It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)
Greetings to you!
Each week I send out a short leadership blog that's called "Tuesday at 2:00pm". The purpose of this is simply to provide a brief thought on leadership that you can read and think about in just a few minutes. I send it out every week at 2:00pm (PST) and encourage you to make an appointment with yourself to pause and think about the thing I'm writing about.
Russ...
LEADERSHIP QUOTE:
"Success is usually the culmination of controlling failure" Sylvester Stallone
What does this stir up? Either write me HERE or comment at the end of the blog post HERE.
A LITTLE BIT DEEPER:
It's summer and I thought I would go a little "lighter" with some quotes over the next few months, and I'll continue with some thoughts from Rocky Balboa aka Sylvester Stallone this month.
The Sylvester Stallone story and the Rocky Balboa have some similarities in that both people didn't believe that either of these "characters" would succeed. People told Stallone for years that he would never make it as an actor, and the character of Balboa was a "down and out" fighter who no one believed in.
The story for both of them is a story of failure after failure that eventually leads to success, however that story isn't a simple story.
For Stallone, even after his break-out role as writer, director and lead actor in the film Rocky, he continued to have things fail and then he'd find success.
This quote is a really good reminder that most of us won't have a couple of failing moments followed by great success. Our story is usually a lot messier and we will continue to fail at things along the way, and that is OK.
The word Stallone uses in this quote it "controlling failure". I interpret that as "managing failure". We can't control everything that comes at us but we can manage our response, our attitude and how we allow these things to affect us.
Here's the truth: We will fail at times. All of us. This is how we learn, how we grow, how we adapt and how we move towards success.
Every once in a while there's the success story that comes out of nowhere when someone happens upon a crazy product or opportunity and it's a life-altering success story, but this isn't normal life for most of us.
For most of us, it's a journey of small success, repeated failure, and constant and steady growth that redefines how we define success.
What failure have you experienced in life and leadership that helped to shape you for success? Describe that...
DEEPER STILL:
I played around with an import business while in college, and my friend Jim and I were going to bring Ecuadorian scarves to the world.
The process was simple: buy the product, and get it to the US, then find an outlet for sales.
We tested the market at a local swap meet, and they sold really well. We were sure that sales would go through the roof.
We imported more product in anticipation of our booming sales.
We even met with a couple of national retail stores to pitch the product, and everything was moving forward.
Then out of the blue, we went back to the swap meet to make some sales and no one was buying. Just a few months earlier we couldn't keep these things in stock, and now they were piling up and we both realized a couple of things:
We didn't want to sell scarves for a living
We couldn't understand why they had sold the first time and not the next couple of times
Import business really only worked if you could scale to larger numbers with smaller margins
As college students, we weren't ready to take that leap so we hung-up the scarf business, went back to focusing on our schooling, and tried a couple of other businesses along the way.
We also left a couple of trunks full of scarves in my parents garage that we eventually gave away.
Was this a failure? Sure it was, but we learned some lessons along the way and we both have continued that entrepreneurial journey in a variety of ways, to both some great failure and some great success.
What did I learn?
Be passionate about what I'm committing my time to
Find a partner who is in it with you. It's much better to fail alongside someone else
Learn when to walk away and when to "double down"
Focus my energy on things that are important at the time. In this case it was my education, but other times it's been my family, relationships, my faith and my values!
What have you learned about "managing your failure" along the way?
Things I'm Reading, Listening To and Watching This Week:
I picked up Andy Stanley's book Not In It To Win It again today. It's worth a re-read.
John Maxwell wrote a great book years ago on failure called Failing Forward. Some great challenges to us about failure.
I'm listening to Johnny Cash Essentials on Apple Music today. My neighbors were playing some of his songs last week and I've been humming them all week.
I just started this series on Apple TV called The Last Thing He Told Me. I have no idea where it's going, but I'm watching!
Found these Wedge Blocks to use at the gym when I'm doing squats. Makes a huge difference and is supposed to be safer!