Bounce Back

Bounce Back is a book by Susan Kahn, a business coach who will teach you the psychology of resilience from the perspectives of Greek philosophy, Sigmund Freud, and modern neuroscience, so you can recover quickly from professional blunders of all kinds by changing your thinking.

In ancient Greece, merchants who owned failed businesses had to sit in the marketplace with a basket over their heads while others ridiculed them for their failures. Pretty harsh, right? Modern society isn’t so bad, but our fear of failure lives on.

Failure doesn’t mean you are less smart or able. Even accomplished people or institutions fail. The key is learning from it.

Just think about one of the most successful basketball players in history—- Michael Jordan. He wasn’t any stranger to failure. In fact, he missed over 9,000 shots in his career, and 26 of those were even potential game-winners. But as he famously said, “That is why I succeed.”

Need more convincing? JK Rowling, one of the world’s most famous children’s authors who penned the Harry Potter series, experienced her fair share of failure. Her books were rejected by dozens of publishing houses before they became a global sensation.

And of course, Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb, thought of each failure as a step in the right direction. With all of his failed attempts, he said he found 10,000 ways the light bulb wouldn’t work.

Obviously, failure is important to success, but not everyone is going to be accepting of it. Stakeholders such as clients or bosses will often be upset about it. That’s why it’s vital to have a system that allows risk-taking and failures, but helps you maintain these relations. This is what the author calls “fail fast.”

The idea of a fail-fast originates from systems design. It is a technology that promptly reports problems that could likely result in serious issues down the line. When it reports a problem, operations are paused so the flaw can be fixed. You can do something similar in day-to-day work. The only guaranteed way to avoid failure in life is by never trying anything new. But this will never help you grow or achieve great things. We only really thrive when we’re excited and challenged in our work. When we’re caught in the same old routine, we stop producing our best work. So many of us get caught in the trap of familiarity. Why? Because once we get really good at something, we start to become risk-averse. It feels good to be an expert at something and we don’t want to leave the comfort zone we worked hard to create. Embracing something new and challenging means we aren’t an expert and we’re likely…