FAILURE TO SUCCESS

Good day,

Today’s post is a reminder that no great achievement happened to any successful person without the lessons learned by failing.

I read in one of John C. Maxwell’s books about an experiment performed by an art teacher that demonstrates this point well. The teacher explained to the class that they would be divided into 2 separate groups and graded accordingly by two different methods.

Group one would be graded purely on the quantity of works they produced. At the end of the semester the teacher would weigh the amount of crafts each student had created and the grades would be based on the quantity alone.

The second group would be graded on quality. They only had to produce one piece of work, but that work had to be perfect.

The results were a surprise to me.  The best QUALITY of the work in the class was created by the students in the 1^st group. The group that was graded on quantity learned so much by making mistakes that their craft became better and better and they produced the best works.

By contrast the second group spend most of their time theorizing on how to produce the perfect work. Most of their efforts was theory and the work itself was unremarkable.

We need to learn by making mistakes. No amount of knowledge is worth a damn if you don’t take action to perfect that knowledge in its application.

For those of you who are parents take this to heart. Let your children make mistakes and help them learn  from them. If we try to prevent mistakes our children will be handicapped instead of protected.

The next time you make a mistake, realize that you are perfecting your skills. Shrug off the disappointment and move on to do it again. Learn, act, analyze. That is the way to perfection.

In a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, I read that on average it takes 10,000 hours of practice for someone to become an EXPERT on something. Can you imagine all the mistakes one has to make in that time? That is the price one has to pay to be great at something. The next mistake you make is one stepping stone closer to ultimate success.

I hope you enjoyed this post. To your success.