Eagles' Don Henley: "Success can be just as frightening as failure"

From the great documentary "History of the Eagles," from the mouth of introspective drummer/vocalist Don Henley:

Success can be just as frightening and disconcerting as failure.


Related post: "Eagles Reunion Concert Set Right By a Mistake"

Merlin Mann: Resilience means focusing on the work more than success or failure

From the Systematic podcast featuring Merlin Mann of Inbox Zero and 43 Folders. The topic is "failing gracefully," and in this excerpt (about 12 minutes from the start of the interview) he discusses that perhaps "doing the work" again and again is more important than tallying individual successes and failures. This is a reminiscent of the Arthur Ashe quote we posted recently:

When you're troubleshooting why your failures are not moving you further along.... you can take it too far.... it can be self-defeating. You can go too far, and try to learn too much from your failures.

Sometimes things just don't work out.... But, if you care a lot about what it is that you're doing, then you have to be open to the idea that it's going to go in all kinds of directions that you didn't expect, and that's the bigger pattern to me. Success and failure, you can look at as a post-mortem on something, after you've succeeded or abandoned it or had it taken away from you.

The people who push out a lot of stuff over time are resilient in a much higher-level way. Which means: they just believe in doing the work, and moving forward. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. Woody Allen puts out a movie every year. I haven't seen all of them, but that's his job.

His job is that he makes movies and that's the thing that he does.

Hat tip Tuuti Piippo.

Arthur Ashe: "You've got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing"

You've got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing.

Arthur Ashe, US Open & Wimbledon Tennis champion.

Seeing this quoted on Twitter resonated based on my recent reading of "Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation" by Ralph Farson and Ralph Keyes. Farson and Keyes discuss the idea that the highest levels of engagement in a project trump the idea of specific success or failure, and Ashe says pretty much the same thing. For me, I needed to get to my forties, and absorb a fair amount of both success and failure, to appreciate what Ashe is saying.

There are many references to this quote, but I can't find its origin - whether in one of Ashe's books, or in an interview. If you know, leave us a comment. Thanks!

Timing and circumstances turn a failure into a success

This week, I met with some colleagues and we discussed our customers' increasing demand for Spanish-language services from us. An exec at our company said, "Yes, we absolutely need to grow this capability. Let's list a set of partners to evaluate in Mexico, so we can provide these services. Can we meet about that next week?"

After the meeting, one colleague was a bit frustrated. "Can I say something?" he said to me. "I proposed we do this a year ago and the suggestion was ignored. What's different this time?"

I said, "The idea was good then, and it is still good now. The only difference is the timing. A year ago, we weren't ready to commit to this, and our customers weren't either. Now we both are."

The lesson: don't give up on a good idea. Put it in a place where you can retrieve it if the circumstances change. If it's a good idea, they very well may, sooner or later.

Mistake Bank Bookshelf: "Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins"

"Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation" by Ralph Farson and Ralph Keyes is our first entry in our "Mistake Bank Bookshelf" series. We'll write a short post on each book that falls into the category of must reads if you are interested in this topic. We'll post this every Friday. Most of the books have been covered in the past, but we will include them here in a simple summary post. You can find them all by clicking on the label "Mistake Bank Bookshelf."


"Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins" is not one we've written about before. It's a slim book, just over 100 pages, and the size made me think of the upcoming Mistake Bank book, which will be about the same size. It's a straightforward business book, focusing both on the psychology of success and failure and its impact on innovation. Women readers alert: there are LOTS of sports analogies, including shout-outs to Vince Lombardi, Bill Russell, Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, etc., etc.

The book was released in 2002, and I wonder if it didn't do so well in its first release, because it's was rereleased a year later as "The Innovation Paradox: The Success of Failure, the Failure of Success." [Note to self: I hope it wasn't the word Mistake that hurt the book's sales prospects!]

Farson and Keyes do a good job of exploring how success and failure intertwine - how failures enable successes and successes set you up for future failure. I particularly love a brief autobiography they include for a "management consultant" who seems a lot like Farson himself:

Because I didn't receive a single "A" in college, I couldn't get into medical school. Instead, I worked as a lifeguard, but got fired at the end of the summer. My next job, selling advertising in the Yellow Pages, was interrupted by breaking my leg badly while skiing. This gave me three months to think about what to do with my life. Since I'd enjoyed my psychology courses in college, I thought I might try to become a school psychologist. So, I enrolled at UCLA to pick up psychology and education courses, but got kicked out of student teaching because I couldn't get along with my supervisor. Back to lifeguarding. Then I noticed that a prominent psychologist was giving a summer seminar at my alma mater, so I quit my job and enrolled. This experience was electrifying. The psychologist invited me to study with him at the University of Chicago. I was so intimidated by that most serious academic institution, however, that I put off going there for a year. Just before receiving my Ph.D. from Chicago, I was given a one-year fellowship on the Harvard Business School faculty. I left there at the end of the year with almost everyone mad at me.

My other favorite part of the book is the final chapter, entitled, "Samurai Success," in which the authors revisit a paradox of competition. In the greatest, most intense competition, winning and losing loses importance to the exhilaration of performing in the moment. And Japanese samurai, adopting Zen principles, "strived to achieve victory by becoming fully absorbed in a process that would lead them there, not by setting their sights on victory itself."

The lessons are that success has a significant component of subjectivity; that there are reversals along the way, and that the process and daily work is where satisfaction rests.

"True Grit" - the importance of learning how to overcome setbacks

Paul Tough of The New York Times Magazine profiled private-school headmaster Dominic Randolph and his focus on instilling character into his students, in addition to the typical focus on academics and extracurriculars. Central to his efforts is a belief that students need to overcome setbacks - to try and fail at things - to develop character. Tough writes:

When I asked Randolph to explain just what he thought Riverdale students were missing out on, he told me the story of his own scholastic career. He did well in boarding school and was admitted to Harvard, but when he got to college, he felt lost, out of step with the power-tie careerism of the Reagan ’80s. After two years at Harvard, Randolph left for a year to work in a low-paying manual job, as a carpenter’s helper, trying to find himself. After college, he moved for a couple of years to Italy, where he worked odd jobs and studied opera. It was an uncertain and unsettled time in his life, filled with plenty of failed experiments and setbacks and struggles. Looking back on his life, though, Randolph says that the character strengths that enabled him to achieve the success that he has were not built in his years at Harvard or at the boarding schools he attended; they came out of those years of trial and error, of taking chances and living without a safety net. And it is precisely those kinds of experiences that he worries that his students aren’t having.

“The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”

And one of the scholars who have influenced Randolph's thinking, Penn's Angela Duckworth, emphasizes that struggle is essential to success:

“The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also the students themselves,” she wrote. “Here’s why: learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying — but it is also often daunting, exhausting and sometimes discouraging. . . . To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.”

Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s. But while self-control seemed to be a critical ingredient in attaining basic success, Duckworth came to feel it wasn’t as relevant when it came to outstanding achievement. People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit."

The idea of "grit" as a character trait vital to success is related to Carol Dweck's research showing the value of a learning versus a fixed mindset. To Dweck, successful learners see a failure as an opportunity to learn and improve, not a referendum on one's innate ability.

Some learn grit later in life. Others learn it early (Randolph is trying to teach it to his students). But in any event, if you don't learn it sooner or later, it's hard to be truly successful.

For more on grit, here's a TED Talk from Angela Duckworth:

What a "broken child" reminds us about life

There's an amazing exchange from Fresh Air when Teri Gross interviews Ian Brown, author of "The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son," a memoir about life with his 15-year old son Walker, who suffers from a rare and severely disabling condition called cardiofaciocutaneous (CFC) syndrome.

Brown is discussing a quote from his wife imagining what the world would be like without people like Walker, when Teri Gross interrupts:

Brown:
What sort of a world would it be without Walkers? A world where there are only sort of Masters of the Universe...would be like Sparta.

Teri Gross:
Could we just stop here? I'm not a Master of the Universe. You know, I'm not broken, physiologically broken, like your boy. But I'm hardly a Master of the Universe. I think most of us are not Masters of the Universe. We're all broken in our own special ways. So it's not like we're perfected people and we need constant reminders of imperfection. I'm not arguing for abortion here, I'm just saying...we're not a population of perfection.

Brown:
No, no, absolutely not... although, you know, the imperative to know what to do, to have the answer, to...have the solution. I think that's a very strong imperative. And Walker is...he's more than a reminder of imperfection. Gradually, I've begun to realize, he is a way of...not the only way of being, but he's an alternate way of being. Because you can't be successful with Walker. You can't "get it done." You can't "just do it," as the ad says. You have to actually just be with him

I remember precisely where I was when I heard this: on Forster St., heading over the Harvey Taylor Bridge taking my son home from school. As I listened, I was reminded of something very current and yet age-old. An obsession with "winning." What Brown is saying means this to me: Walker is important and his life is meaningful because he presents us a situation that is not winnable. It just is. The work involved with raising and caring for Walker will not end in triumph. It will persist, day by day, for as long as it lasts. That is its limitation and, in the end, its beauty.