When
we arrived in Paris from Tel Aviv at midmorning, an agent from the airline
greeted us. “I’m sorry, folks,” she said, “but your flight to New York
has been canceled. There’s a major snowstorm on the Atlantic Coast, and
nothing is going in or out for the next twenty-four hours.” After a week of
being on dusty roads, rushing from site to site, sleeping in strange hotel
rooms, and seeing tense soldiers with machine guns everywhere, our group was
ready to be back home.
As
we got the news, I could sense the disappointment and frustration among our
people. Many who were traveling with us were older and had never been out of
the United States before that trip. Previous departures from the planned
itinerary had upset some of them. The major break in our travel plans was
likely to send them into a panic.
Margaret
and I looked at each other and knew we needed to act.
“Okay,
gang, let’s all get together over here,” I said as I gathered everyone
into a corner in the airport and took a quick head count. “How many of you
have never been to Paris before?” I asked. All but a few hands went up.
“Oh, this is great! We’ve got an awesome opportunity here,” I
explained. “We’re going to take a tour of the city!”
Margaret’s
eyes lit up as she understood the idea, and she jumped right in to help.
“Oh, you’ll love Paris,” she said. “It’s the most romantic city in
the world.” A couple of the women in the group smiled, but the majority of
the group looked at us with skepticism. “We’ll see the Louvre, Notre Dame,
the Eiffel Tower—you name it.”
“We
are so lucky,” I said. “Do you know how much money most people spend to
see Paris? They spend thousands of dollars just to get here, but we’re going
to see it for free.” That got the attention of a couple of the men.
An
hour later, we were at the hotel, and Margaret and I were working on getting
the tour together. “No, monsieur,” the concierge said, “there are no
tours available. I can maybe arrange something for tomorrow.
“It
has to be today. There must be something available,” I said.
“No,
monsieur. I am sorry.
“Then
how about a bus?” said Margaret. He looked at her blankly. “Surely,
there’s a bus in all of Paris. See if you can find us a bus—any kind of
bus—and a driver.”
“That’s
right,” I agreed. “Just find us a bus. We don’t care where you get it or
what it looks like. It can be a school bus for all we care. We’ll take care
of the tour ourselves.” It took us a while to convince him, but he finally
agreed to try. And he got us a bus—complete with a driver who didn’t speak
a word of English.
We
loaded up the group and gave them a whirlwind tour of Paris. “Take lots of
pictures,” we kept telling them. “You’ll want to show everyone when you
get home how you got an extra trip to Paris.” We showed them everything we
could. And I’ll bet we even got the landmarks’ names right, oh, 70 or 80
percent of the time. They even experienced things they wouldn’t have on
another tour. For instance, we spotted pop singer Madonna coming out of the
Louvre surrounded by bodyguards, and everyone took pictures of her.
“It
could only happen on the Maxwell tour,” one member of the group said later.
After
we got home, our people had meaningful memories of Israel and the
awe-inspiring places there. But their favorite story was about their one-day
side trip to Paris.
Have
you ever been on a trip that didn’t turn out the way you planned? If
you’ve done much traveling, maybe I should ask instead if you’ve ever been
on a trip that did
turn out exactly as you planned. Because if you’re like most
people, you’ve had all kinds of things go wrong on a trip. The success
journey is the same way. You may have your journey clearly marked on your road
map, but until you are actually traveling, the obstacles are not apparent.
The journey is full of speed bumps, potholes, and detours. And since nobody
can entirely avoid them, the question is, How are you handling them?
Isabel
Moore aptly stated, “Life is a one-way street. No matter how many detours
you take, none of them leads back. And once you know and accept that, life
becomes much simpler.” One of the major keys to success is to keep moving
forward on the journey, making the best of the detours and interruptions,
turning adversity into advantage.
THE
TWO GREATEST DETOURS
We
all have fears. Nine out of ten people are terrified by the thought of
speaking before groups. Some don’t like insects. Others fear height... deep
water, financial problems, aging, or loneliness. Fears come in almost as many
varieties as there are people. The fears of some well-known people from
history are even comical. For example, Julius Caesar, a powerful military
general and Roman emperor, feared thunder. Peter the Great, the czar of Russia
and an imposing figure at six feet five inches tall, was afraid of bridges. He
crossed them only when there was no other alternative, and when he did, he
trembled and cried like a child. And eighteenth-century British writer and
literary critic Dr. Samuel Johnson had a phobia about entering a room with any
foot other than his left. Any time he accidentally entered a room
wrong-footed, he backed out and entered again with his right foot. He took
wanting to put his best foot forward to a ridiculous extreme!
Inaction
leads
to lack
of experience;
Lack
of experience fosters
ignorance;
and
Ignorance
breeds
fear.
Fear
also causes procrastination. It divides our focus and weakens us. It can even
make us feel isolated. Michael Pritchard called fear “that little darkroom
where negatives are developed.” And former NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton
said, “Fear causes people to draw back from situations; it brings on
mediocrity; it dulls creativity; it sets one up to be a loser in life.” Fear
robs us of our potential and prevents us from moving forward toward our
purpose in life.
A
second way to deal with fear is to hope that it will go away. But that’s
like hoping for a fairy godmother to rescue you.
Fortunately,
there is a third way to deal with fear, and that is to face it and overcome
it. In the end, that’s the only method that really works. Here is a strategy
to help you face the fear and do it anyway:
Most
of the fears we face every day are not based on facts. They are generated by
our feelings. For example, a study conducted by the University of Michigan
showed the following:
That
reminds me of a story I heard about a couple in bed late one night. The
husband was sound asleep until his wife jabbed him in the ribs, saying,
“Burt, wake up. I hear a burglar downstairs. Burt, wake up!”
“Okay,
okay,” said Burt as he sat up on the edge of the bed and searched for his
slippers for what seemed like the ten-thousandth time. “I’m up.” He
grabbed his robe and stumbled groggily out into the hall and down the stairs.
When he reached the bottom step. he found himself staring into the barrel of
a gun.
“Hold
it right there, buddy,” a voice said firmly from behind a ski mask. “Show
me where the valuables are.”
Burt
did. When the burglar had his bag full and was getting ready to leave, Burt
said, “Wait. Before you go, could you go up and meet my wife? She’s been
expecting you every night for more than thirty years.
Fear
is interest paid on a debt you may not owe. If you’ve allowed yourself to be
detoured by fear, it’s time to look beyond your feelings and examine the
thinking that’s generating your fears. Compare your thought patterns to the
facts and see where they don’t match up. If your focus is on the past, try
to move beyond it. If you’re worrying about petty things, remind yourself of
what is really important. And if you can’t change your thought patterns on
your own, seek the help of a professional counselor. Don’t allow yourself to
remain a prisoner of your feelings.
The
best thing to do in the case of your few justifiable fears (5
percent or less) is to acknowledge them and keep moving forward.
That’s what our esteemed heroes have done. For example, consider the life
and career of someone like George S. Patton, a bold and innovative general who
was instrumental in the success of the Allies in World War II. You might be
tempted to think that he didn’t experience fear. But that’s not the case.
He felt the fear, but he didn’t let it stop him. He once said, “I am not a
brave man. The truth of the matter is I am usually a coward at heart. I have
never been in the sound of gunshot or sight of battle in my whole life that I
was not afraid. I constantly have sweat on my palms and a lump in my
throat.” Imagine that: One of our bravest generals thought of himself as a
coward.
One
key to Patton’s success was that he learned how to deal with his fear. He
declared, “The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an
important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can
imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your
decision, turn off all of your fears and go ahead!” If someone who
considered himself a coward could do it, so can you.
You
must realize that the things you fear will come true or they won’t. And your
fear will not positively affect the outcome. Fear can only detour you—if you
let it. That’s why it is critical to accept fear as the price of progress.
Dr. Susan Jeffries admitted, “As long as I continue to stretch my
capabilities, as long as I continue to take risks in making my dreams come
true, I am going to experience fear.”
Any
time you try to move forward into new territory on the success journey,
there is a chance that you will fail. Your attempt to move forward may also
make you look foolish. And the thought of that probably makes you nervous.
That’s all right. Just about every person who ever achieved something of
value faced fear and moved forward anyway. True heroes are the men and women
who conquer themselves.
Your
dream is one of the most effective antidotes for fear. It can fuel the flames
of desire within you until you’re willing to confront and overcome your
fear. Your dream can help you go where you’re afraid to go and do what
you’re afraid to do. It will enable you to channel your fear positively. As
professional boxing manager Cus D’Amato put it, “The hero and the coward
both feel exactly the same fear, only the hero confronts his fear and
converts it into fire.” Your dream can provide the spark that will turn your
fear into fire.
Former
UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, one of the greatest coaches who ever lived,
said, “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
Wooden was known for stressing excellence to his players and encouraging them
to work toward their potential. He never made winning a championship his goal.
He focused on the journey, not the destination. Yet his work ethic and focus
on the things within his control earned his UCLA teams four undefeated
seasons, an eighty-eight-game winning streak, and an incredible ten national
championships. No one had ever done that before him, and no one has done it
since.
As
you move forward on the success journey, you need to remember that what
happens in
you is more important than what happens to
you. You can control your attitudes as you travel on the journey,
but you have no control over the actions of others. You can choose what to put
on your calendar, but you can’t control today’s circumstances.
Unfortunately, the majority of the fear and stress that people experience in
life is from things they can do nothing about. Don’t let that happen to
you.
Vince
Lombardi, legendary coach of the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, once commented,
“Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” He understood that past
successes influence the ability to perform well. That principle also applies
to overcoming fears. Each time you face a fear and move forward in spite of
it, you are better prepared to challenge the next one. In time, you develop
the habit of winning over fear, the smaller victories paving the way for the
greater ones. Eventually, fear is no longer a major problem and no longer
sends you on unnecessary detours from the success journey.
The
bottom line is that you have a choice. You can feed your fears, or you can
starve them. Both fear and faith will be with you every minute of every day.
But the emotion that you continually act upon— the one you feed—dominates
your life. Acting on the right emotion lifts you to success, while acting on
the wrong one starts you on a disheartening detour.
Feeling
the fear and moving ahead anyway depend on changing your thought patterns from
“fear means stop” to “fear means go.” Mark Twain urged, “Do
something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for
acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.”
The
irony is that the successful person who keeps growing, taking risks, and
moving forward feels the same feelings of fear as the one who allows fear to
stop him. The difference comes because one doesn’t let fear dominate while
the other does.
“Well,”
he said, “in the beginning, nobody wanted to publish my stuff.”
I
almost choked on my food. “What?” I said. “What do you mean nobody
wanted to publish your stuff?” Max’s prose reads like poetry. It’s
beautiful.
“Nobody
wanted to publish it,” he answered. “I sent my first manuscript out to
at least fifteen publishers before one finally said yes.
“I
bet some of those publishers are kicking themselves now,” I said. Max has
published a lot of books since then, and I’m guessing he has sold a couple
million copies. “When you were trying to get that first one accepted,
didn’t you ever get discouraged and think about giving up?”
“No,”
he said. “Every time I got the manuscript back, I thought, Well,
I’ll just try another publisher.”
That’s
when it hit me. Max had something that just about all successful people
have: the
ability to fail.
“Wait
a minute!” you may be saying. “I thought we were talking about creating a
road map for success.
Doesn’t success mean avoiding failure?” The answer is no. All
of us fail. As we travel, we all hit potholes, take wrong turns, or forget
to check the radiator. The only person who avoids failure altogether is the
person who never leaves her driveway. So the real issue is not whether
you’re going to fail. It’s whether you’re going to fail successfully
(profiting from your failure) or allow failure to send you on a permanent
detour. As Nelson Boswell observed, “The difference between greatness and
mediocrity is often how an individual views mistakes.” If you want to
continue on the success journey, you need to learn to fail forward.
Successful
people don’t let failure go to their heads. Instead of dwelling on the
negative consequences of failure, thinking of what might have been and how
things haven’t worked out, they focus on the rewards of success: learning
from their mistakes and thinking about how they can improve themselves and
their situations. Depending on your attitude toward it, failure can either bog
you down or help you along on your journey.
Most
of us have been conditioned to look only at the end result of any person’s
long success journey. For example, we celebrate when the Olympic gold medal
goes to someone such as heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, but we don’t think
about the many races and events she has lost over the years, the adjustments
and relearning she has had to do to correct her technique, or the excruciating
injuries she has sustained along the way. Or if we meet a successful
businessperson such as Al Copeland, founder of the Popeye’s restaurant
chain, we wouldn’t know that he tried and failed in several restaurant
ventures, and at one time he couldn’t find financing for his fried-chicken
restaurant idea. But he managed to overcome his failures, and now Popeye’s
Fried Chicken restaurants are located all across the country.
Please
let me help you change your thinking about failure and approach it in an
entirely different way. With each failure, you can move one step farther on
the success journey. As hotel executive Conrad Hilton put it, “Successful
people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.” Here are ten
guidelines to help you change failure from detour to dividend:
Never
forget that you cannot take the success journey without experiencing failure.
In fact, train yourself to think of failures as mileage markers. Each time you
fail, know that you’ve traveled another mile farther on the road to your
potential. Soichino Honda, founder of Honda Motors, offered this insight:
“Many people dream of success. To me success can be achieved only through
repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success only represents 1 percent
of your work that results from 90 percent of that which is called failure.
Very few unacquainted with failure will ever know the true joy of success.”
I would go even farther and say that no person unacquainted with failure
will know success.
Failure
has another value: It strengthens you. Henry Ward Beecher, nineteenth-century
author, clergyman, and outspoken opponent to slavery, said, “It is defeat
that turns bone to flint, and gristle to muscle, and makes people invincible,
and formed those heroic natures that are now in ascendancy in the world. Do
not, then, be afraid of defeat. You are never so near to victory as when
defeated in a good cause.” Each time you experience a fumble, failure, or
defeat, remind yourself that you’re one step closer to your potential and
your dream. You’re learning to fail forward to success.
Most
people who never learn to fail forward are stopped because they take failure
personally. They start saying to themselves, “Why can’t you do anything
right?” or “You shouldn’t have tried; you knew you couldn’t do it,”
or “See that; you’re a failure!” But there is a huge difference
between saying “I have failed” and “I am a failure.” Someone who has
failed can learn from her mistakes and move on. It doesn’t change who she
is. But the person who tells himself, “I am a failure,” gives himself
little hope of improvement. No matter what he does or where he goes, his
failure stays with him because he has internalized it. He makes it an
inseparable part of him. Asking someone who has convinced himself that he is
a failure to be successful would be like asking an apple tree to produce
cantaloupes. It can’t be done.
When
I think back on my life, I realize that I took failure a lot more personally
when I was younger, less experienced, and less successful. My mistakes
looked a lot bigger to me then. But as time has gone by, I’ve learned to
accept my limitations as well as my strengths, understand that everything I do
isn’t going to be successful, and tell myself, “I sure messed that up.
I’ll do better next time.”
If
you’re in the habit of assassinating your own character or questioning
your talent every time something goes wrong, stop it. Making mistakes is like
breathing; it’s something you’ll keep doing as long as you’re alive. So
learn to live with it and move on.
Sometimes
failure signals that it’s time for a change in direction. If you keep
hitting the wall, it may be time to back up and look for the door. If you keep
taking the same detour, maybe it’s not a detour but your main road. However,
when you experience failure after failure but your dream burns within you just
as strongly as ever, keep going. Also recognize that some of the greatest
accomplishments of life literally were birthed out of failure.
For
example, look at the life of John James Audubon. He is considered a pioneer
in wildlife study and preservation. But in the early 1800s, he was merely an
unsuccessful shopkeeper in Louisville, Kentucky. He attempted to support
himself and his wife, Lucy, in that occupation, but after struggling for
eleven years, he finally went bankrupt. That failure prompted him to pursue
his life’s work—observing, drawing, and painting wildlife, the thing for
which he will always be remembered.
If
you’re repeatedly experiencing failure but you want to fail forward, allow
your mistakes to redirect you. Maybe you’re working someplace where you
don’t really fit. That doesn’t mean that you’re bad or wrong. It just
means that you need to make an adjustment. If one door repeatedly closes on
you, don’t stand there forever wondering why you can’t get it open. Look
around for another open door. One may be standing open right now that you’ve
continually overlooked.
When
all else fails, laugh. That’s my motto. It’s easy
to laugh when everything is going great, but it’s important
to laugh when everything is going wrong. Nothing improves emotional
health like laughter. It relieves stress and helps you quickly put your
mistakes into perspective. Jerry Jenkins observed, “To err is human.. .
but when you wear the eraser out ahead of the pencil, you’re overdoing
it.” A very prolific and successful writer, he understands the importance
of a sense of humor when it comes to making mistakes.
As
you make mistakes on the success journey, keep everything in a positive,
humorous perspective. Try to look at life the way professional hockey coach
Harry Neale did during a tough time. He quipped, “Last season, we couldn’t
win at home and we were losing on the road. My failure as a coach was that I
couldn’t think of anyplace else to play.”
When
things go wrong, the natural tendency is to look for someone to blame. You
can go all the way back to the Garden of Eden on this one. When God asked Adam
what he had done, he said it was Eve’s fault. Then when God questioned Eve,
she blamed it on the snake. The same thing happens today. When you ask your
daughter why she hit her brother, she says it’s his fault. When the
quarterback throws an interception, he says the receiver ran the wrong route.
When you ask an employee why he didn’t meet a deadline, he points his finger
at someone else or cites circumstances beyond his control. And we won’t even
talk about all the lawsuits in which people blame others for their problems.
The
next time you experience a failure, think about why you failed nstead of who
was at fault. Try to look at it objectively so that you can do
better next time. My friend Bobb Biehl suggests a list of questions to help
you analyze any failure:
To
be successful, you need to develop the ability to learn from your mistakes.
You see, as Dr. Ronald Niednagel said, “Failure isn’t failure unless you
don’t learn from it.” That learning process changes what could be a
permanent detour into a springboard to your potential.
Let
me share with you one of the most inspirational stories I’ve ever read that
illustrates this idea. It comes from the book Dale
Carnegie: The Man Who Influenced Millions by Giles Kemp and Edward
Claflin. The name Carnegie is synonymous with success. His Dale Carnegie
Institute for Effective Speaking and Human Relations currently trains people
all over the world. His book How
to Win Friends and Influence People has sold more than fifteen
million copies and continues to sell sixty years after it was first published.
But
Carnegie’s early life was plagued by failure. He grew up in poverty. When he
determined to attend teachers college in Warrensburg, Missouri, he was able to
do so only by living at home and riding to school each day on horseback.
Interested
in public speaking from his teen years, Carnegie decided that he wanted to
earn recognition at the college by entering speech contests. He never won a
single one, but he learned each time he tried and failed.
Despite
his hard work at the college, he failed to graduate when he couldn’t pass
Latin. So he moved from Maryville, Missouri, to New York City, where he tried
acting and sales, but he continued to come up short.
Then
he got what turned out to be a golden opportunity. He applied for a job at the
YMCA teaching classes on public speaking. Because he lacked experience, the
YMCA didn’t offer him the usual salary of two dollars per session. Instead,
he was accepted on a trial basis. If he was effective and retained students,
he would earn money. If not, he was out of a job.
Though
he had failed to win a speech contest or become successful as an actor, he
succeeded at the YMCA. Those early detours had taught him a lot. Soon he was
developing his own courses and writing pamphlets that he would later publish
as books. As Kemp and Claflin wrote, “Carnegie rose to fame as one of the
most effective trainers of speakers and one of the best-selling authors of all
time. Two keys enabled him to turn failure into success: his unwillingness to
be stopped by failure, and his willingness to learn from failure”
Willingness
to learn from failure and the ability to overcome it are inseparably linked to
each other. If you’re not continually learning, you’re going to make the
same mistakes over and over again. It’s okay if you fall down as long as you
learn something as you get up.
Austin
O’Malley asserted, “The fact that you have been knocked down is
interesting, but the length of time you remain down is important. As you
travel on the success journey, you will have problems. Are you going to give
up and stay down, wallowing in your defeat, or are you going to get back on
your feet as quickly as you can? Or as a college friend of mine used to say,
“I’m never down; I’m either up or getting up.”
A
lot of people don’t think that way. Some have been down so long that
they’re more comfortable lying down than they are getting back up. It has
become a way of life for them. In fact, some not only stay down, but they will
try to trip you up. Since they’re no longer interested in getting up, their
goal in life is to pull someone else down to make themselves feel better. If
you know people who act like this, steer clear of them.
When
you fall, make the best of it and get back on your feet. Learn what you can
from your mistake, and then get back in the game. View your errors the way
Henry Ford did his. He said, “Failure is the opportunity to begin again
more intelligently.”
When
most people try to gauge success, they judge it according to how little
failure they find. If they see flops or fumbles, they say, “He sure has
messed up a lot. He’s a failure.” But that’s exactly opposite of how
successful people see failure. They already know what the editors of Fortune
magazine found out several years ago when they analyzed successful
people. Most successes failed an average of seven
times before they succeeded. You see, the more you try, the greater
amount of failure you are likely to experience—and the greater amount of success.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather reach 90 percent of my potential
with plenty of mistakes than reach only 10 percent with a perfect score.
Each
time you run the race and fail to finish first, examine your progress. Success
is coming in fourth, exhausted, but excited because you came in fifth the last
time. It’s making progress. That’s what it means to fail forward and avoid
an unnecessary detour.
Nothing
is better at helping you deal with failure than perspective. Let me give you
an example. Tom Landry, Chuck Noll, and Bill Walsh accounted for nine of the
fifteen Super Bowl victories between 1974 and 1989. Do you know what else they
have in common? They also had the worst first-season records of any head
coaches in NFL history. Isn’t that incredible? If they had judged their
potential for success on their first year in professional football, they
probably would have quit. If life were a snapshot and it had been taken during
their losing seasons, they would have been in trouble. But life isn’t a
snapshot—it’s a moving picture. They were able to overcome their failings
and continue on the journey to reaching their potential.
Their
failure was not final, and neither is yours. The next time you blow it, think
about the big picture. There will be other days. We all make mistakes, but we
can come back.
I
mentioned before that occasionally, failure is a sign that you should explore
other opportunities. Although that is sometimes true, most often success comes
as the result of good, old-fashioned tenacity.
B.
C. Forbes said, “History has demonstrated that the most notable
winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed.
They finally won because they refused to become discouraged by their
defeats.” Failure comes easily to everyone, but the price of success is
perseverance.
I’ve
made a lot of mistakes and experienced many failures, probably more than the
average person, but I’ve also experienced more success. When I think back, a
failure that stands out in my mind was an incident that occurred when I was in
my first professional leadership position. I was twenty-two years old, and I
backed down from a challenge when I should have kindly, but firmly, confronted
the person who made it. As a result, I lost a lot of self-respect. I wimped
out when I should have stood strong.
After
that incident, my life could have taken a serious detour. I could have looked
in the mirror every day and beaten myself up, saying, “John, you are a
wimp—a failure. You’ll never be a success, and you’re certainly not a
leader.” But that’s not what I did; I took another route. Instead, I
looked in that mirror and said to myself, “Self (that’s where the sense of
humor comes in), you made a big mistake. If you don’t want to keep making
that same mistake again, you’d better do something about it.”
I
spent the next two days in my office with a legal pad thinking through the
process of positive confrontation. I carefully laid out a strategy for
confronting others so that the next time something like that happened to me, I
could do it right. The incredible thing is that it not only helped me to
succeed the next time, but over the years, positive confrontation has become
one of my strengths as a leader. In fact, I’ve taught more than ten thousand
leaders how to confront others through the INJOY Life Club, the equipping
tapes I send out to leaders across the country each month.
I couldn’t begin to list all my failures, but I can tell you with certainty that I’ll continue to add to that list. At fifty-four years old, I hope to have thirty more good years, and in that time, I’ll keep failing. The issue is not whether I am going to fail. Instead, when I fail, I need to determine whether I’m going to fail backward or forward— that’s the real question. The detours can make a person better or bitter. It’s my choice. And it’s also yours.