A husband and wife were out golfing together. On the par-four eighth hole, the husband hooked his drive into the woods. Angrily he prepared to expend a shot by pitching back out onto the fairway.
“Wait, dear,” his wife said. “See the barn over there between you and the green? If I open the doors on both sides, you could hit it right through the barn onto the green.”
She opened the doors, and the husband hit a screaming three iron, which ricocheted off the barn wall and hit his wife right between the eyes, killing her instantly.
A year later, the same fellow was golfing the same course with a friend. At the eighth hole, he hooked his drive again. He was all set to pitch out into the fairway, when his friend stopped him.
“Wait a minute. The only thing blocking your shot to the green is that barn. If I open up both doors, you can probably shoot right through the barn to the green.”
“No way!” screamed the man. “Not again. I tried that last year and got a seven!”
Okay, I admit that’s an awful joke. But as a golfer, I appreciate it. Some people learn, and some people don’t. And that brings us to the next quality that often separates those who learn from their losses and those who don’t. People often ask me what most determines if they will reach their potential. My answer: a teachable spirit.
What does it mean to be teachable? I define teachability as possessing the intentional attitude and behavior to keep learning and growing throughout life. Some people don’t have that. Jazz trumpeter and bandleader Louis Armstrong described them when he said, “There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t teach them.” Some people want to be right, even when they aren’t. And as a result, life is difficult for them. They never find the pathway of learning nor do they learn the lessons life offers to those with a teachable spirit.
Futuristic author and speaker John Naisbitt said, “No one subject or set of subjects will serve you for a foreseeable future, let alone the rest of your life.” In other words, even if you do know something well, it won’t do everything for you. Living to your potential requires you to keep learning and expanding yourself. For that, you must have a teachable spirit. If you don’t, you will come to the end of your potential long before you come to the end of your life.
If you want to be successful tomorrow, then you must be teachable today. What got you to where you are won’t keep you here. And it certainly won’t take you where you want to go. You need more than a great mind for learning. You need to have a great heart for learning. That’s what a teachable spirit gives you.
Recently I read about a study conducted by Mark Murphy, founder and CEO of Leadership IQ. His organization tracked twenty thousand new hires over a three-year period and found that 46 percent of them failed (got fired, received poor performance reviews, or were written up) within the first eighteen months on the job. The main reason for the failure was not lack of technical competence. Weakness in that skill area was a problem for only one person in ten. Almost 90 percent of their problems were the result of attitude. The top reason for their failure was lack of teachability! Murphy writes that 26 percent of the people who failed weren’t coachable. They lacked “the ability to accept and implement feedback from bosses, colleagues, customers, and others.”1
The saddest thing about that is attitude is a choice. So is teachability. We choose whether we are open or closed to new ideas, new experiences, others’ ideas, people’s feedback, and willingness to change. We can choose the pathway to a better future by developing a teachable spirit, or we can sabotage that future by pretending that we know everything we need to move forward in life—which, by the way, is impossible for anyone!
If you desire to find the pathway from failure to success, you need to become a highly teachable person. How do you do that? By cultivating the following five traits:
The attitude we carry with us in life sets the tone and direction for everything we do. In Life’s Greatest Lessons, Hal Urban writes,
Golfers know that the success of their game is determined by how they approach the ball. Pilots know that the most critical part of landing a plane is in making the right approach. Lawyers know that how they approach the jury will be a determining factor in each case. Approaching means getting ready, taking the preliminary steps toward some type of achievement. The right approach to anything sets the stage for creating the results we hope for. In essence, our attitudes are the way we approach life. And the way we approach it will determine our success or failure.2
People with a teachable spirit approach each day as an opportunity for another learning experience. Their hearts are open. Their minds are alert for something new. Their attitudes are expectant. They know that success has less to do with possessing natural talent and more to do with choosing to learn.
When we are young, parents, teachers, and the educational system take primary responsibility for our learning. But that external impetus and responsibility for us to learn is gradually withdrawn over the course of our educational career. As we get older, and especially when we enter middle school and then move beyond it, a dividing line starts to appear between those who continue to be teachable and those who resist learning. The choice we make at that time is significant. We can choose to remain teachable and fuel our internal desire to intentionally grow. Or we can become indifferent to the opportunities that present themselves for us to keep learning.
Philip B. Crosby, the author of Quality Is Free, says that people can subconsciously retard their own growth because they come to rely on clichés and habits instead of cultivating a teachable spirit. “Once they reach the age of their own personal comfort with the world,” says Crosby, “they stop learning and their mind runs on idle for the rest of their days. They may progress organizationally, they may be ambitious and eager, and they may even work night and day. But they learn no more.”
Being teachable depends on two things: capacity and attitude. Our capacity may to some degree be set. But our attitude is totally our choice. We must proactively decide to embrace an attitude of teachability. Research conducted at Harvard and other universities confirms the importance of attitude to people’s success. Attitude was found to be far more important than intelligence, education, special talent, or luck. In fact, it was concluded that up to 85 percent of success in life is due to attitude, while only 15 percent is due to ability.3 Those findings are very consistent with those of Mark Murphy.
Only rarely have I known a teachable person whose approach toward life was negative. Most people with a teachable spirit and positive attitude don’t allow negative ideas to hijack their thinking. Why? A closed mind does not open doors of opportunity. A scarcity mind-set seldom creates abundance. A negative attitude rarely creates positive change.
If you have not cultivated a positive attitude and teachable spirit, I encourage you to fight for them. The sooner you do it, the better, because as age increases, our negative thoughts, bad habits, and weak character traits become more permanently ingrained. Getting older doesn’t mean getting better. It just means you have less time in which to make the choice to become teachable. So make the choice to be teachable now. I know of no other way to keep learning in life.
As a young leader, I wanted to be successful, and I spent much of my time in the early years of my career searching for the keys to success. During that time, I attended a seminar where the facilitator asked us, “When you think of the most successful CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, what qualities do you think they possess?”
We responded with words like vision, intelligence, passion, determination, and work ethic. Our facilitator agreed that all those things were important, but said the word that best describes top leaders is teachability. He went on to define teachability as the ability and willingness to learn and put into practice whatever was needed to accomplish our goals.
As a young leader I was surprised by his comment. I had thought successful people figured out what they needed to do, and then stuck with it. The people in my circle who had been most successful had an attitude of “been there, done that.” They acted like they had it all figured out. As I grew older and gained more experience, I saw that their attitude got them only so far, and then they plateaued because they weren’t growing. I also realized that I would never get to a place in life where I had everything figured out. I would always need to keep learning. I would always need to keep getting better. Successful people are continually learning new things.
What’s the best way to do that? Have a beginner’s mind-set. Erwin G. Hall observed, “An open mind is the beginning of self-discovery and growth. We can’t learn anything new until we can admit that we don’t already know everything.” If you want to grow and learn, you must approach as many things as you can as a beginner, not an expert.
What do all beginners have in common? They know they don’t know it all, and that shapes the way they approach things. In general, they’re open and humble, lacking in the rigidity that often accompanies achievement. As Zen master Shunryu Suzuki wrote in the classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”
Most people enjoy being experts. In fact, some enjoy it so much and feel so uncomfortable as beginners that they work hard to avoid putting themselves in those situations. Others are more open and enjoy learning something new. When they are actually beginners, they find it easy to have a beginner’s mind-set. But maintaining that teachability becomes more difficult as you learn more and achieve some degree of success. It’s a challenge to remain receptive and open in every circumstance and situation over the course of time.
I try to maintain a beginner’s mind-set, but I have to admit it’s often difficult. To help me do it, I try to always keep the following three things in mind:
The other thing I do is focus on asking questions. For too many years I concentrated on giving answers. As a young leader, I felt that was expected of me. But as soon as I started to get over my insecurity, I discovered that asking questions did more for my development than answering them, and the moment I intentionally asked questions and started listening, my personal and professional growth took off. Asking questions can do the same for you.
Novelist James Thom remarked, “Probably the most honest, ‘self-made’ man ever was the one we heard say: ‘I got to the top the hard way—fighting my own laziness and ignorance every step of the way.’ ” Can you relate to that statement? I certainly can. I’m known for writing and speaking on leadership, but the most difficult person I have ever led is me!
Becoming and remaining teachable requires people to honestly and openly evaluate themselves on a continual basis. Any time you face a challenge, loss, or problem, one of the first things you need to ask yourself is, “Am I the cause?” This is a key to teachability. If the answer is yes, then you need to be ready to make changes. Otherwise you’re going to experience what one wit called “déjà-poo,” the feeling you’ve been in this mess before.
When people refuse to look in the mirror and instead look to other people or situations to blame, they keep getting the same result over and over. Perhaps the best description of this that I’ve ever found—and the solution—is contained in a piece by Portia Nelson called “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters”:
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost… I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find my way out.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I’m in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in… it’s a habit… but,
my eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
I walk down another street.
Recognizing your own part in your failings, seeking solutions (no matter how painful), and working hard to put them into place is teachability in action. And it leads to the ability to change, grow, and move forward in life.
Physician William Mayo prayed, “Lord, deliver me from the man who never makes a mistake, and also from the man who makes the same mistake twice.” There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes, but some people respond with encores. A teachable spirit will help to put a stop to that.
One day a fox, a wolf, and a bear went hunting together. After each of them caught a deer, they discussed how to divide the spoils.
The bear asked the wolf how he thought it should be done. The wolf said everyone should get one deer. Suddenly the bear ate the wolf.
Then the bear asked the fox how he proposed to divvy things up. The fox offered the bear his deer and then said the bear ought to take the wolf’s deer as well.
“Where did you get such wisdom?” asked the bear.
“From the wolf,” replied the fox.
Unfortunately, most of us are too much like the bear. We don’t like it when people speak the truth into our lives, and when someone has courage enough to speak up, we attack them. We need to react differently.
Teachable people need to surround themselves with people who know them well and who will lovingly, yet honestly, speak into their life. However, that can be a challenge—for many reasons. First, you must be willing to develop strong enough relationships with people that you can credibly ask them to speak into your life. Second, they must be courageous and honest enough to speak freely to you. And third, you must be willing to accept their feedback and criticism without defending yourself. Otherwise, you’ll only receive it once!
That process becomes further complicated if you are highly successful. When you are influential and highly respected, people tend to tell you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. They are seeking your approval, or they flatter you. Unfortunately, that creates a gap between what you hear and reality. If you find yourself in that situation, you will need to work extra hard to get the people close to you to speak honesty into your life. And you will have to become highly intentional in observing and listening.
Everybody needs someone who is willing to speak into his life. Ideally, it should be someone who is above you organizationally or ahead of you experientially. When I was leading a large church in San Diego, I invited feedback and criticism from Steve Babby, who oversaw the leaders of dozens of churches in Southern California. At least once a year I’d ask Steve to point out anything he thought I was doing that was wrong or weaknesses in my leadership that he believed might have me headed for trouble. After a couple of years of this, Steve once said, “John, you are the most successful person I work with, yet you are the only one who invites criticism. Why?”
“I don’t trust anyone with power that can’t be checked,” I answered. “Especially me.”
Writer Peter M. Leschak asserted, “All of us are watchers—of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway—but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.” Look for clues that you may be off track, and ask people to verify your suspicions. They will be more likely to speak freely if you’ve brought up your deficiency first.
I have to admit, listening is a learned skill in my life. Talking is much more natural for me. My mother used to tell everyone, “At six months John started talking and he never stopped.” It’s true. I never run out of words to say. I like to set the tone. I like to entertain. I like to teach and mentor. But talking isn’t learning. Listening is. Columnist Doug Larson said, “Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you would have preferred to talk.” I try to keep that in mind. If you’re a talker, you should, too.
The secret to any person’s success can be found in his or her daily agenda. People grow and improve, not by huge leaps and bounds, but by small, incremental changes. Children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman said, “We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.” She understands that progress comes day by day, inch by inch.
Teachable people try to leverage this truth by learning something new every day. A single day is enough to make us a little larger or a little smaller. Several single days strung together will make us a lot larger or a lot smaller. If we do that every day, day upon day, there is great power for change. Author and motivational speaker Dennis P. Kimbro gives insight into this in a piece he wrote years ago:
I am your constant companion. I am your greatest helper or heaviest burden. I will push you onward, or drag you down to failure. I am completely at your command. Half of the things you do, you might just as well turn over to me, and I will be able to do them quickly and correctly. I am easily managed—you must merely be firm with me. Show me exactly how you want something done and after a few lessons, I will do it automatically. I am the servant of all great men; and alas, of all failures, as well. Those who are failures, I have made failures. Those who are great, I have made great. I am not a machine, though I work with all the precision of a machine, plus the intelligence of a man. You may run me for profit, or run me for ruin—it makes no difference to me. Take me, train me, be firm with me, and I will place the world at your feet. Be easy with me and I will destroy you. Who am I? I am a habit.4
The habits you practice every day will make you or break you, just as Kimbro suggests. If you want to become a teachable person who learns from losses, then make learning your daily habit. It may not change your life in a day. But it will change your days for life.
If you believe in the idea of trying to learn something new every day, but you don’t know the best way to go about it, then I recommend that you engage in the following three practices every day.
If you want to be ready to meet whatever challenges you’re going to face on a given day and learn from them, you need to be prepared. That means working in advance—every day. As my old mentor John Wooden used to say, “When opportunity comes, it’s too late to prepare.”
How do I go about preparing for my day so that I can learn from it? I start each morning by looking at my schedule. As I review my commitments for the day, I ask myself some questions:
By looking for the probable teaching moments and preparing for them, I make learning possible.
The first time I met with Coach Wooden, I spent hours in preparation. I wrote pages of questions to ask him. After our first few hours in which he patiently answered my questions, I asked him if we could meet again in the future. I will never forget his answer. He said, “Yes, John, we can meet again. I can tell you will always be prepared for our time together.” What a great compliment. That was the beginning of many wonderful meetings. Every time I left this wise man, I felt fulfilled by what I had learned.
You don’t have to spend hours in preparation every day, though you may sometimes have things on your schedule that would warrant such preparation. Just plan to spend a few minutes each morning or the evening before thinking through what your day will be like and where the greatest potential opportunities lie for you to learn. You will be amazed by how often you can improve yourself just drawing on the people and experiences that are part of your daily life.
Time alone is essential to learning. Contemplation allows people to observe and reflect on the occurrences of their lives and derive meaning from them. Stopping and thinking allows us to gain perspective on both the successes and failures of our day so that we can find the lessons within them. It also enables you to plan how you can improve in the future.
It’s good to remember that there’s much to learn from negative experiences. In science, mistakes always precede discoveries. It is impossible to make discoveries without an accumulation of errors. To a scientist, a mistake is not failure—it’s feedback. Using that feedback, a scientist can ask not just “What happened?” but also “What does it mean?” That comes from using critical thinking skills. Without them, we miss the meaning of the occurrences in our lives.
When the lessons we learn come from mistakes, we must first determine if the mistake was due to ignorance or stupidity. Ignorance means we didn’t have the necessary information; stupidity means we had the necessary information but misused it.
As you spend time in contemplation, ask yourself questions like these:
I recommend that you set aside thirty minutes at the end of every day to think about the preceding twenty-four hours, contemplating what occurred and what you can learn from it. Not only will that help you to remain teachable, but you will also learn something every day because of the process.
The true value of teachability comes when we take something that we learn and apply it. We can learn a lot from our mistakes if we remain teachable. Not everyone does that. When people make mistakes, they generally do one of three things in response to them: They resolve to never make another mistake, which is impossible. They allow their mistake to make them into cowards, which is foolish. Or they make up their minds to learn from their mistake and apply the lesson to their lives, which is profitable.
Other times we learn from the positives and apply those lessons. Recently, my assistant, Linda Eggers, asked me if I wanted to see a list of all the books I had written. The big surprise to me was the number of books: seventy-one! I never dreamed that would be possible. I remember when I wanted to write my first book. The task was overwhelming. I chipped away at it for over a year, and even then I was able to eke out only 120 pages. I could hardly believe it.
What was the lesson I learned from that? If you keep focused on the task at hand and you keep working at it, day after day, week after week, year after year, you can accomplish much. But there was also another lesson. The only reason I was able to write so many books was that I take a similarly disciplined approach to learning. I try to learn something new every day. And because I do that, the pool of what I’m learning keeps growing, not diminishing. A friend recently asked me how many more books I want to write. I don’t have a specific number. The answer will be determined by whether I remain teachable and keep applying what I discover. As long as I’m still learning, I will continue to have something to say.
Some people may be tempted to think that teachability is for people with advantages and that it’s more difficult for people who are underprivileged, facing adversity, or suffering pain to be teachable. But I don’t think that’s true. I believe teachability is an attitude, a mind-set that teachable people carry with them wherever they go and whatever they experience.
A great example of this can be found in the life of Richard Wurmbrand, who was born in Romania in 1909. As a young man, he went into business. By the time he was twenty-five, he had made a lot of money and was living the high life. When he was twenty-seven, he contracted tuberculosis. His poor health prompted him to reexamine his life, and he became a person of strong faith. So did his wife a short time later. A few years after that, Wurmbrand felt compelled to become a minister.
During World War II, Romania suffered under the Nazis and Soviets. Wurmbrand recalled,
As the war progressed, many of the Christian minorities… were massacred or driven into concentration camps with the Jews. All of my wife’s family were carried off—she never saw them again. I was arrested by the Fascists on three occasions; tried, interrogated, beaten, and imprisoned. So I was well prepared for what was to come under the Communists.5
As the end of the war neared, Russian troops poured into Romania and it fell under Communist rule. The persecution of Christians, especially pastors, became commonplace. In February 1948, Wurmbrand was arrested. “I was walking alone down a street in Bucharest,” he recalled, “when a black Ford car braked sharply beside me and two men jumped out. They seized my arms and thrust me into the back seat, while a third man beside the driver kept me covered with a pistol.”6
The Communist secret police had taken him, accusing him of spying for the West. They left him alone for months at a time. At other times he was tortured and questioned. Often they tried to get him to confess to crimes he had not committed. At other times they tried to get him to implicate other “conspirators.” Wurmbrand was willing to inform on himself, but never on others. He was put in solitary confinement for three years with nothing to read and no writing materials. He was placed in a cupboardlike area with spikes on the walls for days at a time. In all, he spent fourteen years in various Communist prisons. After he finally got out and moved to the West, he founded Voice of the Martyrs, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping persecuted Christians.
During his imprisonment, Wurmbrand made it his goal to learn. His particular focus was on his spiritual development. But he also tried to pass on his teachable spirit to others while incarcerated. Once when a fellow prisoner was being led away to a punishment cell where many prisoners had died, Wurmbrand, who had previously been put in the same cell, said to the man, “When you come back, tell us what you have learned.”
Why would Wurmbrand do that? He was trying to remind the man to maintain a teachable spirit so that he would have hope and keep on living.
The desire to learn is a great motivation to keep on living, whether you are a child first exploring the world, a worker, a prisoner, or an elderly person in the December of life. It keeps us young and alive and full of hope. That is the power of remaining teachable.