-by Matt Leedham
Member of BNI Inner Loop Connection (meets on Thursday @ 7:30am at Westin Tysons)
The best way I know to succeed is to fail.
Fail. Fail as many times as you can, as fast as you can. Let failure tell you what was flawed in your original plan so you can tweak and adapt and fail again. Eventually, all of your tweaks and adaptations and scrapped plans and new schemes will equal a success.
REFRAME FAILURE (FAILURE IS FEEDBACK)
In 1978, two University of Illinois psychologists, Carol Diener and Carol Dweck, did a study on achievement and failure. They found that children who attributed failure to lack of effort did far better in achieving goals than children who attributed failure to lack of ability.
In fact, their study showed that if you trained children to attribute failure to motivation instead of ability, the children’s reaction to failure improved drastically. By disassociating failure with your ability or talent, it is much easier to learn from your mistakes and ultimately succeed.
TALENT DOESN’T EXIST EITHER.
This study reinforces concepts that we are just starting to come to terms with in the deconstruction of achievement – talent is overrated. In fact, if you focus just on your talent, or ability, as these psychologists named it, you are less likely to achieve your goals.
In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell wanted to figure out how people became extraordinary in their field. In a study of violin players enrolled at the prestigious Berlin Music School, the most “talented” players are the students who have put in the most practice. Again, this shows that success is related far more to perseverance than it is to talent.
In fact, there is now a movement in American education that asks parents and teachers to focus on hard work instead of innate talent. James Stigler’s book, The Learning Gap, posits that Asians do better than American students in math because they simply try harder. The Asian work ethic is that “nothing is impossible,” whereas Americans believe that their natural ability is paramount. Therefore, when an American student can’t solve a math problem quickly, they believe they don’t have “the talent” for math and quit. Asian students keep trying and trying, knowing that success is theirs if they work hard enough for it.
Jeff Weinstock, the Executive Editor of THE Journal sums up the moral of Stigler’s book nicely when he says, “Don’t call my kid smart, call her hard working.”
BE GRITTY.
Once you understand that failure is just feedback and that ability is ultimately a learned skill, the next step is to keeping yourself motivated to stay on target despite the challenges. Angela Lee Duckworth Ph.D. has spent the last ten years researching achievement and believes “grit” is the answer.
In a recent Tedx Talk, she discussed her research of incoming freshman at West Point in order to quantify their “grit,” which she defines as “tenaciously perusing something over the long term.” The survey asked students to respond to questions like “I finish whatever I begin,” “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge” versus statements like “My interests change from year to year.”
She found that the 96% students who scored in the highest quartile for grit were able to successfully graduate from West Point. In fact, people who scored highest for grit performed better than the students who were in the highest quartile of the “whole candidate score” which takes into account intelligence, physical prowess, and other factors that West Point believes are attributes of the most “talented” students.
SUCCESS IS A JOURNEY
Born in 1931 to sharecroppers, Carl Brashear was destined to fail. He was a southern black man with an 8th grade education growing up during America’s Jim Crow era, where his opportunities were constantly truncated by segregation.
He enlisted in the Navy and was relegated to the kitchen, where the only water he saw was in washing dishes. Undaunted, Carl doggedly pursued his goal of becoming a Master Diver in the Navy. He was turned down for diving school more than once before being accepted. He almost dropped out of the school he worked so hard to get accepted into because he was belittled and harassed daily by those who didn’t want any “n—-r divers” in the Navy.
Once he graduated from the grueling diving program, he was faced with another serious set-back – passing the educational requirements for divers. He quickly failed his first attempt at “first class school” because he didn’t know the math and science necessary to pass. Brashear spent years studying before re-entering first class and graduating third in his class, only 50% of whom even graduated.
Tragedy struck shortly after he became a first class diver. In a salvage rescue operation three years after his graduation, Brashear was seriously injured. In his attempt to get fellow sailors out of harm’s way when a large crate broke away from the ship, Carl was hit by a flying pipe below the knee. The injury to his leg was so great, he spent two months fighting infection and gangrene. When doctors told him that rehabbing his leg would take two to three years and still would leave him with a shortened leg that would prevent active duty in the Navy, Brashear chose to get his leg amputated below the knee.
Carl then began his own training regimen to return to active duty. After hours and hours of sneaking out of the Naval hospital for practice dives and strength training, Carl signed his own transfer papers ordering him back to diving school. He spent the next year proving to the Navy that he was fit for active duty.
After becoming reinstated as the first amputee diver in Naval history, Carl turned down other promotions to focus on his goal of becoming a Master Diver, the highest position you can hold in the diving community. Twenty-two years after Carl Brashear joined the Navy, he became the first African American Master Diver in the Navy’s history.
Carl’s story, which you may recall from its adaptation in the Cuba Gooding, Jr. movie Men of Honor, is the perfect example of success. Carl was not the smartest guy in the Navy, nor the perfect physical specimen. Brashear was simply the guy that would not quit until he reached his goal. He failed and he failed a lot. Achieving his goal was more than two decades – TWO DECADES – in the making.
Carl understood the formula for success is not about talent and not about being perfect, but about never quitting.
Posted by BNI NOVA 
