Walt Hampton, J.D.

Creating the Work & Life You LOVE

The Other F* Word
April 1, 2010

My mother kept a bar of brown soap next to the kitchen sink.  And she’d use it if any one of us uttered a profanity.

So it’s with great trepidation that I dare to write about the other four-letter F* word.

Fail.

There.  I said it.

Growing up, it was an unmentionable word.  An inconceivable concept.  Failing wasn’t an option.  In school. In sports.  In life. In anything.  Anywhere.  Anytime.

It was expected that we would succeed at everything we did.

I understand the reason why.  In most professions, including mine, it’s poor style to say, “Oops, failed again.  At least we tried.”  It can get one sued.  Or worse.

The problem with avoiding failure, though, is that it leads to mediocrity.  And stagnation.

William Gladstone, a former prime minister of Great Britain said, “No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.”

“Many people fail to take action because they’re afraid to fail,” says Jack Canfield in his book The Success Principals.  “Successful people, on the other hand, realize that failure is an important part of the learning process.”

It is said that when Thomas Edison was endeavoring to invent the light bulb, he tried more than 10,000 different approaches.  When asked about these “failures,” Edison replied, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward”, he said.

“Your next level of excellence is hidden behind your next level of resistance,” says leadership guru Robin Sharma in his new book The Leader Who Had No Title. According to Sharma, “You really don’t grow unless you move toward your areas of discomfort.”  And fail.

Darren Hardy, the publisher and editorial director of Success magazine, recalls a time in his youth when he told his father about a day on the ski slope.  “I didn’t fall once,” he said proudly. His father replied, “Then you didn’t get any better.”

What a wonderful way to look at failure.  

My friend Bob is a very successful business man.  He was raised with a completely different paradigm than mine.  Failure for him growing up was not something to be avoided. It was a way to discover what works.  

“Mistakes are just opportunities for learning something new,” says Canfield.

I can see how that idea has played out in Bob’s life.  Even in the throws of a very difficult business environment, Bob is not afraid to push the edges of what is possible. He is not afraid to fail.

Intuitively, I know this.  There have been times that I’ve avoided a difficult climb because I “knew” I’d fall.  Of course, it’s tough to learn much like that. In falling, I discover what doesn’t work.  And what does.  I get stronger. And better.  

In embracing the possibility of failure, we are free to experiment, to play, to create, to grow.

Not only that, but in failing, we also have the capacity to move from the merely good to the truly great.  

Tony Robbins uses the idea of 2 millimeters: the two millimeters that often separates success from failure, the 2 millimeters that separates the excellent from the outstanding, if only we push through our failures.  Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”  

If we don’t retreat from failure, but learn from it instead, it can catapult us to brilliance.

For me, it’s a constant struggle to embrace failure. I know I’ve made my children neurotic about it. At least I didn’t bring out the soap.

“Fail forward,”  Canfield says.

Use the other F* word!

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