and attention grabbing. On the other hand, some people report a near death experience as everything slowing down where a minute feels like an hour and every experience is crystal clear and has our full attention.
Some people get into flow frequently without noticing it, while others get into the flow state on rare occasions. Flow can be incorporated into your everyday life, if all or some of the components are met. True joy, fun and happiness will be the experience and with the experiences mentioned above you grow into complexity growing from one experience to the next as the challenges grow with your skills always seeking balance. To be at your very best will require full immersion in the present moment.
Isaiah Berlin, in his essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes using the following ancient Greek parable:
“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. The fox is cunning and able to develop a myriad of complex strategies for sneak attacks on the hedgehog. Day in and day out, the fox circles around the hedgehog’s den, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. Fast, sleek, beautiful, fleet of foot and crafty- the fox looks like the sure winner. The Hedgehog on the other hand is a dowdier creature, looking like a genetic mix-up between a porcupine and a small armadillo. He waddles along, going about his simple day, searching for lunch and taking care of his home.
The fox waits in cunning silence at the juncture in the trail. The hedgehog minding his own business, wanders right into the path of the fox. “Aha, i’ve got you now!” thinks the fox, leaping out, bounding across the ground, lightning fast. The little hedgehog sensing danger, looks up and thinks, “Here we go again. Will he ever learn?” Rolling up into a perfect ball, the hedgehog becomes a sphere of sharp spikes, pointing outward in all directions. The fox, bounding towards his prey, sees the hedgehogs defence and calls off the attack. Retreating back to the forest, the fox begins to calculate a new line of attack. Each day, a version of this battle between the hedgehog and the fox takes place, and despite the greater cunning fox, the hedgehog always wins.”
Dividing performers or people into 2 basic groups, foxes and hedgehogs, Berlin deduced that foxes pursue many ends at the same time and see the world in all its complexity. They are “scattered or diffused moving on many levels” Berlin says, never integrating their thinking into one overall concept.
Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organising idea, a basic principle or concept that unifies and guides everything. It doesn’t matter how complex the world, a hedgehog reduces all challenges and dilemmas to simple- almost overly simplistic. For a hedgehog, anything that does not somehow relate to the hedgehog idea holds no relevance.
Hedgehogs aren’t stupid, they understand the essence of profound insight is simplicity.
To have a simple and clear living or performance concept from deep understanding, the following three circles of enquiry or discovery will have to intersect or come together:
What can you be the best in the world at? Also, importantly and clearly deciding, what you can not be the best in the word at. This is beyond core competence.
What drives your performance or economic engine? The greats have a piercing insight into how to generate sustained and robust performance. They discover a single denominator – profit per customer, goal per entry into box for and against, tries per 23 entry for and against and resources per learner in education for example.
What are you deeply passionate about? Discover what makes you passionate and do that. This will sustain you.
What can we be the best in the world at and having a deep understanding of this with piercing insight and egoless clarity. What is the single performance or economic or social denominator, to understand the key driver of our sustainable and robust performance and finally, discovering what you are passionate about, will help in driving your choice of activities, your resource and time allocation and what programs you decide to adopt toward your overarching vision. It is very important to state that answering the three interlinked questions are not a question of want or bravado but based on deep understanding and empirical evidence that will guide your decisions.
Furthermore, great performances happen when a group of people come together and define their hedgehog as group and then define each individual in that teams own personal hedgehog and create roles, responsibilities and pursuits aligned with their own passions, potential and performance or economic driver.
Choosing that job or position of responsibility? Taking that part in a play? Singing that song or taking up that role in a sports team? Or even starting that company or starting the team off for the year? With deep understanding? What can you be the best in the world at? What is your one economic and performance driver or denominator? What are you deeply passionate about? Now chose, focus and grow.
Reference:
Jim Collins, Good to Great. Why some companies make the leap and others don’t. (London: Random House Business books, 2001), 90-112.
“If there are no mistakes…. it’s a mistake!” Miles Davis
Now i know in a success series, talking about failure is strange and seems paradoxical. That is because we all have had it drummed into our heads for a very long time that failure is bad. “You didn’t study or prepare”, “we were slack or dumb” and essentially be ashamed and creates a visceral reaction because it hurts. With this embarrassment and stigmatisation of failure a problem arises… avoiding, ignoring, rejecting and resisting failure manifested in a multitude of behaviours. We as adults also tend to vilify and find fault within failure for us to scapegoat the perceived “failure.”
With the societal norm of avoiding shame and embarrassment we essentially miss opportunities to grow and then gain no originality, only duplicating what has been done before. Hence in the 21st century we have learning institutions designed for the 18th century that have not changed much. The fear-based-failure-averse cultures are safe, stuck in the past, risk averse and produce derivative work. My hope today will be to try to frame and define some benefits of failure, mistakes, problem identification and to talk about potential tools to benefit from the inevitable failures, mistakes or identified problems.
“Mistakes are a necessary evil … in-fact they aren’t evil at all.”
Andrew Stanton who while working for Pixar at the time repeated phrases like “fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.” He first recognised that learning is important to an organisations success and growth and likened failure to learning to ride a bike; it isn’ conceivable that we learn to ride without making mistakes-without falling over a few times. You also wouldn’t say to somebody who is first learning to play the guitar. “You better think really hard about where you put your fingers on the guitar neck before you strum, because you only get to strum once, and thats it.”
Firstly, it is important that when attempting something new or wanting to be a peak performer or successful it is important to accept that there will be mistakes, failure, problems and obstacles and it will be hard to succeed in anything worthwhile or life affirming. A simple and powerful tool leaders, coaches and teachers can use, for their people in their charge to be engaged, excited, decisive and to attempt phenomenal work, is to simply talk about their own mistakes, problems, obstacles and failures openly.
Secondly, it is good to know that, while on a success journey, failure leads you closer to finding better options and that you are an inch closer to greater and deeper understanding and insight. On this iterative trial and error process, there is an internal growth being developed where your true primal instincts are being honed and solidified.
Furthermore, there are two parts to failure- the event itself and all its attendant disappointments, confusion and shame mentioned earlier (which i give myself a time constraint to feel, usually 24 hours only). The second part to failure is our reaction to it. Are we introspective or do we bury our heads in the sand by blaming someone else, making excuses and essentially cut off further engagement for learning and growth. Another reaction can be to view it as an opportunity to grow and look inward taking full responsibility and ownership for every action and detail by analysing personal assumptions.
A big barrier is fear, and while failure comes with the territory, fear shouldn’t have to. The aim is to uncouple fear and failure by creating an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into peoples hearts. Develop strong people who contribute. The antidote to fear is trust and this is built by mangers, parents, teachers and leaders responding well to failure by solving the problem together. Create organisation mentors and mentees who meet regularly and develop deep connections and a place to share fears and challenges.
In conclusion, it is clear that if you are on the pursuit to success or peak performance, failure will happen. Failure will cut off the inessential, it will introduce you to yourself, it will hurt and you will grow. Know that when you face it head on the pain will turn to progress. Failure will present you with new and unique information. Failure is a part of success.
” I started my business in February 2002 and it was incredibly exciting. I was full of “piss and vinegar,” as my grandfather would say. From an early age my goal was to start my own business. It was the American Dream, and i was living it. My whole feeling of self worth came from the fact that i did it, i took the plunge, and it felt amazing. If anyone ever ask me what i did, i would pose like George Reeves from the old Superman TV series. I would put my hands on my hips, stick out my chest, stand at an angle and with my head raised high i’d declare, “I am an entrepreneur.” What i did was how i defined myself, and it felt good. I wasn’t like Superman, I was Superman.
Over 90% of all new businesses fail in the first three years. For anyone with even a bit of competitive spirit in them, these overwhelming odds of failure are not intimidating, they only add fuel to the fire. The foolishness of thinking that you’re a part of the small minority of those who will actually make it past three years and defy the odds is part of what makes entrepreneurs who they are, driven by passion and completely irrational.
After year one, we celebrated. We hadn’t gone out of business. We were beating the odds. We were living the dream. Two years passed. Then three years. I’m still not sure how we did it- we never properly implemented any good systems and processes. But to heck with it, we’d beaten the odds. I had my goal and that’s all that mattered. I was now a proud member of a very small group of people who could say, with statistical proof, that i was an American small business owner.
The fourth year proved to be very different. The novelty of being an entrepreneur had worn off. I no longer stood like George Reeves. When asked what i did, i would now tell people that i did “positioning and strategy consulting.” It was much less exciting and it certainly didn’t feel like a big race anymore. It was no longer a passionate pursuit, it was just a business. And the reality was that the business didn’t look that rosy.
We were never a runaway success. We made a living, but not much more. We had some FORTUNE 500 clients and we did good work. I was crystal clear on what we did. And i could tell you how we were different- how we did it. Like everyone else in the game, i would try to convince prospective clients how we did it, how we were better, how our way was unique…. and it was hard work.
The truth is we beat the odds because of my energy, not because of my business acumen, but i didn’t have the energy to sustain that strategy for the rest of my life. I was aware enough to know that we needed better systems and processes if the business was to sustain itself.
I was incredibly demoralised. Intellectually, i could tell you what i needed to do, i just couldn’t do it. By September 2005 i was the closest i’ve ever been to, if i wasn’t already, completely depressed. My whole life I’d been a pretty happy-go-lucky guy, so just being unhappy was bad enough. But this was worse.
The depression made me paranoid. I was convinced i was going to go out of business. I was convinced i was going to be evicted from my apartment. I was certain that who worked with me didn’t like me and that my clients knew that i was a fraud. I thought everyone i met was smarter than me. Any energy i had left to sustain the business now went into propping myself up and pretending that i was doing well.
If things were to change, i knew i needed to learn to implement more structure before everything crashed. I attended conferences, read books and asked successful friends for advice on how to do it. It was all good advice, but i couldn’t hear it. No matter what i was told, all i could hear was that i was doing everything wrong. Trying to fix the problem didn’t make me feel better, it made me feel worse. I felt more helpless. I started having desperate thoughts, thoughts that for an entrepreneur are almost worse than suicide: i thought about getting a job. Anything. Anything that would stop the feeling of falling i had almost every day.
I remember visiting the family of my future brother-in-law for Thanksgiving that year. I sat on the couch in the living room of his mother’s house, people were talking to me, but i never heard a word. I was asked questions, i replied only in platitudes. I didn’t really desire or even have the ability to make conversation anymore.
It was then that i realised the truth. Statistics notwithstanding, I was a failure.” Start with Why. Simon Sinek. p215-217
“Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” John Wooden
As we continue on our success series it can be ascertained that true success is only a result of consistent work over a long period of time that extends to a community of people. We can also confirm that true mastery of a craft comes about after having given your all to every moment, activity and chosen action over an undefined period of time. In every chosen action, have we focused and paid full attention to every action?
Everyone and everything matters! Every word, every meeting, every step, every run, every job, every quote, every receipt, every pass, every ball, every interaction, every relationship, every pass, every shot, every plan, every hour scheduled, every win, every loss and every choice every day matters and is the most important thing in our lives. The present moment!
The discipline to be fully present, focused and aware at every second at every minute to a tipping point is what will bring about meaningful success and performance.
With infinite and inspirational goals or life aspirations and 10 to 20 years of consistent passionate work as well as executing daily, micro targets can potentially lead to outcomes that can transcend to meaningful success and performance.
The following posts will focus on what it takes to be successful as we have now clearly defined what success is. PS. Rest in eternal peace Fabian Gregory.
“Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as a by product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.” Viktor E. Frankl
Society highlights the end outcome of success, the trophy celebration, the position on the log, the time, the score, the test result, money in the bank, the big business and the early morning celebrations post a winning result. Apart from being fleeting and short lived and an experience leaving you with no answer to the question of… what’s next or what now? and creating ubiquitous aspiration, it cuts out 95% of the true story, the failure along the way, how hard it really is, how long it takes, the hours, the doubts, the consistent feeling of wanting to give up and the hard often uninspiring days you had to get deep work done, the loss of family time and close connectedness to close ones and the “groundhog day” nature of constant repetition to mastery of the relevant pursuit.
If society knew what “it” takes to be truly successful it would in my narrow and humble opinion serve society best, knowing what “it” takes and overcoming multiple challenges, even if in only one venture in your youth, would be the greatest education any teenager or young adult would receive as it can be repeatable in many different spheres. I can also argue that future generations, with constant change and uncertainty, will have to do something great or have mastered some activity, to flourish in a world we all can’t plan for and deeply know what “it” takes.
Skills drive the proverbial bus, knowledge and information come along for the ride. To grow productivity and performance globally we have to grow skills and not fact retention. That information comes along for the ride as we develop skill deliberately and iteratively on an infinite and ever changing journey.
My hope for all of you reading is to drown yourselves in the process of developing skill independently to essentially enhance your environment and the people within it. This lives forever.
To conclude, in Arthur Millers play Incident at Vichy in which an upper-middle-class man appears before Nazi authority, that has occupied his town, and shows his credentials: his university degrees, his letters of reference from prominent citizens, his trophies and so on. The Nazi asks him “Is that everything you have?” The man nods yes. The Nazi then throws it all in the wastebasket and destroys it all and tells him “Good, now you have nothing.” The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed.
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