failure, A Man and His Bicycle

February 18, 2022February 16, 2022

Owning Your Life

Card that states, "If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door." - Kurt Cobain — Photo by **Annie Spratt** from **Pexels**

As I was skimming through my newsfeeds today (yes, I still us an RSS reader), I came across an article title that reached out and grabbed me: ‘Most of Us Look for Ways to Feel Offended’: How to Break Out of Toxic Patterns and Start Living. What caught my eye was the first part, since too often I have noticed exactly that: often people seem like their trying to be offended.

Interestingly, I had a discussion just today with a colleague who was put off by the manner and tone an individual was using to provide valuable insights during a teleconference. I had previous interactions with the individual who was providing the feedback, so I understood that right or wrong, that was his style. I told my colleague that the person was providing valuable feedback, probably earned through some painful lessons, despite the somewhat tactless approach he used to convey his points.

One of the reasons I’m able to work with just about anybody, is that I realized that everyone has their own set of ‘filters’ through which they experience the world. These filters not only bias the way in which people perceive the world, but also the way the interact with it, including with other people. Additionally, not everyone has learned how to communicate effectively. Top it all off with individual quirks, some more pronounced that others, and you can get some rather interesting interactions.

I’ve found that the trick is to separate the personality from the message. While some people are utterly toxic, others just have certain idiosyncrasies to their approach. Once you understand a person’s style, even if you don’t particularly like it, you can still work with them effectively. Maybe you don’t want to invite them over for dinner, but at least you can interact with them and not get all bent out of shape. Another key is to realize that most of the time, it’s never about you – even if the person you have to deal with is somewhat obnoxious. Finally, it’s just not worth the energy to get all bent out of shape over someone’s personality, particularly is you have to work with them (of course harassment, bullying, threatening, etc. is never acceptable, but that’s a different story altogether).

The part of the title that mentioned being easily offended is why I clicked the link, but that was only one little piece of the article; the author offers 7 additional maxims that amount to the fact that you need to ‘own’ your own life, control what is within your control, and don’t cede control to other people or things you cannot change. I highly recommend reading the entire article, and really reflecting honestly on the 8 points. They are proven concepts that increase the likelihood of living a happier, more fulfilling life.

“Everything we think, say and do in life is a choice. Regardless of what’s happening to us, we always have a choice in how we respond, and when we leave our focus and energy there, we find ways to win and succeed.”
Amy M Chambers

March 14, 2021March 14, 2021

Rethink Failure: What Can You Learn?

A few years ago I read The 12 Week Year by Brian Moran, and signed up for the associated email newsletter. One of the latest emails linked to a short video called “Rethink Failure”. All too often, we see failure as a permanent condition, something to avoid. We fear criticism and judgement – from other as well as from ourselves – and use ‘failure’ as proof that we’re not good enough. Not only is this just untrue, but it’s unhealthy and nonproductive. First of all, things will not always go perfectly. Secondly, you can’t grow and improve your skills without ‘failing’ along the way – just like you weren’t born able to walk or talk. Cut yourself some slack. Instead of beating yourself up, figure out how to learn from ‘failures’. That’s how the most successful people get where they are. I know – much easier said than done. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

November 12, 2020October 25, 2020

How to Practice

Looking back throughout my life when I’ve tried to learn new skills, I’ve realized that I hadn’t been practicing in the most effective way, so my success was limited and progress slower than I’d expected. It was only recently in starting to learn to play guitar from Justin Guitar (www.justinguitar.com) that I started to appreciate more effective ways to practice. In fact, Justin has a whole area of his website devoted to practicing, though he also mentions some of these throughout his tutorials. A few key lessons from Justin stand out for me:

Set goals regarding what you want to achieve and why – this helps motivate you, especially when practice gets boring or you are trying to figure out how to do something really difficult.
“Practice makes permanent.” Note he says “PERMANENT”, not “perfect”! It means that whatever you practice will be ingrained and retained…all the more reason to practice doing the skill the right way!
Following closely on #2, start slowly and pick of speed as you improve. Remember that you want to learn how to do it right, so you need to move at a pace that allows you to do the skill correctly, not quickly, to start with.
Practice the fundamentals. Keep practicing them. Fundamentals are the foundation for more advanced skills.
“Don’t practice what you know, practice what you don’t know.” The stuff you haven’t yet mastered is the stuff you need to practice. Focusing on the stuff you don’t know can be frustrating simply because you don’t know it, but the only way to ever become good at it is to practice it. The natural inclination is to switch to what you can do since it’s easier and more fun, but that won’t help you progress.
‘Playing’ is not ‘practicing’. Practice is very focused on learning how to do something very specific (like playing a specific chord, changing between two chords, etc.) and do it properly. Playing is for enjoyment using what you have learned.

I used to mistake ‘playing’ for ‘practicing’, so it was much more difficult to learn a skill. Now I try to break things into smaller parts to focus on, then practice those specific things over and over – and try to get feedback to make sure I’m doing it correctly (preferably from an expert). That allows me to show a marked improvement on those fundamental skills, and lets me fit the separate fundamentals together more easily.

In addition to continually hammering on the fundamentals, it’s also important to take time to ‘play’. While effective practice is critical to learning something properly, you also need to play around and have fun with what you have learned so far. You need a balance between practice and play in order to maintain interest while also improving your abilities.

Another aspect critical to learning a skill is to be willing to have failures and setbacks along the way. Part of learning involves taking small risks, experimenting, and stretching yourself outside your comfort zone. A book I read recently(Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future, by Leonard A. Schlesinger, et. al., Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) with respect to entrepreneurship discusses this at length – how to fail quickly, cheaply, and often. Why? Because you can also learn a lot from your ‘failures’. It is important to note here that ‘failure’ in this sense means that the result of an effort or experiment did not have the intended results. We leverage these failures by analyzing them, learning the proper lessons from them, and applying the resulting experience towards the next ‘experiment’. Using failures to build wisdom that guides us forward closer to our desired futures is a positive, healthy, productive attitude. Conversely, wallowing in despair over each failure is debilitating and destructive. Likewise, failing on purpose by not giving your best effort and then using that as an excuse to quit is unhealthy as well.

As I mentioned above, it was only recently that I’ve truly begun to appreciate how to practice properly and balance practice with play. While I am no means an expert (yet), I have used these techniques to improve my skills in photography, playing guitar, and learning trials biking. In each of these areas, I have watched myself progress – with the biggest leaps in progress following focused repetition of one or more fundamentals. Often you have only seen the end result where I seem to pick up some skill out of nowhere, What you typically have not seen is all the underlying practice. Maybe the once exception has been trials biking. How many times have you seen me attempting the same thing over, and over, and over, and over. How many times have you seen me fall off my bike – whether it be a simple ‘dab’, a controlled bail-out, a back-flop, or a launch over my handlebars? So when you see me actually successfully pull off a trick, you know it was not my first attempt – by that point I’ve tried it a zillion times, and probably crashed and burned the first half-zillion. You know, because you’ve seen a lot of the unsuccessful attempts and the hours upon hours of practice I put in. I didn’t just hop on a bike and nail a perfect endo first try – I face-planted quite a few times first (hint: that’s why I practice on the grass…it’s softer than pavement).

Hopefully you can benefit from this insight and get much more out of your practicing (of whatever skills you wish to learn). I sure wish I knew how to practice properly when I was a kid.

[Note: I originally wrote this as a life lesson for my son on September 25, 2017.]

October 29, 2020October 25, 2020

Don’t Be Afraid To Fail

Believe it or not, failure is an essential aspect of learning – whether you’re learning to ride a bike, developing a new technology, building a business, or simply learning a new subject in school. The goal is not to fail intentionally or to fail because you didn’t do your best, but rather to understand that when you try something new, failures are likely to occur. Every failure contains a lesson – this is what makes failures so valuable. The key is to learn the correct lessons from each failure and to adapt accordingly.

Unfortunately, fear of failure stops many people from even trying. The pain, frustration, cost, and embarrassment of their own past failures or mistakes teaches them that failure hurts – so they avoid failure (I struggle with this myself). The irony is that while failure can sometimes be difficult, being willing to fail and learn from it is what it takes to achieve great things. However, embracing failure does not mean taking dangerous risks and making huge “blind leaps”.

The secret is to learn how to take calculated risks toward your objectives. It’s important to guide your choices with some level of information and analysis. The trick is to know when to act since you’ll never have perfect and complete information. Then act (practice, experiment) in some small way and learn from what worked and what did not work. By constantly taking steps and keeping the risks relatively small, you’ll always be learning, growing, improving, winning. It’s certainly not easy, but it works.

James Dyson is a well known inventor and entrepreneur who embraces failure and emphasizes it’s important role in success. I recommend reading this article and listening to this interview with Mr. Dyson.

[Note: I originally wrote this as a life lesson for my son on April 15, 2016.]