How high do you bounce?

I have been, at times in my life, a spectacular failure. I’ve had a business fail. I’ve had friendships fail. I’ve had ideas fail. I have had personal financial crises stemming from failure. I’ve lost friends over performance failures.

I have experienced a lot of failure in my life, and I’m willing to bet that since you don’t settle for a mediocre life you’ve had your share of failures too.

The important thing about failure is not the failure itself - we will all fail at something, sometime in our life. If you’re not failing, you’re not setting the bar very high. The important thing we learn from failure is the lesson of why we failed, and how to bounce back from failure.

There’s a saying I like; fail faster. Basically, when you undertake a new challenge, you need to get to and through your failures as quickly as possible because you’ll get them past you, and you’ll learn what didn’t work. Learning what doesn’t work can be just as important as learning what does work and you’ll only learn this lesson when you fail.

“I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but how high be bounces when he hits bottom”
–General George S. Patton

What’s important is to bounce back after you fail. It’s not just important, it’s vitally critical to future success.

Thomas Edison is a great example of someone who bounced. He tried hundreds of times to improve the light bulb and make it practical and workable. He was fond of telling people that he hadn’t failed 700 times to build a better light bulb, rather he had just found 700 ways to not build a better light bulb.

Edison bounced when a design change for a light bulb failed. And with each bounce he moved closer and closer to his ultimate success. And what did his ultimate success entail, a little company you may have heard called General Electric.

It’s the bounce that counts. So, how high do you bounce after you fail? Are you an “Edison” and keep trying over and over until you get it right or do you adopt the slogan, “If at first you do succeed, change your definition of success”?

Learning to bounce up after a defeat isn’t hard, but it’s not fun. When we try to achieve, and get met with failure, we have a tendency to want to stay down and lick our wounds. Years ago I had a bad business breakup because of my own failure to be something I didn’t want to be (a salesperson). I stayed “down” for a couple of days, licking my wounds, until I realized I was only making myself feel worse.

I was dwelling on something I couldn’t change, so I looked at my failure and tried to learn what I could from it. I realized that I didn’t enjoy being a full-time salesperson. I didn’t enjoy cold calling (and that’s putting it mildly - I hated it). I was able to evaluate my situation and then make an intelligent decision to move my life in a direction that I would enjoy much more.

That bounce landed me at my now-present position; in a job I love, working for a great company. It also afforded me the ability to create this web site, not because I have a great insight to life and success, but because I’ve been at the bottom and had to crawl back up.

I bounced.

And throughout my life I’ve bounced. As I said before, I’ve suffered failed businesses, failed personal finances, failed relationships - all standard fare for someone with an entrepreneurial streak.

Do you bounce?

Do you take the time to evaluate your failures to see what you can learn? Every failure is really just a teacher in disguise. The trick is to get past the pain of failure that you’re feeling and uncover the lesson and learn from the “teacher” that’s hidden. Don’t just bury your failures and move forward like they never happened, take the time to really evaluate what led to them. You can only really learn from a failure when you take the time to dissect the failure and understand it.

And this process can take time. When one of my businesses failed, I didn’t admit the real reasons of why it failed for a long time. It took me years to really be able to look back and realize and understand all of the minuscule bad decisions that added up to the colossal failure.

Now that I’ve been in that position, and I’ve looked back at my mistakes and my partners’ mistakes, I realize what I wouldn’t do the next time I open a business.

You can remember what to do when you fail if you know the acronym “FREE”.

F - Fail
R - Review
E - Enlighten
E - Employ

FAIL
You have to fail to learn from your failures. If you’re not failing at something then you’re either a) Superman or b) not setting your bar high enough.

Go raise your bar and fail, then come back to the FREE acronym.

REVIEW
You have to dissect your failure and identify what caused you to fail. Was is self-sabotage (it happens more then you think), was it a bad market, was it bad decisions? You need to review your failure and get to the root cause(s) of your failure.

ENLIGHTEN
You know what caused you to fail, so now you need to figure out what you can learn from your failure. It’s time to enlighten yourself. I’ve learned that I detest cold calling and being a “pushy” salesman. It’s not for me. I learned this by reviewing my failure at being a “cold calling” salesman.

EMPLOY
Once you have learned from your failures, it’s time to make changes and employ those changes. I can’t do cold calls. I hate, hate, hate it. I am fine calling on a warm lead or having a sales meeting face-to-face. So I have put myself in a position where I am only really faced with having to do warm sales - that is sell my ideas to an already warm audience. I’ve decided what I wanted to change from my failure, and I’ve employed it in my life.

Now get out there, fail (faster!), learn from your failures and bounce baby…just bounce as high as you can!

Add comment February 22nd, 2006