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Opportunity Knocks:
Creative Ways to Make a Living Without A Job
How Do You
Overcome the Terror of Failing?
By Valerie Young
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Valerie and her rescue dog,
"Cokie Roberts" |
That was the question
someone asked in a recent survey of Changing Course readers. It was the second
time in as many months that someone who was getting ready to start a small
business talked about being “terrified” of failing. In neither case were we
talking about anyone putting their home up as collateral or sinking their life
savings into a venture. In fact, the stakes were relatively low. And all too
often this sense of terror at the prospect of failing can be paralyzing.
Every entrepreneur
experiences failures on the way to success. I am certainly no exception. While I
was still in my corporate job, I decided to produce a line of humorous greeting
cards on the side. I spent months drawing each card, surveying my friends to see
which ones people liked best, and then invested a couple of thousand of dollars
getting them printed. They sold pretty well in small gift stores in San
Francisco, Boston, New York, Hartford, Connecticut, and Provincetown,
Massachusetts. But about a year into it, I realized that it was the wrong
business for me.
Did I spend more money than
I made? Yes. But I never felt like a failure. To the contrary, I felt proud of
myself for giving it my best shot. I learned a ton about the greeting card
business which I’ve been able to share with others considering that same path,
and I moved on to my next venture with a much clearer picture of what I was
looking for in a livelihood.
No one sets out to fail and
certainly no one likes it when they do. But terror? There are things worthy of
being terrified about like global warming or a car bomb going off in your
neighborhood. Giving something your best shot and finding out that it didn’t
work, well, I call that “life.”
If you really want to change
course to work for yourself, then you absolutely must readjust your emotional
response to failure. This means embracing some fundamental truths about failure
that have guided successful people since the first caveman’s spear missed that
first wooly mammoth and he picked it up to try again.
To get you started, here are
six rules about failure,
mistake-making and risk-taking that every entrepreneur needs to
understand:
Rule 1: You’ll strike out
more often then not.
In baseball a .333 batting
average is considered outstanding. If you’re not a baseball fan, what this means
is that for every 10 pitches, the batter only has to hit the ball three times to
be considered exceptional. Even the legendary Babe Ruth “only” batted .342. The
point is, you can be at the top of your game and still strike out more often
than not. No one bats 1000, so stop expecting yourself to be the exception.
Rule 2: Failures offer
valuable lessons – and opportunities.
Believe it or not, there is
lots of good news about failure. Henry Ford understood that, “Failure is only
the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” In engineering, the process
of “failure analysis” is based on the recognition that you can learn just as
much from studying what went wrong as you can from what went right. It is this
understanding that led Thomas Edison to famously remark, “I have not failed. I
have successfully discovered 1,200 ideas that don’t work.”
Instead of seeing your flops
as evidence of your incompetence, think of them as information you can use to do
better next time. Do you need to develop or hone a certain skill? Do you need
more practice or a different approach? Do you need to delegate the things you’re
not gifted at? What will you do differently next time? What lessons can you
glean? The sooner you
grasp the learning value following what feels like a
setback, the better. The key is to fail forward.
Rule 3: Failure is just a
curve in the road.
I know how easy it is to be
so discouraged by setbacks that you just give up. But it’s time you start seeing
failure for what it is, a curve in the road and not the end of the road. Did you
know that Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper job for “lacking ideas”? Or
that H. Macy’s store failed seven times before it caught on? Or that Michael
Jordan was cut from his junior varsity basketball team? Did they give up? No.
If Abraham Lincoln had taken
failure as cause to quit, it would have changed the course of history. In fact
he suffered repeated failures on the road to success. After failing as a
storekeeper and a farmer, Lincoln decided to run for political office. He
failed. Once he finally did get elected to the legislature, he sought the office
of speaker and failed. He failed in his first bid for Congress. He failed when
he sought the appointment to the United States Land Office. And he failed when
he ran for the United States Senate. Despite repeated public failures, Lincoln
never saw failure as a reason to give up.
Rule 4: Not taking risks may
be the riskiest move of all.
So much of changing course
comes down to being able to shift your thinking about what “risk” really means.
It worked for Janice Bennett. Whenever people begin with “What if…” right before
saying “…it doesn’t work?” Janice would always finish their
question with, “…what
if it does?”
“Now,” says Janice, “is the time for me to [ask myself] not only what could
happen to me if I didn’t make the change, but what could happen to me if I DO?
Wow, those possibilities are endless. As morbid as it may
sound, at my funeral, I want it to be full, to be standing room only, to be
overflowing, to know that I made a difference in people’s lives, and I touched
them somehow.”
Just two weeks after Janice
shared her big
“aha” at the Changing Course Blog, she took her own advice. She took the
plunge and signed up for the Outside of the Job Box Career Expert and Small
Business Success Idea Consultant Course. I have no doubt that in the process of
realizing “endless possibilities” for herself, that Janice’s ability to turn
fear into excitement will indeed make a difference in the lives of everyone she
touches.
Whenever you try anything
new there will always the risk of failure. At the same time, not taking risks is
often the riskiest move of all. The reason Michael Jordon says he made so many
baskets is because he was willing to take so many shots, explaining, “I’ve
missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games.
Twenty-six
times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve
failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Rule 5: It’s not your
failures that count, but how you handle them.
Imagine making a major
mistake with 1 billion people watching. That’s what Miss USA Crystle Stewart did
when she fell during the 2008 Miss Universe pageant. She handled the fiasco by
putting on a radiant smile, picking herself up and clapping her hands over her
head as if to say, “Let’s have a round of applause.” This was not the first time
Stewart had to pick herself up after a failure. It had taken her five tries
before being crowned Miss Texas. As you think about launching that
entrepreneurial dream, remind yourself that it’s not your failures that count,
but how you handle them.
Rule 6: Choose what kind of
failures you want to have.
In his commencement address
at Macalister College, radio show host and author Garrison Keillor encouraged
his audience to “have interesting failures.” Let those words sink in for a
moment. Have interesting failures. Not only do you have a choice about
how you handle failure, you also have a huge say in what kind of failures
to have.
From time to time you’re
going to miss the mark. So why just be a failure at parallel parking or
balancing your checkbook when you can come in third at the National Jigsaw
Puzzle Championships, only write one children’s book, or make it only half way
up Mount Everest? The fact that you never fail is proof of only one thing – you
never tried.
Every day you get to choose
settling over reaching, inaction over action, continuing to live your life the
way it is over the life you could have. It really is your choice. As Billie Jean
King once said, “Be bold. If you’re going to make an error, make a doozey, and
don’t be afraid to hit the ball.”
Rule 7: Make your fear work for
you.
It’s one thing to quietly promise yourself that
you’re going to push past your fears and finally act on those long buried
dreams. It’s quite another thing to announce to the world your intention to
write your first chapter, hold your own seminar, figure out how to sell your
jewelry, learn a new craft, or whatever it is you’ve been “terrified” of doing.
It's quite another to announce it to the world.
Yet making a public commitment is one of the best
ways to ensure that you’ll actually follow through, because now you’ve built in
that all important accountability. After all, suddenly other people are watching
and waiting. Sure the naysayers are watching and waiting for any setback so they
can say, “I told you so.” But if you make a point to tell the “right” people I
guarantee they’ll be cheering you on. And guess what? When other people see you
taking steps, they’ll be inspired to act too.
That’s because action is contagious! Which is why
I’m asking all of the members of the Changing Course Club to add their goals to
a “Changing Course in 2009 Pledge list.” It’s a new section of the Club Forum
where members get to stand up and
publicly state their goal and one action they’ll take to get there and
the date they pledge to take that action. And, if they choose, Club Members can
sign up to be in a small Tele-Study Group or Dream Team to help one another stay
on track. (Not a member? Learn more at
ChangingCourse.com/changingcourseclub.htm)
With the New Year comes the
opportunity to start anew… to make new choices. Which will you choose – fear or
action?
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About the
Author
"Turning Interests Into Income" expert, Valerie Young,
abandoned her corporate cubicle to become the Dreamer in Residence at
ChangingCourse.com
offering resources to help you discover your life mission and live it. Her
career change tips have been cited in Kiplinger's, The Wall Street Journal,
USA Today Weekend, Woman's Day, and elsewhere and on-line at MSN,
CareerBuilder, and iVillage.com. An expert on the Impostor Syndrome, Valerie
has spoken on the topic of
How to Feel as Bright and Capable as Everyone Seems to Think You Are
to
such diverse organizations as Daimler Chrysler, Bristol-Meyers Squibb,
Harvard, and American Women in Radio and Television.
To read more
articles about how to work at what you love without a job go to
ChangingCourse.com/articles.htm
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