Reward excellent failures,
Punish mediocre successes.
Phil Daniels
Somewhere between the school yard and the safety of the corporate cubicle we lose the bright badge of childhood’s courage. There was once a time – when falling out the tree was recognized as the only way to learn to climb.
Today? We shy away from anything that poses risk and in so doing we bypass the thorny path to growth.
We’ve tarred and feathered failure to the point where it’s unwelcome in polite company. We’ve lost sight of the fact that to learn how to swim requires we snort water up our nose, that the only way to ride the red bike is tattered knees and bruised bones, that failure is evidence of our effort.
We’ve forgotten failure is the only way to foster feats of glory.
Small successes are safe, simple and sinecure. Show up on time. Do today what worked yesterday, and blindly do it again tomorrow. Do it faster. Do it cheaper. Do it robotically. Turn the wide promise of our tomorrows into a series of predictable sequels.
There’s another path around our practiced patterns — it’s called the razor’s edge. Each dance step on this life path requires careful thought with cuts and scrapes abounding. This risky rocky road leads us forward to where the air is rare and competition absent.
Failure is the only ladder tall enough to reach the next plateau.
(c) 2007 Peter de Jager
Wow. You beat me to the punch…and more eloquently. I wrote a draft yesterday about failure as a step to success. I whole-heartedly agree with you. Failure, sometimes, is the first step to success!
I think children are so insulated now from failure they do not know how to fail gracefully. Sometimes, thanks to their “helicopter parents” they don’t fail until they are in their 20’s and when they do….hoo boy, they don’t even know how to react.
http://www.thepowerofnegativethinking.com
Greetings Craigprice – thanks for the compliment… as to beating you to the punch? Saying anything totally original after thousands of years of human history is unlikely – all I did was say it differently.
Don’t let my post stop your post. It’s the differences in the angles that make the writing unique, not the ideas they contain.
Hey Peter!
Love your blogs. It’s like Truth Picks again. Thanks for doing this. I’m adding this to my Google Reader.
All the best,
Deb
Hi Deb,
Glad you like them and glad they resonate the same way.
I’ll give this a year to see how it works. If the reaction is positive then it’ll continue. If not? I’ll find another ship to build.
Enjoy the day
Peter
“Small successes are safe, simple and sinecure.”
Peter, I can usually figure out what was intended when someone makes a typo like this. Was it SINCERE? Or did you really mean sinecure?
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sinecure
HI Jim,
You should know me by now… I meant ’sinecure’ as in ‘easy target’ (http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/sinecure).
Or, if you want to stay with the definitions you referred to, then we could ‘twist’ it a bit to mean ‘profit without thought or effort’.
A totally accurate usage? Perhaps not, I can hear the argument against my usage, but what is writing if you can’t play with the words sometimes.
Enjoy the day.
p.s. It’s good to have you as part of the audience!
Hi Peter,
The entrepreneur in me loves the sentiment in this article, and if I had the opportunity to be an inventor or trail blazer all the time this would be my credo. Unfortunately as a realist and someone who is responsible for delivering a stable reliable system platform 24×7 – risk averseness is our number one objective – punishment for outages is extreme and their is no forgiveness.
I would be very interested in your thoughts around this article and it’s application to mission critical business processes/systems.
Greetings Neil,
Your point is well taken. The term ‘Mission CRITICAL’ says it all. In those circumstances, reliability rules. It’s even more important than ‘aesthetics’ or ‘ease of use’.
All of the above is true, and even while it is true, there is still a need for experimentation and exploration outside of the mission critical system. It’s not okay to state ‘we’ve run this system, this way for 20 years, with .00001% downtime, we can’t change it’. There still a need to explore other (read better) ways of doing that without putting the original system at risk.
We do ourselves a disservice if we ignore the possibility of .00001% downtime at 1% of the cost/resources.
It gets interesting on the day of the ‘cut over’ when we shift from the system we know works, to the newer system that we’ve tested, tested, and now – honestly – hope works.
Enjoy the day