“Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.” - Wilma Rudolf

** Learning Through Failure "Conceptlet":

I truly believe that any great innovative company is founded on a set of "freedoms":

• Freedom of Time
• Freedom to Think
• Freedom from Bureaucracy
• Freedom to Try
• Freedom to Imagine
• Freedom to Fail
  

I am sure you can think of a few more "freedoms" to add to that list.  But, in my opinion, the freedom to fail is perhaps the most important.  Failing is something in which an innovator takes great pride.  This is because only through failure can a person really say that they have tried, and learned.

I am a spectacular failure.  This business, Think For A Change, LLC., has technically failed dozens of times over the last seven years.  I have worked on projects, and have failed.  I have participated in sports, and have failed.  I have taken some professional risks, and have failed.  But with each failure, I have also learned.  When the business stumbled, I learned what did and did not work and tried something new.  When my project failed, I learned where I went went wrong and committed myself to not repeat the failure again.  When I failed in sports, I learned to practice harder.  When I have failed in the professional risks I have taken, I learned important lessons about boundaries and corporate politics.

If you aren't failing, then you really aren't trying anything new.  And if you aren't trying anything new, then you aren't innovating.  Learning to accept and embrace failure as a method of accelerated learning is one of the most important traits of a truly successful person.  But learning from failure isn't complete until you reach within yourself and try something new and unique again.  Being able to bounce back from failure to try again is what makes a person a success.

Sometimes my failures do get me down in the dumps.  This typically happens when I am so certain of success that the failure surprises me.  But again, I learn, and then try make an even more successul effort at something new. 

When my failures really get me down, I pick myself back up by remembering that the world is full of some very famous failures:

• Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard’s early failed products included a lettuce-picking machine and an electric weight-loss machine
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team
• Ray Krok failed as a real estate salesperson before discovering the McDonald’s idea.
• Walt Disney was fired by the editor of a newspaper because he had "no good ideas"
• When Thomas Edison was a boy, his teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything
• R.H. Macy failed 7 times before his store in New York caught on
• Albert Einstein was four-years-old before he spoke and was advised many times to drop out of high school and university
• Steven Spielberg dropped out of high school in his sophomore year and when he was persuaded to come back, he was placed in a learning disabled class.  He lasted one month.
• Henry Ford’s first two automobile businesses failed
• F. W. Woolworth got a job in a dry good store when he was 21, but his employer would not let him wait on customers because he "didn’t have enough business sense."
• The great baseball pitcher Cy Young lost almost as many games as he won.

There are literally hundreds and hundreds of other famous "failures."  But the one common thing that makes these failures famous, is that the people involved dusted themselves off, and tried again.  And through that next try, they succeeded.

So start trying something new today.  Start failing at something today.  Don't fear failure, learn from it.  Don't fail and stop trying...fail, learn and keep trying until you succeed.  It will take personal and corporate courage.  It will take a culture that understands and even supports fast failure.  Be the next "famous failure."

Have a great week!!!