Failing Forward

Failing Forward will help you stop making excuses, start embracing failure as a natural, necessary part of the process and let you find the confidence to proceed anyway.

This year the G20 summit took place in Hamburg, Germany. It’s an important political event on a global scale, with some of the world’s most powerful countries’ leaders sitting together, talking about economics, finances, health, security, and so on. There are always protesters demonstrating for certain causes during the event, but this year, it was engulfed in a wave of vandalism.

Masked men stormed around the city, destroying everything in sight, just for the fun of it. They torched cars, ruined public facilities and trashed entire stores. I remember seeing the owner of an organic grocery store standing in his 500,000 € loss.

This failure wasn’t his fault by any means. But how fast he turns it around is up to him. A similar thing happened to Greg Horn in 1997. His store was destroyed by the Kentucky Floods and guess what the only thing was he hadn’t insured it for? Water.

Instead of giving up, though, he took responsibility for getting back to success. He continued to support his 80 employees and scraped together the $1 million it took to repair everything. Within 21 days, he was back up and running.

It’s not always your fault when things go wrong. But when you give up and sit and wallow, that is.

Maxwell tells an interesting story from another classic book, Art & Fear by Ted Orland. The teacher of a ceramics class divides her students into two groups. She told the first group they’d be graded based on how many pieces they created over the course of the class. The second group was supposed to make just one piece of pottery, but make that the best they can.

Your gut might tell you the second group should produce better work, but actually, the first group completely outgunned them when it came to quality of their creations. Why? Two reasons:

Making multiple pieces took the pressure off every single one. Failing wasn’t so bad. Going through multiple stages of failure allowed them to learn from each one and improve their next piece.

This is how failure leads to success. When we put too much pressure on ourselves, we often don’t have the stomach to re-visit our failure. But how else should we find out what we did wrong?

Make more. Quantity over quality. Be determined to understand your failures. And then improve each time.