Develop Tactics for Surviving Failure
October 2007

Thomas Edison was famous for his failures — thousands of them. Asked about the lack of results in many of his experiments, he said, “Results! Why man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.”

And that’s not a bad thing. As Woody Allen pointed out: “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sure sign that you’re not trying anything very innovative.” Edison was nothing if not supremely innovative.

Many believe that exceptional success is achieved only after one or more failures. Ruth King, who has owned seven businesses in the past 25 years, has documented her own failures, along with 50 other real-life “failures” in her book The Ugly Truth about Small Business (Sourcebooks, Inc., 2005). She’s learned from her mistakes and personal disasters the hard way, she says, stressing that failure should always be looked upon as a learning experience and an opportunity to consider “what happened, why it happened, what you learned from it and what you now know that you will never do again.”

Bouncing Back

Unfortunately, despite meticulous planning, many make the same disastrous mistakes over and over again, or buckle under to the same types of damaging events, which they never really saw coming. Bouncing back — and learning from these failures — is crucial.

King offers a number of survival strategies in her book. Some of the most important, she says, are:

• Pick yourself up. Put one foot in front of the other and ask, “what can I do to get through this particular crisis today?”
• Have a group of people around you, outside of your business, whom you can trust to provide perspective.
• Be flexible — the thing you think is the solution may, in fact, not be the solution.
• Surround yourself with positivity. “Don’t listen to the news: Listen to Zig Ziglar!”

Deal With Your Emotions

Most importantly, King says, learn to deal with your emotions. “If you’re too emotionally involved you can’t think rationally. Put the emotions aside, which is incredibly difficult at times. But once you get through the emotions, you can start thinking rationally and that’s when you start getting over it.”

Liz Cornish is an HR and organizational consultant and the author of Hit the Ground Running: a Woman’s Guide to the First 100 Days on the Job (McGraw Hill, 2006). Cornish interviewed 200 executives, most of whom had experienced tremendous setbacks and are all currently successful. She was inspired to write the book, she says, “because both my marriage and my business partnership simultaneously failed and I needed a focus.” Cornish recommends that those dealing with personal or professional failures, use the two following strategies to speed recovery from setbacks:

• Take hits with humor. Remember, there’s no mistake you will make that some other very smart, competent professional hasn’t made and survived. Keep your sense of humor and you will ultimately get results. Lose it and you get whiny, cynical and stuck.
• Look beyond the problem. If you remain very clear about what you want to accomplish, you can see beyond the setbacks. Focus on what you want to accomplish, not the difficulty of getting there. “For example,” she says, “I had to rewrite one chapter more than twenty times!”

And when recovering from failures, keep in mind what Winston Churchill, a man who suffered incredible failures and enjoyed even more incredible successes, had to say about it: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

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