Preface
At the outset a question comes to mind, "Why write a book focused on failing?" First, as you will soon discover, this book is actually a book on a primary secret to success—how to harness the Power of Failure. Nevertheless, the real motivation that led me to write this book is more personal. On many occasions people have said to me something like, "You are obviously a very successful person. Don't you ever fail at anything?" By outward appearances, my life may seem to be mostly filled with success, such as having published 12 books and 100 articles or having received a number of awards during my academic career. But frankly I find this kind of comment rather embarrassing.
I'm embarrassed because I know what they apparently don't: that I have failed far more than I have succeeded. Sometimes people point to one of my previous books. They may point to the success of SuperLeadership: Leading Others to Lead Themselves that I co-authored with my good colleague Hank Sims, Jr., which won a national book award and became a national best-seller. They just see the end result, but I remember how many times we rewrote chapters that weren't working and the fact that the book was rejected by about 30 publishers before finally being signed by a risk-taking young editor. The truth is that the book almost never saw the light of day.
Or they might point to my career as a professor. I am very fortunate and honored to currently hold the Nirenberg Chair of Business Leadership at the University of Massachusetts. And I previously held appointments at several major universities, including a Marvin Bower Fellowship at the Harvard Business School that was awarded for, in their words, "outstanding achievement in research and exceptional promise . . . in business scholarship." What people don't know is that I struggled a great deal in my early career, first to find a job at all after college and then both in retailing (I truly failed relative to most standards in that brief experience) and in my early years as a young professor. It would be difficult for me to even calculate how many papers I have had rejected by journals, how many students didn't care for my teaching style, and how many business executives found my consulting to be less than exceptional.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that I consider myself a failure in work and life. On the contrary, I consider myself to be a considerable success. When people say that they think I am a successful person, that is not what I find embarrassing. It's that they seem to think I do not, never have, and apparently never will, fail in significant ways. What I am saying is that I truly believe that I owe most of the success I have enjoyed to my willingness to fail, to fail repeatedly, and to fail well. That is really why I am writing this book: to give failure the credit it deserves and to hopefully help others discover the rich rewards it offers when it is handled wisely.
This short book is filled with simple ideas about how to use failure in the short run in order to succeed on a long-term basis, throughout a lifetime. It is written for anyone who would like to increase his or her awareness and ability to reap the rewards of the many inevitable failures that we all experience in our lives. This recognition can be a very freeing experience. It can feel wonderful to drop the heavy weight of trying to explain away our human fallibility, of feigning perfection, and of denying that when we take risks and try new worthwhile things we will surely make mistakes.
Of course, some mistakes should not be made, such as when we recklessly endanger the lives of others. At the same time, when we sincerely do our best with good intentions and come up short, it rarely does much good to dwell on our immediate failure. If we really want to do better next time around, it is far better to reframe our view. It is not that we have failed and that is the end of the story but that we are in the ongoing developmental process of succeeding. I hope that by the time you finish this book you will enjoy many of the benefits that flow from learning this ultimate secret—the way to realize meaningful success is to harness the Power of Failure.
