Tag Archives: quote

If I never fail…

I’ve written a lot about failure. Just click the ‘failure‘ tag under this post and you’ll see my most recent thoughts (including this one).

But today I actually share the words of someone else. I saw a video clip of Adam Grant on LinkedIn, where he said the following:

If I never fail, it means I’m not challenging myself. I actually set a goal that I would start at least one project every year that didn’t succeed. And let’s be clear, I’m not aiming for failure. What I’m doing is creating an acceptable zone of failure to know that’s going to motivate some risk-taking and some experimentation and hopefully some growth. If you succeed on 90% of your projects, that should be a hugely successful year. If you succeed on 100%, I think you’re aiming too low.

Brilliant!

This is what I said in a post a few years back, about how even ‘A’ students should have tried at least one epic thing and failed:

Every student will encounter failures later in life, ‘in the real world’, so if we don’t challenge them in school, we have not given them the tools to face adversity later on. The question we have to ask ourselves is, “Are we challenging students enough, so that they are maximizing their learning opportunities?” 

Two sides of the same coin. But I like Adam’s framing of it a lot better than mine. I prefer to think of it as failure brings growth and inspires new experimentation rather than failure prepares you to face even greater failure in the future.

Do the thing

“Preparing to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.

Scheduling time to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.

Making a to-do list for the thing isn’t doing the thing.

Telling people you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.

Messaging friends who may or may not be doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.

Writing a banger tweet about how you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.

Hating on yourself for not doing the thing isn’t doing the thing. Hating on other people who have done the thing isn’t doing the thing. Hating on the obstacles in the way of doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.

Fantasizing about all of the adoration you’ll receive once you do the thing isn’t doing the thing.

Reading about how to do the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading this essay isn’t doing the thing.

The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.” ~ Strangest Loop

It doesn’t matter if it’s a workout, a phone call, a challenging conversation, or even a blog post. The task won’t get done unless you actually do it. That said, if you want it done, it’s good to schedule it, it’s good to add it to your tasks, and it’s good to tell people and make the thing public. The quote above doesn’t dismiss doing these preparatory things, it just identifies that these aren’t enough.

The only thing that is enough is doing the thing.

Kids do well if they can

I love this video by Ross Greene:

Moving from ‘kids do well if they wanna’ to ‘kids do well if they can’ is a significant change in philosophy. I like that Ross admits that this philosophy is “a lot harder and… more productive”.

It’s easy to blame a kid who doesn’t want to do school work. It’s hard to figure out what’s getting in the way of their learning. But which of these models provides the most reward, for the student and the educator?

I know there are students who are really hard to figure out. I know there are students who refuse to accept help. I know there are educators willing to bend over backwards to support kids who still opt out. But if you believe they will do well if they can, then you are still in a better mindset to find a way to support a student than you would be believing they just don’t want to do the work.

Kids do well if they can.

Lifestyle as process, not outcome

I love this quote:

New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do.

And a lifestyle is not an outcome, it is a process. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results. ~ James Clear, author of Atomic Habits.

Regular fitness, listening to audio books while I work out (and instead of the radio in my car), regular writing, time restricted eating, and daily meditation… these are lifestyle choices I made, I track daily, and I hold myself accountable to.

This year I made lifestyle choices that have made me feel so much better about myself.

Result: I have more of myself to offer to others, family and work. Sure, I still feel overwhelmed at times, and I still feel like I’ve got more on my plate than I can handle, but I also feel more resilient and up for the challenge.

Lifestyle is a process, not an outcome, and I’m working on that process daily. As I approach my one-year anniversary of tracking these things, I now need to reexamine my process. What am I now doing regardless of my tracking, that is now habit, and what do I need to track more closely to ensure I’m refining the process, and my habits, to make my lifestyle even richer and more rewarding?

Ben-Horowitz-Leadership-Quote

Tough Leadership Decisions

Here is a great quote by Ben Horowitz on the Tim Ferris Podcast:

“One of the most important kind of leadership skills:

…If you make decisions that everybody likes all the time, then those are the decisions that they would make without you. So, you are not actually adding any value… Almost by definition a lot of the most important decisions end up being ones that people don’t agree with, don’t like, and are difficult, and cause people not to like you, at least for a while.”

I’ve shared before that “As a leader if we don’t have relationships where we can go to the hard places, then we aren’t being the best leaders we can be.” The Horowitz quote adds a whole other element to this. We really are not being leaders if we are only making decisions that would happen without us. If that’s not what we are doing, then we will obviously be making decisions that not everyone will approve of. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we don’t try to create a common vision, and it doesn’t excuse us from treating everyone as team members who can contribute to that vision… but sometimes we need to make hard, unpopular decisions.

Something that I can critique myself on, and that others might be able to empathize with, is that sometimes I delay those hard, uncomfortable conversations or redirections for too long. I spend too much time trying to get everyone on board with a new idea, or I walk on eggshells leading up to the shift. One thing we do need to recognize is that sometimes our decisions can affect others far more than they affect us, and so the readiness for change is not always evenly distributed. Resistance can come from unexpected places, and ripple in unforeseen ways. This isn’t always because of poor leadership or communication, but rather something we need to respond to after making tough leadership decisions.

Change is hard to lead. These 3 images (and the accompanying blog post) examine the challenges of embracing change, resisting change, and also inspiring change.

But as Ben points out, even when we work hard to inspire change, sometimes we have to make unpopular decisions, ones that not everyone will agree with. At that point, you aren’t going to win a popularity contest, and you aren’t necessarily going to be inspiring. But it is in these moments that you’ve got to decide if it is more important to go to the hard places of making such decisions, or if you would rather do something that could be done without you there as a leader?

I think truly great leaders define themselves when they are making tough leadership decisions, rather than when they are making popular decisions. Although when it is you that has to make those decisions, it doesn’t feel always feel great. Ben continues in the podcast to describe this feeling as ‘running towards the darkness’. When you are making tough, unpopular decisions you can feel alone and uncertain, but that’s probably better for your organization than yielding to decisions that are easier to make, but less likely to have a favourable outcome.

Ben-Horowitz-Leadership-Quote

The pain of inaction

“Most failures are one-time costs. Most regrets are recurring costs.

The pain of inaction stings longer than the pain of incorrect action.
~ James Clear

When I look back on my life, I have very few regrets. I do not look back longingly, I look back fondly. I look at my mistakes as lessons, and my repeated mistakes as necessary because I wasn’t yet ready to learn the lesson. But when I do think of regrets, it is almost never for the things that I did, but rather the things that I did not do.

I regret not appreciating the outdoors enough on a beautiful day, not taking a photo, not spending more quality time with a lost friend or family member. I do not regret trying something challenging or new. Indecision or lack of action are far more likely to haunt me than a bad decision.

I remember reading once that this Shakespeare quote was wrong,

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.”

In reality the hero confronts the same thousand deaths the coward does, except the hero actually faces them. Heroes are not ignorant of the same fears and worries of the coward, they just don’t cower at them.

“The pain of inaction stings longer than the pain of incorrect action.”

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Image by MDARIFLIMAT