When I was a kid, I worked winters as for the National Ski Patrol. Being a ski patroller sounds glamorous, but it actually involved a lot of waiting. To amuse myself during the downtime, I taught beginners how to ski. More often than not, what began as simply learning a fun sport would slip, twist, and slide into an emotional shit show. Skiers want to ski; they don’t want to fall. Falling is a big part of the ski learning curve, but mounting frustration and snow down your ski pants does not lead to progress. I quickly learned that if I wanted to actually teach people to ski, I had to first help them deal with their feelings of failure when they fell.
We hate to fail. It makes us feel like we’ve done something wrong. But by putting yourself in a position to fail—on the ski slope or in your business—you’ve done something very right.
The first step down any path is most likely failure. Most great tales of success begin rather grimly. Failure is a teacher—just not always the kindest teacher. Its lesson is to not quit and run in the opposite direction, but to learn from failure, to follow its lead. Failure is a test. Its purpose is to weed out those of us who don’t want things badly enough. It presents a choice—you can stay down or you can get up and try again. Failure is a shepherd who’s smarter than you.
Because of our reluctance to accept the hard lessons of failure, most of us fail even bigger—and don’t even know it. We slip into a mediocre life. We quit our goals, lose our “crazy” aspirations, and choose the “easy way.” The consolation prize is a flat screen TV and a bag of chips. From the outside, this looks like success, but it’s actually settling for less—comfort disguised as success.
The path to success is marked by failure. Not just once, but again and again. Accept it and learn. Reject it and . . . well, fail. I still teach beginners how to ski, and my best lesson is still, “If you’re not falling, you’re not skiing.”