Fail well. Everyone fails. Anyone you see succeeding is only succeeding at the things you’re paying attention to, I guarantee they are also failing at lots of other things. The people I respect most are those who fail well. I respect them even more than those who succeed. That is because failing is a painful experience while succeeding is a joyous one, so it requires much more character to fail, change, and then succeed than to just succeed. People who are just succeeding must not be pushing their limits. Of course the worst are those who fail and don’t recognize it and don’t change.
Don’t feel bad about your mistakes or those of others. Love them! People typically feel bad about their mistakes because they think in a shortsighted way about the bad outcome and not about the evolutionary process of which mistakes are an integral part. I once had a ski instructor who had also given lessons to Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time. Jordan, he told me, reveled in his mistakes, seeing each of them as an opportunity to improve. He understood that mistakes are like those little puzzles that, when you solve them, give you a gem. Every mistake that you make and learn from will save you from thousands of similar mistakes in the future.
Don’t worry about looking good, worry about achieving your goals.
Put your insecurities away and get on with achieving your goals. Reflect and remind yourself that an accurate criticism is the most valuable feedback you can receive. Imagine how silly and unproductive it would be to respond to your ski instructor as if he were blaming you when he told you that you fell because you didn’t shift your weight properly. It’s no different if a supervisor points out a flaw in your work process. Fix it and move on.
Get over “blame” and “credit” and get on with “accurate” and “inaccurate.” Worrying about “blame” and “credit” or “positive” and “negative” feedback impedes the iterative process that is essential to learning. Remember that what has already happened lies in the past and no longer matters except as a lesson for the future. The need for phony praise needs to be unlearned.
Observe the patterns of mistakes to see if they are products of weaknesses.
Everyone has weaknesses and they are generally revealed in the patterns of mistakes they make. The fastest path to success starts with knowing what your weaknesses are and staring hard at them. Start by writing down your mistakes and connecting the dots between them. Then write down your “one big challenge,” the weakness that stands the most in the way of your getting what you want. Everyone has at least one big challenge. You may in fact have several, but don’t go beyond your “big three.” The first step to tackling these impediments is getting them out into the open.
Remember to reflect when you experience pain.
Remember this: The pain is all in your head. If you want to evolve, you need to go where the problems and the pain are. By confronting the pain, you will see more clearly the paradoxes and problems you face. Reflecting on them and resolving them will give you wisdom. The harder the pain and the challenge, the better.
Because these moments of pain are so important, you shouldn’t rush through them. Stay in them and explore them so you can build a foundation for improvement. Embracing your failures, and confronting the pain they cause you and others, is the first step toward genuine improvement; it is why confession precedes forgiveness in many societies. Psychologists call this “hitting bottom.” If you keep doing this you will convert the pain of facing your mistakes and weaknesses into pleasure and “get to the other side” as I explained in Embrace Reality and Deal with It.
Be self-reflective and make sure your people are self-reflective. When there is pain, the animal instinct is flight-or-fight. Calm yourself down and reflect instead. The pain you are feeling is due to things being in conflict, maybe you’ve come up against a terrible reality, such as the death of a friend, and are unable to accept it; maybe you’ve been forced to acknowledge a weakness that challenges the idea you’d had of yourself. If you can think clearly about what’s behind it, you will learn more about what reality is like and how to better deal with it. Self-reflectiveness is the quality that most differentiates those who evolve quickly from those who don’t. Remember: Pain + Reflection = Progress.