It would be wonderful if the gun in the airport incident were the only dumb major mistake I’ve made in life. Sadly, that is not the case. That was the worst of them, but there have been many other incidents of stupid-is-as-stupid-does.
A classic one occurred in 2000. At that time, I was working on my book The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork. About a month before the manuscript was due, I was scheduled to go on a two-week speaking tour in Africa. What a great opportunity to finish writing the book, I thought. And it was. I can still remember the satisfaction I felt at Victoria Falls, when I finished the work. It was on the very day I was to return to the United States. With a great sense of completion and fulfillment, I put the manuscript into my briefcase and headed home.
When I arrived back in the United States, my son-in-law Steve picked me up at the Atlanta airport. He was going to drive us straight up to Highlands, North Carolina, because Margaret and our daughter Elizabeth, who is married to Steve, were waiting there for us. After the long flight, I was hungry, so we stopped to pick up some Mexican food on our way out of Atlanta, and off we went.
As Steve drove, I rode in the passenger seat and got ready to eat, but I managed to drop my fork. I tried to reach down and find it, but it was hopeless. “Steve, pull over, will you?” I finally asked. And Steve, who is used to this sort of thing from me, pulled over to the side of the road so that I could make my search. I got out, started feeling around, and still I couldn’t find it. Finally, I moved my briefcase, which was sitting beside me on the floor, and there was the fork. Fantastic! I could finally eat! I climbed back in, and off we went.
About twenty minutes later, after I’d finished my food, I looked over and said, “Where’s my briefcase?” That’s when it hit me. When I was looking for the fork, I had taken out my briefcase and set it on the side of the road. And I never put it back in the car!
The loss of the briefcase would be bad enough, but you have to understand that when I write, I don’t use a computer. I write everything out on a legal pad by hand using a four-color pen and taping quotes and illustrations right on the paper. There is no backup. There’s only one copy, and that copy represents months of work.
We had gone twenty miles by the time I realized what I had done. The instant I figured it out, we turned around. And while we were driving back, I was already calling Linda, my assistant. She lived only five miles from that spot, and I knew she could get to it quickly, probably before we did.
A few minutes later my phone rang. I answered with great hope, but my heart sank when she gave me the news that the briefcase was gone! When Steve and I arrived, there was Linda. Sure enough, she was in the right place, but there was no sign of the briefcase. I felt sick.
We noticed that there were a few stores close by, so we went to each and asked if anyone had picked up a briefcase and turned it in there. No luck. The briefcase and my manuscript were gone!
Over the next several days, I was overwhelmed with emotions. I felt:
At that time, the poem “The Land of Beginning Again” by Louisa Fletcher Tarkington came to mind:
I wish that there were some wonderful place
Called the Land of Beginning Again
Where all our mistakes and all our heart-aches,
And all of our poor selfish grief
Could be dropped, like a shabby old coat, at the door,
And never put on again.1
While I was feeling discouraged, Linda was undaunted. She started calling local police precincts to see if the briefcase had been turned in to them. On the fourth day, Linda struck gold. The briefcase had been turned in. Better yet, everything was still in it—including the manuscript. We all rejoiced, the book was published, and all was well. However, even to this day, whenever I pick up The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork I think of my bad experience and the lessons I learned from it.
Obviously, no one goes out of the way to have bad experiences. But the truth is that the negative experiences we have can do us some good, if we are willing to let them. The next time you have a bad experience, allow it to help you do the following:
No matter how hard we try, no matter how talented we are, no matter how high our standards may be, we will fail. Why? Because we’re human. Nobody is perfect, and when we have bad experiences, we should allow that to be a reminder to us that we need to accept our imperfections.
I came across an article by Larry Libby written about President George H. W. Bush that reminded me that everyone has a bad day, even a president. Libby wrote,
He longed for a Single Dazzling Moment. A defining performance in a long and storied career. It was a state dinner in Tokyo. The political and economic shoguns of Japan arranged themselves around a table that shone with white silk, gold utensils, and brilliant floral arrangements. American business moguls were there, too, silently willing their leader to throw all the condescending smiles back in their hosts’ faces. The world’s media packed the back of the hall, microphones open, video cameras rolling. Trouble was, he’d been feeling a little funny all morning. A little light-headed. A little shaky. But this was one of those times when personal comfort had to be shunted aside. These meetings—this very dinner—carried huge implications for American business and the world economy. He simply had to be in top form. He simply had to make a commanding impression. He had just worked his way through the second course—raw salmon with caviar—and was now staring dubiously at the third—grilled beef with pepper sauce. He turned to his left and nodded at his smiling host, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. And then he threw up in the Prime Minister’s lap and tumbled to the floor. As his alarmed wife, security agents, and personal physician knelt on the floor beside him, he groaned, “Roll me under the table until the dinner’s over.” Lying there on that fine oriental carpet, President George Bush may have been thinking about the videotape. He may have been visualizing CNN replaying the whole thing. Over and over. In prime time. In slow motion. In full color. And he would have been right.
A little later, when Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater stood before the massed media of the Western world, he was obliged to say what ought to have been obvious to everyone.
“The President,” he intoned, “is a human being. The President gets the flu like everyone else.”2
When you have a bad experience, I hope you will give yourself some grace—whether it’s a matter beyond your control or because you make a mistake. You’re only human, and you shouldn’t expect yourself to be perfect.
I have discovered that if I’m willing see the humor in my bad experiences, I will never run out of things to laugh about. Does laughing fix everything? Maybe not. But it helps. Laughter is like changing a baby’s diaper—it doesn’t permanently solve any problems, but it makes things more acceptable for a while.
One of my favorite stories related to bad experiences is about a man who sent a business friend flowers on the day of his grand opening. However, the order was handled badly by the florist, and the businessman received a bouquet that was intended for a funeral. It was accompanied by a card that said: “My deepest sympathy during this time of sorrow.”
When the man called his friend on the phone to wish him well, his friend was confused. “Why in the world did you send me these sympathy flowers?” asked the businessman.
The man who had sent the flowers went immediately to the florist to demand an explanation.
“I am terribly sorry about the mix up with the flowers,” said the florist, who was obviously upset, “but I hope you will be understanding. Your situation is not half as bad as the one down at the funeral home. The folks there received your flowers accompanied by the card, which said: “Best wishes in your new location.”
President Abraham Lincoln, who led the United States through its darkest hour, was well known for finding ways to laugh at himself and the difficult situations he faced. In fact, he was criticized for it. But that didn’t stop him. Addressing a group of critics, he said, “Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh, I should die.”
Sometimes it’s hard to see the humor during a difficult experience. Often I say to myself, “This is not funny today, but tomorrow it may be.” That was the case when I took the gun into the airport. That day, I was embarrassed and humiliated. But only a few days later, I was able to see the humor and absurdity of my actions. How much lighter would your load be if you were to find ways to laugh when you were faced with bad experiences?
When you have a bad experience, which of the following phrases is most likely to represent your thinking?
Your answer says more about your perspective than it does about the bad experience. That’s why the responses to the same bad experience can be so varied.
Author and speaker Denis Waitley says, “Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what is called experience.” Seeing difficulties as experience is a matter of perspective. It’s like the difference between going in the ocean as a small child and as an adult. When you’re little, the waves look massive, and you fear that they may overwhelm you. As an adult, the same size waves may be seen as a source of relaxation and fun.
When facing difficulties, maintaining perspective isn’t always easy, but it is worth fighting for. As you work to maintain the right point of view, try to keep these three things in mind.
You are not your performance. And you don’t have to be defined by your worst moments. So don’t base your self-image on those things. Instead, try to understand and accept your value as a human being. If you fail, don’t ever tell yourself, “I am a failure.” Instead, keep things in perspective and say, “I may have missed that one, but I’m still okay. I can still be a winner!”
One of the worst things you can do to lose perspective is to start feeling sorry for yourself. Okay, if you have a bad experience, you can feel sorry for yourself for twenty-four hours, but then after that, pick yourself up and get moving again. Because if you start to wallow, you just might get stuck.
Psychiatrist Frederic Flach in his book Resilience points out that survivors of bad experiences don’t let the negatives in their lives define them, and they don’t wallow in self-pity. They don’t believe their negative experience is the worst thing in the world. Instead, they think, What happened to me may have been bad, but other people are worse off. I’m not giving in.
If you find yourself in the aftermath of a bad experience, try to remember that if you’re still breathing, it could have been worse. Try to focus on the good you can make of the difficulty. Because of the experience you’ve gained, you may even be able to help others who have gone through similar difficulties.
When we fail or have a bad experience, we need to learn to become more like scientists and inventors. When their work fails, they call it an experiment that didn’t work. Or they say they tested a hypothesis. Or they term it data collection. They keep their perspective, avoid taking it personally, learn from it, and leverage it for future success. What a great way to look at things.
Psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers asserted, “The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.” Or to put it another way, as longtime baseball manager Casey Stengel did: “You gotta lose’m sometimes. When you do, lose’m right.”
Swimmer Eric Shanteau has called the 2004 U.S. Olympic Swim Trials “the most devastating experience of my life.” That’s quite a statement considering Shanteau was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. What would make those Olympic trails such a difficult experience? He finished third—and only the first two places in the trials make the Olympic team. In fact, it happened twice during those trials. He missed second place in the 400-meter individual medley by 0.99 seconds and the 200-meter individual medley by 0.34 seconds. Shanteau recalls,
The initial reaction was anger. I remember walking down that deck being very frustrated. You see a lifelong goal slip out of your fingers in the last five meters and it’s brutal. It was very, very hard. I didn’t want anything to do with the sport for about seven weeks after. Finishing third at the trials, you might as well get last.3
He may have wanted to give up, but he didn’t. He got back in the pool and trained for another four years. His reward in 2008 was making the team in the 200-meter breaststroke. Though he didn’t medal in Beijing, he did swim a personal best. He kept training and returned to the Olympics again in 2012 in London. He won a gold medal by swimming the breaststroke for the team in the 4×100-meter medley relay.
What does Shanteau know about bad experiences that most people don’t? He knows that:
If you want to succeed in life, you can’t give up.
Author and speaker Og Mandino, whose work influenced me greatly, said, “Whenever you make a mistake or get knocked down by life, don’t look back at it too long. Mistakes are life’s way of teaching you. Your capacity for occasional blunders is inseparable from your capacity to reach your goals. No one wins them all, and your failures, when they happen, are just part of your growth. Shake off your blunders. How will you know your limits without an occasional failure?” He goes on to say, “Your turn will come.” What great advice!
Back in the days when the only way to watch sports was on network television (unless you actually went to the event), the premier show was ABC’s Wide World of Sports. For three and a half decades, the show opened with various sports images and a narrator saying, “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports… the thrill of victory… the agony of defeat.” To illustrate the latter, it always showed a ski jumper heading down ramp, and then suddenly going off course, spinning, crashing through the supporting structure, and then bouncing on the ground. It looked like a horrendous crash.
What most people didn’t know was that the skier’s fall wasn’t a freak accident. He chose to fall rather than to finish the jump. An experienced jumper, he realized that the ramp had become icy, and he was picking up so much speed that if he completed the jump, he would probably land far beyond the sloped landing area and hit level ground, which might have killed him. So instead, he changed directions. What looked like a catastrophically painful accident actually resulted in no more than a headache, whereas what would have looked like a great jump might have been fatal.
The lesson to be learned from this is that one of the things that’s worse than a bad experience is letting that bad experience become an even worse one—if you have the power to stop it. How do you gain the power to recognize when an experience is going from bad to worse? By learning from previous experiences using critical thinking skills.
If you find yourself in a bad experience, one of the first things you should try to do is determine if the bad experience is a result of ignorance or stupidity. Ignorance means that you didn’t have the necessary knowledge to do the right thing. A person can hardly be blamed for that. Stupidity is the result of knowing what to do but not acting upon that knowledge.
| BAD EXPERIENCES BASED ON IGNORANCE | BAD EXPERIENCES BASED ON STUPIDITY |
| “I didn’t know better, so I did it.” | “I knew better, but I did it anyway.” |
| “I didn’t know better, so I didn’t do it.” | “I knew better, yet I didn’t do it.” |
Bad experiences based on ignorance require learning. If you have a teachable spirit, as I discussed in chapter 7, not only can you stop a bad experience from getting worse, you can make it better. On the other hand, bad experiences based on stupidity usually come from lack of discipline and poor choices. Changing those requires not only teachability but also a change in behavior. If you don’t make those changes, the bad experiences will likely keep coming and keep getting worse.
Everyone can relate to having bad experiences in life. But not everyone works to turn the bad experiences into good ones. That is possible only when we turn our losses into learning experiences. You just have to remember that bad experiences are bad only if we fail to learn from them. And good experiences are almost always a result of previous bad experiences.
For years I have been a pen collector. Maybe that’s because I actually use a pen, not a computer, when I write. In my search for interesting pens, I came across an interesting story about a young insurance agent who had been working to win a new client for quite a long time. Finally, he was successful and persuaded the man to take out a large policy.
The agent arrived at the potential client’s office with the contract ready for a signature. He placed it on the man’s desk and took out a fountain pen. But as he removed the pen’s cap, it leaked ink all over the contract, ruining it.
The agent prepared another contract a quickly as he could, but by the time he returned, the window of opportunity was closed. The would-be client had changed his mind and declined to give the agent his business.
The young agent was so disgusted with the pen and the problem it had caused that he devoted his time to the development of a reliable fountain pen. That young agent was Lewis E. Waterman, and his company has been in the business of producing fine pens for 120 years. He not only took a bad experience and turned it into a good experience, but he created a well-respected and lucrative business from it.
I started this chapter with the story of my bad experience losing my briefcase and the manuscript inside it. How did I take that bad experience and turn it into a better one? I decided that day to always make a copy of anything I write in addition to the one in my possession. I also learned to get anything I create into the hands of Linda, my assistant, as soon as I am done with it, whether it’s a chapter of a book or a lecture I’ve written. And I never carry a complete manuscript in my briefcase.
Will I lose my writing material in the future? Probably. I am just not very careful. Will it be the only copy of my material when I lose it? Never! That’s the perspective I’ve gained from that bad experience.
As you face bad experiences, it’s important for you to remember that you can rarely see the benefits while you’re in the midst of trouble. You usually gain perspective on the other side of it. That was certainly the case for Giuseppe, who was named for his father, an immigrant from Italy who had settled in California. Because they lived in America, the family called him Joe. But his father had his own nickname for him: Good-for-Nothing. Why did the elder Giuseppe call him that? Because Joe hated fishing. That was seen as a terrible thing by the father, because he was a fisherman. He loved the fishing business. So did all of his sons—except for Good-for-Nothing Joe. The boy didn’t like being on the boat, and the smell of fish made him sick.
The boy offered to work in the office or to repair nets, but his father was simply disgusted with him and said he was good for nothing.
The boy, who was not afraid of hard work, delivered newspapers and shined shoes, giving the money to the family, but since it wasn’t fishing, the elder Giuseppe saw no value in it.
Young Joe hated fishing, but he loved baseball. His older brother used to play sandlot ball, and Joe used to follow him there. And he was good—something of a legend among his playmates. When Joe was sixteen, he decided to drop out of school to become a baseball player. By the time he was through with baseball, he was a legend. He was christened as Giuseppe, but the nation came to know him as Joe DiMaggio, called the most complete player of his generation.
And his father, the elder Giuseppe, what did he think about it? Though he had wanted all of his sons to enter the family business, he was finally proud of his son and respected his accomplishments. How could he not? Joe took the bad experiences and turned them into great experiences through the perspective of learning.