I Came, I Saw, I Failed Completely ….

“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more
important to heed the lessons of failure.”

Bill Gates

OK, we all know that Gates also said “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” a few years ago and that turned out to be a Very Large Mistake. 

I think Gates is onto something with the value of failure.

When we succeed, we do celebrate and rightfully so.  We also tend
to not look terribly closely at how we succeeded.  Sometimes we win in spite of ourselves, but that knowedge is lost in the euphoria of our victory dances.

We have also made a little cult out of making people feel good about themselves.  The current state of the products of our educational system seem to support the idea that we may have gone too far toward “Everybody’s A Star” and lost our focus on how to actually excel.

Success too often simply teaches us it feels good to win.

When we fail, if we are smart, we go over what happened with a fine-tooth comb.  We critically evaluate each step, each component, each pivotal point in the the process that led to our failure.

If we are smart, we learn and we create new systems and approaches that insure we will at least fail by doing something else the next time.

Failure can teach us how to succeed, but only if we pay attention.

Digging on failure since I have so much more material to work with in the Heartland ….

John