I remember reading a For Better or Worse comic strip in which a boy is playing chess with his grandfather. “Oh, no! Not again!” cries the boy. “Grandpa, you always win!”
“What do you want me to do,” answers his grandfather, “lose on purpose? You won’t learn anything if I do that.”
“I don’t wanna learn anything,” complains the boy. “I just wanna win!”
As well as anything I’ve ever seen, that captures how most of us feel. We just want to win! But the truth is that winning isn’t everything—learning is.
Author Doug Adams said, “You live and learn. At any rate you live.” It is possible to win and not learn. However, for the person who puts winning ahead of learning, life will be difficult.
My purpose in writing this book has been to help you to learn how to learn—from your losses, failures, mistakes, challenges, and bad experiences. I want you to become a continual winner by being a habitual learner. To help you with that, I want to share some final thoughts on learning to help guide you as you go forward.
Several years ago over dinner in Odessa, Texas, I had a conversation with Jim Collins, author of Good to Great. Jim is a good thinker, and I enjoy discussing leadership with him. At that time, the economy was humming and unemployment was running under 4 percent. We talked about the danger of complacency anytime people are winning. They are tempted to relax and sit back when things are going well. And Jim posed a question: “How do we continue to grow and improve and become more, when what we already have is pretty good?”
Complacency: that is the danger any successful person faces. Microsoft founder Bill Gates observed, “Success is a lousy teacher. It makes smart people think they can’t lose.” It also makes them think they don’t need to learn.
The biggest detriment to tomorrow’s success is today’s success. That problem can manifest itself in many ways. Here are the ones I’ve observed most often:
Any one of these wrong attitudes toward winning can turn a person from winner to loser very quickly. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “The number one rule of winning is don’t beat yourself!” These are some of the most common ways people get off track once they’ve achieved some level of success. Novelist John Steinbeck gives some insight into why this happens. In a letter to Adlai Stevenson published in the Washington Post on January 28, 1960, Steinbeck wrote, “A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and nature throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees: miserable, greedy, and sick.”
If you want to keep learning and growing, you need to stay hungry. Depending on your personality, winning may remove some of your hunger to win again. So instead, keep your hunger to learn. Then no matter whether you win or lose, you’ll keep getting better.
Have you ever wondered why so many people who win the lottery lose all of their money? It happens continually. One day they’re holding a check worth millions, and a few years later they’ve lost it all. Why is that? The reason they lose their money is that they don’t change their thinking. They may receive new money, but they hold on to their same old thinking. It’s not what we have that determines our success. It’s how we think. If they’d give up their thinking, then they might hold on to their money.
I’ve noticed three particular positive thinking patterns of people who are always learning. Adopt them and you will be able to keep changing your thinking in a way to keep you learning:
Writer and philosopher J. Krishnamurti asserted, “To know is to be ignorant. Not to know is the beginning of wisdom.” As you win, and learn and grow, you face a genuine danger of thinking you know it all. Don’t let that happen! You simply can’t learn what you think you already know.
I’ve worked hard to protect myself from falling into this trap. I began my passionate study of leadership in 1974. In the nearly four decades since then, I’ve read thousands of leadership articles and books, met thousands of leaders, attended hundreds of leadership events, dealt with continual leadership issues, written hundreds of leadership lessons, spoken to millions of people on this subject, and written over seventy books. Have I arrived? No! I’m still a student of leadership, and I’m still challenged to become a better leader.
One of the things that keeps me excited about learning new leadership thoughts is my passion for the subject. I’m still asking other leaders questions about leadership. I’m still exploring. I’m not close to knowing everything about it, and I don’t think I ever will be. I don’t want to be close. I want to die asking questions and still wanting to learn more. You should be just as passionate about whatever it is you were put on this earth to do. If you can maintain a beginner’s mind-set to the end, your thinking will keep changing and you will keep growing.
Writer and thinker G. K. Chesterton said, “How we think when we lose determines how long it will be until we win.” I believe a key part of the right kind of thinking comes from remaining positive. How do you do that? By continually feeding positive thoughts to your mind by reading positive books, collecting positive quotes, and listening to positive messages. When you do that, you supply your thinking with plenty of positive material, and you keep your mind focused on things that will encourage you.
When negative ideas and discouraging thoughts want to creep in and make you negative, you will have already created a barrier to them. Think positively long enough, and not only will your positive thoughts be stronger than your negative ones, they will be more comfortable, too.
Maintaining a consistently positive mental attitude will be your greatest ally in growing and learning. If you can remain positive, then even when things go wrong, you won’t break a sweat. Your attitude will be, The worst thing that could happen to me today could lead to the best thing that happens today.
There’s a classic brainteaser showing the power of creative thinking that I have sometimes shared with people when I teach. Here it is: using four straight lines, connect all nine dots below without crossing the same dot twice or lifting your pencil from the paper.
Did you solve it? Most people have a hard time with it the first time they try it. The secret is that you have to got outside of the box! (If you’re still not sure how to solve it, you can find the solution at the end of the chapter.)
Going outside of the box is the key to much of the creative thinking that can help you to keep growing and learning. The problem is that most of us believe we are supposed to stay inside the box, remain inside the lines, and so forth. Who says so? There should be no restrictions to the way we think or how we approach problem solving.
Creativity is the ability to free yourself from imaginary boundaries, to see new relationships, and to explore options so that you can accomplish more things of value. What holds people back from their potential is all the “imaginary boundaries” they have allowed to imprison their thinking and doing. Wonderful, workable options are the rewards for becoming more creative. Greater learning comes from better thinking. That requires us to change.
Humorist Will Rogers said, “There are three kinds of men. Ones that learn by reading, a few who learn by observation, and the rest of us have to pee on an electric fence and find out for ourselves.” Ouch. That’s got to hurt. But let’s face it: some people only learn things the hard way.
I’ve heard author and consultant Ken Blanchard say, “You haven’t learned anything until you take action and use it.” In my opinion, that’s the right perspective when it comes to learning. It’s measured by tangible action. That’s why coach John Wooden used to continually say to his players, “Don’t tell me what you’re going to do, show me what you will do.”
The greatest gap in life is the one between knowing and doing. I can’t count the number of people I’ve met who know what they are supposed to do, yet don’t take action on it. Sometimes it’s due to fear. Other times to laziness. Other times to emotional dysfunction. The problem is that knowing what to do and not doing it is no better than not knowing what to do. It ends in the same result. Stagnation. You haven’t really learned something until you’ve lived it. Or as poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”
My friend Dave Ramsey, a financial expert who writes books, teaches seminars, and hosts a syndicated radio show, places a very high premium on action when he teaches and counsels people about money and finances. During a recent interview he pointed out, “What I found is that personal finance is 80 percent behavior. Everybody tries to fix financial problems with math. But it’s not a math problem, and it’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a behavior problem. The problem with my money is the idiot I shave with every morning. If I can get that guy in the mirror to behave, he can be skinny and rich. It’s not magic.”1 That’s true. Turning learning into changed behavior isn’t magic. But it is magical. It can change your life.
Chicago teacher Marva Collins says, “If you can’t make a mistake, you can’t make anything.” How true. If you want to be successful, you must be willing to fail, and you must be intent on learning from those failures. If we are willing to repeat this fail-and-learn process, we become stronger and better than we were before.
In his book Life’s Greatest Lessons, Hal Urban describes this process. He calls it “Strong at the Broken Places.” Urban writes,
Near the end of A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway’s famous novel about World War I, he wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” The world does, indeed, break everyone, and usually not just once. But as a broken bone becomes even stronger when it heals, so do we. It all depends on our attitude and our choices. We can become stronger at our broken places if we choose to learn from our mistakes, correct our course, and try again. Our failures in life, as painful as they are, can be our most valuable learning experiences and our greatest source of renewed strength. As General George S. Patton said, “Success is how high you bounce after you hit bottom.”2
My hope for you is that you will bounce high—and keep bouncing. With each successive bounce back, you’ll be able to go higher and farther. That’s what success in life is: the learned ability to keep bouncing back. As author and entrepreneur Joseph Sugarman says, “If you’re willing to accept failure and learn from it, if you’re willing to consider failure as a blessing in disguise and bounce back, you’ve got the potential of harnessing one of the most powerful success forces.”
As you move forward in life and work to achieve success, remember that progress requires risk, leads to failure, and provides many learning opportunities. Anytime you try something new, you must risk. That’s just a part of learning. But there’s an art to managing that risk, and it comes from successfully coordinating the two zones for success that you have in your life: your strength zone, where you do your best work; and your comfort zone, where you feel safe.
To maximize your success, you must make the most of your successes and failures. To do that, you need to get in your strength zone but get out of your comfort zone. Take a look at how this works:
| STRENGTH ZONE | COMFORT ZONE | RESULT |
| Outside Your Strength Zone | Outside Your Comfort Zone | Poor Performance—Winning is Impossible |
| Outside Your Strength Zone | Inside Your Comfort Zone | Mediocre Performance—Winning is Impossible |
| Inside Your Strength Zone | Inside Your Comfort Zone | Good Performance—Winning is Possible |
| Inside Your Strength Zone | Outside Your Comfort Zone | Great Performance—Winning is Continual |
Traditional wisdom and, frankly, the focus of most education, is to shore up your weaknesses. But that’s not where you will do your best work. People don’t succeed if they focus their time and effort outside of their strength zone. You have to major in your strengths. That’s where your productivity resides. The recent work of the Gallup organization bears this out and is discussed extensively in the Strengths Finder books and testing instruments they’ve published.
While it’s true that your greatest successes will be in your strength zone, it’s also true that your best failures will occur there. Why do I say that? Because you’ll recover the fastest and learn the most where your talent and skills are strongest. For example, one of my greatest strengths is communication. Let’s say I try something new onstage when I’m speaking to an audience, and it fails miserably. I will probably be able to figure out what went wrong very quickly. I might even be able to diagnose the problem and make the necessary adjustments while I’m still on stage speaking. And because I’m working in my strength, I’ll understand the problem and won’t repeat what I did wrong.
In contrast, let’s say I have a problem with my car. I’m driving down the road and it quits on me. The only thing I know how to do in that situation is check the fuel gauge. If that’s not the problem, I have absolutely no chance of figuring out how to fix it. The only thing I can do in that situation is call my mechanic. And even if he explains exactly what was wrong, there won’t be anything I can do about it if it happens again in the future. Why? Because it’s totally out of my strength zone.
I’m sure the process is similar for you. If you’re outside of your strength zone, a problem is a mystery. If you’re in your strength zone, a problem is a challenge, a learning experience, and a road to improvement. That’s why you need to get out of your comfort zone by taking risks while working in your strength zone. When you take risks, you learn things faster than the people who don’t take risks. You experiment. You learn more about what works and what doesn’t. You overcome obstacles more quickly than the people who play it safe and are able to build on those experiences.
Political theorist Benjamin Barber said, “I divide the world into learners and nonlearners. There are people who learn, who are open to what happens around them, who listen, who hear the lessons. When they do something stupid, they don’t do it again. And when they do something that works a little bit, they do it even better and harder the next time. The question to ask is not whether you are a success or a failure, but whether you are a learner or a nonlearner.”
The greatest education you ever receive will come from taking risks in your area of strength. Risk taking without ability leads to increased frustration and continual failure. Risk taking with ability leads to increased learning and success.
I don’t know what your personal Mount Everest is—what you were put on this earth to do. Everybody has one. But I do know this: win or lose, you need to try to reach the summit. If you don’t, you will always regret it. As you get older, you will find that you become more disappointed by the things you didn’t attempt than by the ones you tried and failed to achieve. And here’s the best news. Every step of the way there’s something to learn. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. In it, there are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation and improvement. The failed experiments are as much of that process as the ones that work.
The lessons you have the opportunity to learn will be presented to you in various forms. Fail to learn the lesson and you get stuck, unable to move forward. Learn the lesson and you get to move forward and go to the next one. And if you do it right, the process never ends. There is no part of life that doesn’t contain lessons. If you’re alive, that means you still have opportunities ahead of you to learn. You just have to be willing to tackle them. You have all the tools and resources you need. The choice is yours. Others will give you advice. Some may even help you, But you have to take the test. Sometimes you will win. Sometimes you will lose. But every time you will have the opportunity to ask yourself, “What did I learn?” If you always have an answer to that question, then you will go far. And you will enjoy the journey.
Solution to the puzzle on page 218:
