英語范文背誦精華 13.5 Don't Worry About Failing

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Don't Worry About Failing

Ray Meyer led the De Paul University basketball team to 42 When his lost its first after 29 winning seasons. Team game straight victories at home, his response was: "Great! Now we can focus on winning, rather than on not losing." Meyer showed a spirit of working towards positive goals, pouring one's energy into the task, and not looking behind and making excuses for past events.

For a lot of people, the word "failure" carries with it a feeling of coming to an end, but for the successful leader, failure is a beginning, a seed of hope. Leaders don't allow themselves to be held prisoner by the fear of failure. They don't even use the word "failure", instead they rely on words like "false start, never failure."

One leader said in an interview "a mistake is just another way of doing things." Another said, "If I have a secret of leadership, it is to make as many mistakes as quickly as I can in order to learn." One recalled Harry Truman's famous saying: "Whenever I make a bad decision, I just go out and make another one."

Karl Wallenda, the great tightrope walker, usually walked without a net below him. He fell 23 meters to his death in 1978, during a midday walk in downtown San Juan, Puerto Rico. His wife recalled: "All Karl thought about for a period of three straight months was falling. It was the first time he'd ever thought about that, and it seemed to me that he put all his energy into not falling rather than walking the tightrope." Wallenda also carefully watched the workers put up the tightrope, "something he had never even thought of doing before."

From what we learned from interviews with successful leaders, it became clear that when Karl Wallenda poured his energy into not falling rather than walking the tightrope, he was almost certain to fail.

William Smithburg, the chairman of a large food company, took responsibility for two major "mistakes." he said "There isn't one manager who hasn't had a product that did badly. That includes me. It's like learning to ski. If you're not falling down, you're not learning."

The lesson here, understood by these captains of industry, is that failure equals learning. While we can't say that they exactly welcomed failure, they were uniform in their ability to profit from it. They used the healthy energy coming from failure to reach higher goals. Almost every "false step" was regarded as an opportunity and not as the end of the world.

Tom Watson, Sr., who founded IBM and was its guiding force for over 40 years, knew the importance of learning from mistakes. A young manager at IBM took a big risk on a product and lost over $10 million. After he climbed the stairs up to Watson's office, the nervous manager said, "I guess you want me to quit my job?" Watson said, "You can't be serious. We've just spent $10 million educating you! "

These leaders enjoy what they're doing. They have stopped worrying about failure. They are walking the tightrope.