Musings on Leadership

I've written on the subject of defeats before but I came across a quote by Maya Angelou that I love: "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it." We've all suffered defeats. You didn't get the promotion or raise you felt like you had earned. You didn't get the job for which you were SO right. You asked someone out and they turned you down. Failure is a fact of life. I don't know of ANYONE who hasn't had at least one or two failures along the way. A study by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck, researchers at Columbia University, found that it's MUCH better to praise a child for his or her EFFORT instead of their RESULTS. They studied 412 fifth graders, ages 10 - 12, and found that when you praised children for being smart, they began to focus solely on results and began to resist trying anythin...

If Steve Jobs hadn't been fired from Apple, he never would have bought Pixar and then revolutionized Apple when he went back to the company. Walt Disney was fired as a newspaper editor for his lack of imagination. If he hadn't been fired, we never would have had Mickey Mouse, Disneyland, or Disney World. Colonel Sanders got his start with a restaurant by the side of the road. If it hadn't failed, there wouldn't be a KFC today. Failure isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it's impossible to achieve great things without it. But it's what you do with failure that truly matters. 1. Learn from the experience. Failure is just feedback telling you that something wasn't working and that you need to change it. Treat "failure" as feedback that will help you improve. Did you not work hard enough? Did you overestimate your abilities? Did you have the right resources? Do you need to tweak your plan? Remember your first few speeches? Did you g...

Maybe you haven’t achieved the success at work, diet and exercise, or in your relationships, that you’d like. If that’s the case, then you need to try something new. The challenge is that trying new, unfamiliar things, carries with it the possibility of failure. No one LIKES to fail. Everyone WANTS to succeed. Failure doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Failing doesn’t make you any less intelligent. It doesn’t make you any less capable. It doesn’t make you a loser. It simply means you tried something and it didn’t work out. Move on and try something else. History is filled with famous “failures”. It took Thomas Edison over 1,000 attempts to make a light bulb that worked. Have you ever looked at Abraham Lincoln’s list of failures? 1831 - Lost his job. 1832 - Defeated in his run for the Illinois state legislature. 1833 - Failed in business. 1835 - His sweetheart died. 1836 - Had a nervous breakdown. 1838 - Defeated in his run for Illinois House Speaker. 1843 - Defeated in a ...