Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much!
The most important lesson I learned about failure is that without it, you do not truly understand success. When success comes too easily or too early in the process, we come to believe it is the natural state of things, and when failure comes at a later date in some form or another we are most often utterly unprepared.
There are some significant misunderstandings about failure. A common one, similar to one we seem to have about death, is that if you don’t plan for it, it won’t happen.
All of us fail. Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.
Two habits that don’t help:
While it may seem like these two choices increase your chances for survival or even promotion, in fact they merely insulate you from worthwhile failures.
I think it’s worth noting that my definition of failure does not include being unlucky enough to be involved in a project where random external events kept you from succeeding. That’s the cost of showing up, not the definition of failure.
Identifying these random events, of course, is part of the art of doing ever better. Many of the things we’d like to blame as being out of our control are in fact avoidable or can be planned around.
“Motivated employees make a huge difference in service” says David A. Aaker in his book, Strategic Market Management
Mind the gap
Like many busy moms, I willingly and sometimes, forcefully, take on everyone’s shopping in my family. This year, more than ever before, I’ve had the opportunity to experience the limits of customer service at retailers, more particularly, at Canadian retailers.
This has given me a pretty good insight in their practices and what the end user, the customer deals with. I will use this “experience” to bring you a series on Canadian retailers; the first topic is pretty general as it sets the tone and give you a fair idea of the landscape.
Does a stressful event start a cascade that ends up making even you more stressed?
If an authority figure corrects your behavior, does the intervention lead you to push back and make the behavior worse?
Does a failure set you on a path to more failure?