039: Failure is Not Optional




Uncommon Sense: the This is True Podcast show

Summary: In This Episode: Humans don’t like to fail. Sure, sometimes failure has catastrophic results, so surgeons work hard to ensure their operations are successful. But when we don’t allow ourselves, or our children, or our employees to fail, they can’t reach their full potential. Here’s why you should actually embrace failure.<br> <br> <a class="twitter-share-button" href="https://twitter.com/share?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">Tweet</a><br> <a href="#transcript">Jump to Transcript</a><br> <a href="https://thisistrue.com/category/podcasts/">How to Subscribe and List of All Episodes</a><br> Show Notes<br> <br> * I only barely touched on the ideas in Carol Dweck’s book <a href="https://amzn.to/2LNalQk">Mindset: The New Psychology of Success</a>. I’ve read it, and there’s a lot more to delve into — highly recommended if you found her ideas at all interesting, or want more tools to help you push toward a growth mindset.<br> <br> <a name="transcript"></a><br> Transcript<br> Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.<br> It’s not just OK to fail, it’s actually a requirement to reach the greatest success. If you never fail, you’re clearly not pushing yourself hard enough. There’s a big difference between failing and giving up.<br> One of the first business books I ever read was about sales. The guy who wrote it was a very successful salesman, and in the business he was in, only one in 50 calls he made to potential clients resulted in a sale. Some salesmen would be depressed at so much rejection. This guy, and I’m sorry that decades later I can’t remember who he was or what he sold, he didn’t get angry or depressed at being turned down so much. Rather, it energized him: if he was only going to sell something one time out of 50, he said, the faster he got through the 49 non-sales, the sooner he would get to the one who would buy! Then he’d celebrate that win, that commission, and start over on the next 50.<br> He was no fool: as I said, he was a very successful salesman — so much so, he wrote a book about his methods. And no doubt it sold well!<br> I didn’t want to go into sales myself, but I have the same attitude about This is True: only a small percentage of people who subscribe to the free edition of the newsletter will upgrade to the paid edition, yet I’ve always said that if someone can’t afford to upgrade, they’re welcome to stay on the free distribution for as long as they’d like. Because at some point, things may be better for them: they might get a job, come into an inheritance, or whatever, and upgrade then. Or they may have a friend that they suddenly realize would really like the newsletter, and recommend it to them because they see it every week and it’s fresh in their mind.<br> New readers subscribe pretty much every day. Some percentage of them will upgrade, and those Premium subscribers make my job possible. I’m really happy to say it’s more than one out of 50! But even if they never do anything that supports This is True, at least those free edition readers are prompted to think more, and to make the world around them a better place. And for me, that’s a win.<br> Getting back to the bigger picture, humans need to fail because that’s how they learn. Do everything you can to keep your child from failing is stealing from their future. Worse, they develop a fear of failure, and don’t push themselves because …they might fail! And then, when failure does happen, and it will, it really hurts: they retreat even more, push even less, and don’t get to see what their limits are. Which is really sad: they could have been a great writer,...