Seth Godin has attributed his success to the fact that he has failed more than anyone he knows. If you don’t know Seth Godin, he has been writing daily on his blog since 2002 and is one of the leading thinkers of our time.
When I heard him share this idea in a podcast I listened to, it made me think of something that wasn’t immediately obvious to me.
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Years ago, Mark Zuckerberg took the world by storm with Facebook and the internal motto of “move fast and break things”. The motto was shortened in the industry to “fail fast”.
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For the last several years I have been running leadership development programs and a core component of those programs has always been a variation on a “learning group”. A group of learners going through a shared experience and learning from each other while they progress.
Historically about 80% of learning groups that I have looked after have been miserable failures. The leaders do not take the time to meet with each other and when they do, they do not have anything meaningful to say to each other so little value is produced.
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I am afraid to be judged. I am afraid to do what I need to do to achieve my potential. I am afraid I will not be able to provide for my family. I am afraid I will go all in and not find the success I am looking for. This fear of failure is getting in the way of the progress I need to make. I know all of this, and I still struggle to do what needs to be done.
(more…)At work I look after a program designed to help senior leaders progress at Microsoft. COVID-19 introduced interesting challenges to our program, as it was originally designed to be in person. In one case, a key experience of the program, we did not convert to virtual because we felt the impact in person could never be matched virtually.
Things changed and we decided to convert the experience. My first thought was, there is no room for failure with this audience – we must succeed. This is one of the core experiences leaders have at Microsoft and there is no room for failure at this level.
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I teach and invite people to act. Proud husband, father and amateur pizzaiolo