What do you get if you follow through with all the ideas I’ve been discussing in this book? Is there a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow? What happens if you:
What happens? You are rewarded with Maturity: The Value of Learning!
When I say maturity, I don’t mean age. Many people think maturity is a natural result of getting older. When they encounter an immature person, they say, “Give him a few years and he’ll mature.” Not necessarily. Maturity doesn’t always accompany age. Sometimes age comes alone! No, to me a mature person is someone who has learned from losses, has gained wisdom, and possesses a strong emotional and mental stability in the face of life’s difficulties.
Author William Saroyan observed, “Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.” What Saroyan is describing is this kind of maturity. To some that quality comes at an early age. For others, it never comes.
George Reedy, who was President Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary, convinced the president that he should not have any assistants who were younger than forty and who had never suffered any major disappointments in life. Why? Reedy believed they lacked the maturity needed to advise the president. People who haven’t overcome major losses are prone to think they are invincible. They start to believe they are better than they really are and are inclined to misuse their power. Everyone who makes a major contribution to life knows what it is to have failures.
Fred Smith, a mentor of mine for many years, used to tell me, “I don’t think God is as interested in our success as He is in our maturity.” That is a sobering thought, but I agree with it. Maturity is more often developed out of our losses than our wins. But how you face those losses really matters. People suffer losses, make mistakes, and endure bad experiences all the time without developing maturity.
If you desire to gain the true value of learning that comes through maturity, then keep in mind the following truths:
First, you have to learn from your mistakes and losses. That’s been the common theme throughout this book. Learning is what investor Warren Buffett has done. People today know him as one of the richest men in the world. This elder statesman is well respected for his financial skill and wisdom, but those qualities have come as a result of learning from his losses. He says, “I make plenty of mistakes and I’ll make plenty more mistakes, too. That’s part of the game. You’ve just got to make sure that the right things overcome the wrong ones.”
Buffett’s mistakes include paying too much for businesses (Conoco Phillips and USAir), buying into sinking businesses (Blue Chip Stamp), missing great opportunities (Capital Cities Broadcasting), hiring poor managers, and running operations himself when he shouldn’t have. Yet one of the reasons he is so successful in the face of his losses is that he learns from his mistakes but he doesn’t dwell on them. I believe the key to being free from the stranglehold of past failures and mistakes is to learn the lesson and forget the details. That brings not only mental advancement but emotional freedom.
Learning from our mistakes is wonderful, but it means little if you don’t know how to turn the lesson into a benefit. That comes when we take what we’ve learned and apply it to our future actions. That’s what I have tried to do, though it took me a while to learn how to do it. Here are some examples of difficulties I faced, how they affected me emotionally, and how I tried to change my thinking and find the benefit of the experience:
These key experiences changed me. They taught me lessons, and I benefitted when I applied those lessons. When I was young, I mistakenly thought that as I got older and gained experience, I would make fewer mistakes and suffer few losses. That hasn’t been true. What I’ve discovered is that I still make mistakes and face losses, but I learn more quickly from them and am able to move on much more quickly on an emotional level.
If you want to gain the benefits learned from your losses and mistakes, don’t allow them to take you captive emotionally. Banker and speaker Herbert V. Prochnow asserted, “The fellow who never makes a mistake takes his orders from one who does.” Why? Because the person who advances in his or her career takes risks, fails, learns, and applies the lesson to gain the benefit. Observe any successful person, and you’ll see someone who doesn’t see a mistake as the enemy. If they have any regrets, they are likely to be like that of actress Tallulah Bankhead, who said, “If I had my life to live over again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.”
Many years ago I came across a verse that I feel accurately describes the human condition. It says,
Two natures beat within my breast.
The one is foul, the other blessed.
The one I love, the other I hate,
The one I feed will dominate.1
I believe both positive and negative emotions are contained within each of us. There are people who teach that we should try to eliminate all negative feelings from our lives, but I have never been able to do that. I have tried, but I found that I simply can’t. However, what I can do is feed the positive thoughts until they become dominant over the negative ones.
It’s said that General George Patton, a fearless warrior of the U.S. Army during World War II, thought of himself as anything but brave. When an official praised his acts of heroism, Patton’s response was, “Sir, I am not a brave man. The truth of the matter is I am usually a coward at heart. I have never been in the sound of gunshot or sight of battle in my whole life that I was not afraid. I constantly have sweat on my palms and a lump in my throat.” How was someone so afraid able to be so brave? He fed the right emotions. Or as Patton put it himself: “I learned very early in life not to take counsel of my fears.”
I try to feed the right emotions within myself by acting on the emotion that I want to win. “Do something every day that you don’t want to do,” advised author Mark Twain. “This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.” Acting on the right emotion will lift you to success. Acting on the wrong emotion will lower you to failure.
I once had lunch with Dom Capers, the successful NFL coach. One of the things he said during our conversation was, “Maturity is doing what you are supposed to be doing, when you’re supposed to be doing it, no matter how you feel.” That’s true. The key to success is action. Too often we want to feel our way into acting, when instead we need to act our way into feeling. If we do the right thing, we will eventually feel the right feelings.
Og Mandino, author of The Greatest Salesman in the World, said, “In truth, the only difference between those who have failed and those who have succeeded lies in the difference of their habits.” By encouraging the right emotions within us through positive action over a sustained period of time, we can actually form the habit of taking the right action. And that often leads to further positive results. As poet John Dryden put it: “We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.”
In Life’s Greatest Lessons, Hal Urban writes about the power of good habits. He says,
The original meaning of habit was “garment,” or “piece of clothing.” And as with garments, we wear our habits daily. Our personalities are actually a composite of our attitudes, habits, and appearance. In other words, our personalities are the characteristics by which we’re identified, the parts of us which we reflect to others. As with our clothes, all of our habits are acquired. We’re not born with any of them. We learn them, just as we learn our attitudes. They develop over time and are reinforced through repetition.2
Good habits require discipline and time to develop. Urban goes on to describe how Benjamin Franklin developed the habits he thought would improve him. Franklin listed thirteen qualities he desired to possess, ranked them in order of importance, and then gave each its own page in a small notebook. He would concentrate on one quality each week, making notes in his little book. In time, he developed the qualities he admired, and it changed him from who he was to who he desired to be.
People in high-pressure careers seem to learn this lesson early, or they don’t reach the highest levels of success. For example, in professional ice skating, they call it “staying in your program.” When a skater is doing a routine, if he makes a mistake or takes a fall, he is supposed to immediately get up and jump right back into his program—whether he’s competing in the Olympics in front of hawk-eyed judges and millions of television watchers or practicing on his own in the early morning hours. It requires focus and the ability to live in the moment. Why is that important? Because to succeed at that high level, you can’t allow a challenge to get you off track. You need to cultivate the habit of executing and following through.
If we want to gain the value of learning, we need to be in the habit of executing at a high level, rain or shine, success or failure, setback or breakthrough. We need to heed the advice of Nobel Peace Prize winner Fridtjof Nansen, who said, “Have you not succeeded? Continue! Have you succeeded? Continue!”
I’ve touched on this point before, but it bears repeating. There is a definite connection between success and a person’s willingness to make sacrifices. Author Arthur C. Brooks recently wrote an opinion column for the Wall Street Journal that addressed this subject. In it, Brooks states, “People who cannot defer current gratification tend to fail, and sacrifice itself is part of entrepreneurial success.” He cites a study from 1972 in which Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel conducted an experiment involving small children and marshmallows. Researchers offered the children a marshmallow but stated they could receive a second one if they waited fifteen minutes without eating the first. Two-thirds of the children failed to wait.
One of the most intriguing things about the study was what researchers discovered later. When they followed up on the children to see how their lives were turning out, they found that the children who had delayed gratification scored on average 210 points higher on the SAT, were less likely to drop out of college, made a higher income, and suffered from fewer drug and alcohol problems.
Brooks goes on to explain some of the implications of the research. He writes,
But the evidence goes beyond a finding that people who can defer gratification tend to turn out well in general.
When we hear about successful entrepreneurs, it is always as if they had the Midas touch. A pimply college kid cooks up an Internet company during a boring lecture at Harvard, and before lunch he’s a billionaire. In real life, that’s not how it works. Northwestern University Professor Steven Rogers has shown that the average entrepreneur fails about four times before succeeding.
When asked about their ultimate success, entrepreneurs often talk instead about the importance of their hardships…. When I asked the legendary investment company founder Charles Schwab about the success of the $15 billion corporation that bears his name, he told me the story about taking out a second mortgage on his home just to make payroll in the early years.
Why this emphasis on the struggle? Entrepreneurs know that when they sacrifice, they are learning and improving, exactly what they need to do to earn success through their merits. Every sacrifice and deferred gratification makes them wiser and better, showing them that they’re not getting anything free. When success ultimately comes, they wouldn’t trade away the earlier days for anything, even if they felt wretched at the time.3
Willingness to sacrifice does not come easily. People naturally tend to adopt behaviors that make them feel good. Everyone likes comfort, pleasure, and entertainment, and they tend to want to reexperience them. If we do this repeatedly, we can become addicted or bored and seek greater pleasures. For some people, this becomes a lifelong pursuit. But there’s a problem with that. A person who cannot sacrifice will never belong to himself; he belongs to whatever he was unwilling to give up. If you want to develop maturity and gain the value of learning, you need to learn to give up some things today for greater gains tomorrow.
Our children are grown and married now with their own families, but when they were teenagers Margaret and I sometimes met with a counselor friend of ours. We both felt the weight of responsibility that accompanies parenting, and we benefited from her advice. During one of those sessions, she scolded me, saying, “You’re too affirming with your children, and you want to help them too quickly when they have problems.”
I was surprised by her statement and became defensive. “How could anyone be too affirming?” I asked. “And why shouldn’t a parent jump in and help his children with their problems?”
She knew I believed positive self-worth to be very important in a person’s life. She also knew that I wanted to be supportive to my children. But her concern was that I was fostering false self-esteem in them.
“Look,” she said, “you can tell your children that they are wonderful all day long, whether they are or not, and it might make them feel good. But then they will go out into the real world expecting the same type of treatment from others, and they will get crushed.” Her words rang true to me. She continued, “The best way to enhance the self-esteem in the lives of your children is to give them tools that they can use to better their lives.”
Her admonition was confirmed by Margaret. It was true that I did want to shield my family from problems. From that day on, I worked hard to change. I realized that I couldn’t give my children self-esteem. I could love them unconditionally, but they had to find their self-esteem themselves through their actions and choices. (And by the way, if you grew up with affirming parents, be grateful, but be determined to perform with excellence, take responsibility for yourself when you don’t succeed, and learn from your failures without being defensive.)
The word esteem means “to appreciate the worth of, to hold in high regard, to have genuine respect.” So self-esteem really means “self-respect.” That comes from our character. We feel good about ourselves when we make right choices regardless of the circumstances. In fact, if our behavior is positive in the face of negative circumstances, it builds character and self-respect. This comes from inside each of us. And the better prepared we are to face our problems, the greater the maturity and the chance that we can learn and grow.
Author and speaker Brian Tracy says, “Self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself.” If you want it to be solid and lasting, it must be earned and confirmed, day by day. It happens from the inside out. And when it’s solid, you know that external forces that come against you aren’t going to shake it. You stay true to who you are to the core, you learn from your mistakes, and you keep moving forward.
For more than fifty years, Gail Borden Jr. was not a successful man, though it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. Born in 1801, Borden spent his childhood growing up in New York, Indiana, and Mississippi. He received very little formal education, attending school for only two years in his teens. He learned the trade of surveying, and for a while in his midtwenties, he worked as the county surveyor in Amite, Mississippi. But he grew restless there, and when he was twenty-eight he moved to Texas, following his father and brother. For a while, he farmed and raised livestock, but that wasn’t what he ultimately wanted to do. So when he got the opportunity to replace his brother as official surveyor in Stephen F. Austin’s colony, headquartered at San Felipe, he took the position. But that didn’t last long either.
In his midthirties, Borden went into partnership with his brother and a third man to start a newspaper—despite none of them having any printing experience. They published their first issue just days after the start of the Texas Revolution. They published the first list of Texans who died at the Alamo, and they popularized the rallying cry, “Remember the Alamo.”
During the Texas Revolution, they fled the Mexican army with their printing press, but had it captured anyway. The soldiers threw the press into Buffalo Bayou. Shortly after the end of the revolution, Borden mortgaged his land to purchase a new printing press, but because of financial difficulties, he ended up selling his interest in the paper.
That was when Borden used his political connections to secure a position in government. Sam Houston appointed Borden as collector of customs in Galveston. Though Borden experienced some success in the position, he was replaced by Sam Houston’s successor. So he tried his hand at real estate.
To his credit, Borden never gave up. He displayed great tenacity. But one of the strongest criticisms leveled against him was that he lost interest in his endeavors too quickly and would jump to a new interest. As he approached age fifty, a level of maturity finally seemed to be setting in. In the 1840s, he started inventing. When he learned about the California Gold Rush, he concentrated his full attention on condensing foods so that they could be preserved for long periods of time. Borden said, “I mean to put a potato into a pillbox, a pumpkin into a tablespoon, and a watermelon into a saucer.”
Borden’s first effort was what he called a meat biscuit. He extracted all the nutrients from beef by boiling it. He then strained the liquid and condensed it into a syrup, which he mixed with flour and baked into a dry biscuit. He eventually patented the process, and it was successful enough for him to receive a contract to produce the biscuits for the United States Army. He also received a Council medal at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. But his greatest contribution to society ended up being a different product.
Onboard ship returning from England, Borden saw children die as a result of drinking contaminated milk. He vowed to find a way to condense milk and preserve it so that it would be safe for human consumption.
At first he approached the task in a way similar to how he had created the meat biscuit. He put milk in a kettle and boiled off the water, but the process failed. The milk tasted burned. He tried other approaches, but it wasn’t until he saw maple sugar condensed in a vacuum-sealed pan that he discovered the process that worked. He had finally found success, but by that time he was nearly ruined financially. So he took on partners. With their help, he was able to open a factory in Connecticut in 1856. However, when the operation didn’t see an immediate profit, the investors withdrew and the facility closed down. With the help of another investor, Borden opened another facility. It too shut down because of a nationwide financial crisis.
Many people would have given up at this point. In fact, had these events happened earlier in Borden’s life, he probably would have given up. But by this time he had finally developed enough maturity to learn from his losses and seize opportunity when it presented itself. When Borden met financier Jeremiah Milbank on a train, Borden convinced him to become his partner. They founded the New York Condensed Milk Company in 1857, which was finally successful. Later, it was renamed the Borden Company. Milbank’s investment of $100,000 was said to be worth $8 million when he died in 1884.
Condensed milk became the means of Borden’s fortune. He developed other processes to preserve food, such as one to condense fruit juices. But it is for condensed milk that he will always be remembered. And his life is a testament to the value of learning when a person finally matures and absorbs the lessons of loss, mistakes, and failure. It was a lesson Borden learned well. On his tombstone he asked that the following words be inscribed: “I tried and failed. I tried again and succeeded.” What more could a person be expected to do?