“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
—Bill Gates
We took seriously what Bill Gates said, when, at our last Sales, Authenticity & Success (Sassy) Mastermind retreat, we created our first-ever Failure Festival.
You read that correctly. In a safe and structured environment, we split our Sassy members into groups and invited them to share their biggest failures and the lessons learned. And, boy, were we all enlightened.
Each group then picked its top failure, and acted it out as a skit on stage, along with a one-line proverb to summarize the lesson.
They were all great, and here are three of our favorites:
- When people show you who they really are, believe them.
Who hasn’t learned this lesson the hard way? Well, this time it was the lesson learned from one of our Sassies who hired an online virtual assistant. During the interview process when she was researching the candidate, she noticed that many of the links on her website were broken, and that the video she had of herself was very sloppy, but she hired her anyway. Needless to say, the work produced was just that: incomplete and sloppy, teaching her the lesson that when people show you who they really are, by all means, believe them! - Be congruent. Your customers are always watching you, even when you don’t think they are.
The first time that one of our Sassies was being interviewed on video Skype, she thought that when she stopped speaking, the audience couldn’t see her anymore. Yes, you may have guessed it, she started picking her nose. Ouch. While the skit gave us all a good laugh, the experience was mortifying for her. And it taught her the lesson: Be congruent. Your customers are always watching you, even when you don’t think they are. - Don’t get involved in businesses you’re not passionate about.
This is the lesson of a woman whom everybody had been telling that she should try her hand at real estate. So she bought an income property and proceeded to rent it out to some really bad tenants. It cost her years in court and a lot of money trying to evict them, not to mention the upset of the other people in the multiunit complex. She hated the whole thing from start to finish, and she learned the lesson: Don’t get involved in businesses you’re not passionate about.
Bonus lesson: Never give up.
And, finally, is this proverb from our greatest inventor of all time:
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” —Thomas Edison
In other words, never give up. You may be closer to success than you know.