TOW#497 — iFail
What’s the secret to success?
Making the right decisions!
How do you make the right decisions?
From experience!
How do you gain experience?
By making bad decisions!?
Last week, someone on FB shared a meme with this interesting and very accurate message: “In order to make right decisions, or at least fewer mistakes, in any sphere of work, experience is of great importance.” Experience means making successful decisions, but also unsuccessful ones, and the latter ones mean wasting time and energy, ‘digging in the dirt’, a business collapsing and coming back to life… In short, experience means both positive and negative sets of events. And, having repeated the cycle many times, we gain more experience and make better decisions — we become wiser. However, as the Native Americans say, “in the end you become wise, but then you’re old.” That’s why we always say that older people are wiser and that they make more rational decisions.
For better or for worse, experience is connected to age. Since we can’t change this and thus gain experience sooner, my advice is that you should look positively on all experiences that you have in your life (and work). Often, when something unpleasant happens or a project fails at work, we immediately think that it’s the worst thing that could have happened to us. But we don’t understand that precisely because of that thing that’s happened, in future we’ll make another decision that’ll help us achieve much greater success.
If you read a book on ‘how to achieve greater success’ or you listen to a motivational speaker, they all talk about how and what to do to be better in sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, business, etc., and they all highlight their positive experiences and habits / practices. Rarely does someone ‘boast’ about their failures.
A few years ago I was invited by a youth initiative to introduce myself to their students with an ‘iFail’ concept, which proved to be a surprisingly fascinating experience. The idea was to present one of our projects that failed in the past and explain what lessons we learned (key conclusions). It was a wonderful experience, both for me and for the participants, because several people from various fields presented their ‘iFail’ projects and explained what they learned. Just for your information, while I was deciding on which project I would present at the event, I opened the folder of failed projects and there were around 25 serious ones. These aren’t just projects for which we wrote an application, applied, and in the end we weren’t chosen. They’re all projects that had their own beginning and end, from the development of the idea, to realisation, commercialisation and ultimately the closure of the project. I must point out that in those moments these were catastrophic problems and serious blows to our business, but from this perspective we look upon those situations as fantastic experiences which helped us achieve greater success with the projects that followed.
Therefore, in future, don’t be afraid or ashamed of your failures. They only serve to make you wiser, stronger and more experienced.
Wishing you success with the changes to come,
Petar Lazarov
“Tip of the Week” Team member
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