There is a famous commercial with Michael Jordan where he says, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
I have been fired twice in my career. Both times the reason given was probably not the truth. I could have blamed those reasons and moved on, but instead, I looked closer and realized my failures caused these things to happen. By embracing this, I have used them as fuel and motivation.
The first time was in a plane on a tarmac on the way to my wife’s second grandparent’s funeral that month. The call came from our company lawyer telling me that the founder “wondered how many grandparents can you have die in one month, and that my services were no longer needed.” To be honest I closed my flip phone and breathed a sigh of relief. He had been riding me into the ground for the past three months working 6-1/2 days a week and I hadn’t been able to figure out why, or how to fix things. I later realized that at that point in my life, I was 37 years old and had been extremely fortunate, and lucky, in all of my business opportunities. I succeeded when the deck was supposed to be stacked against me, and I not only knew it, I was counting on it. I was confident in my abilities and I welcomed all challenges. I was cocky. The owner knew it too and was trying to teach me a lesson. He threw everything he could at me and it hadn’t broken me yet, so he finally just fired me.
Now that got my attention! It was hard to sit at my in-law’s table and tell my family that their dad got fired and we would probably have to move. My older children put their heads down in their arms and got real quiet. My youngest, who was seven, came around the table, hugged me and told me “That’s OK, Dad. It will be alright.” I vowed right then and there that I would never do that to my family again. To make that come true, I had to learn humility.
The second time, I was just told that the company wanted to move in a different strategic direction. The real reason was that I had failed to change some key parts of the business because I thought I could do it on my own through the sheer force of my hard work, determination, and personality. I tried to be Superman, rather than surrounding myself with people who complemented my shortcomings.
Instead of trying to forget them, I chose to take two of the darkest moments of my life and use them to fuel my effort to work harder, surround myself with people more skilled than me, and just be a better person. I have failed over and over in my life. And that is why I succeed.
I recently shared a meme with my team of young leaders. It shows a dart board with darts all over the place, but none near the bullseye, and it is titled, “This is not failure.” Next to it is a picture of an empty dart board with the darts neatly in the rack above and it is titled “This is failure.” My reason for sharing this was I noticed that many of them were risk averse for fear it would derail their career. Maybe it is the cliche that as kids they all got trophies and no one ever lost. Or maybe they saw their mom and dad lose their jobs during the Great Recession. Regardless of the reason, I realized that I had to encourage them. No, I had to tell them, that they needed to fail, and fail often. Otherwise, they would never earn that motivation to succeed. I told them I had their back.
Wayne Gretzky famously said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” We need our young people to take more shots and fail. That way they will learn to succeed.
