Daring Success and Failure

Surely this is science fiction:

Man dares to safely land first stage rocket booster, in an upright standing position, on an unmanned drone barge in the ocean.  The booster hits too hard and crashes.   Elon Musk tweets, "Close, but no cigar."

It is not science fiction, and as a National Geographic article puts it...

Failure is an Option

The failed attempt is part of the efforts of a bold agent of change, Elon Musk (see my Jan 5th blog --Transformational Change) who planned the test booster landing as part of what NASA called a flawless mission launch to re-supply the International Space Station.  Here is an example of a man who has set out to change everything about the way we launch into space and think about space travel.

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.--Winston Churchill

Some businesses have made efforts to institutionalize the power of failure by creating Walls of Failure within their offices. Workers post their failures and what they learned from the experience.  The practice keeps others from repeating the same mistakes.

The takeaway here is not to let fear of failure keep you from acting on what matters.  Instead, plan on it as part of the process.

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.--Michael Jordan

Recent Articles

Change Happens
Small Matters
I Am Charlie
A Call to News Beat Activisim
Help to Break Bad Habits
Transformational Change

Small Matters

It is brutally cold outside today, it's Friday, and there is not even one small thing I have the motivation to start. What good would it do anyway?

It reminds me of another Friday, early in my career when I was freelancing for my friend Lou's creative agency. It was 4 pm and out the window nothing but sheets of rain.  Inside, beer and wine started to break out among the staff when, just then, the phone rang. Lou emerged from his office and handed me a small note containing contact information.  He explained it was someone wanting a small project done, but they wanted to meet for a discussion right now -- tonight! Lou didn't want to drive 35 miles away, during rush hour, in the rain, so he said that if I wanted to pursue the job on my own, to go for it. I called back, agreed to meet, and then cursed the whole drive out to his office.

Put your heart, mind, intellect, and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.--Swami Sivananda

The office was very small -- a travel agency -- and I had a sick feeling that this was going to be a total waste of time.  Nonetheless, I was happy for the referral and decided to give it my best effort thinking perhaps it would lead to something down the road.  

After some preliminary questions regarding my experience, the owner of the travel agency explained that this year it was his turn to chair his industry's national association meeting and that he needed my help to put on the meeting in Nashville for its 2,000 members.   I hyperventilated the entire ride home.

The project billed out at a quarter of a million dollars. Attending at the Nashville meeting was the head of an even larger allied travel association. Eight months later, we produced his meeting in Washington, DC for its 5,000 members.  I suddenly found myself with 5 employees and looking for a larger office.

If you had asked me that late Friday afternoon if I could tackle a meeting for 5,000 people, I might have backed off driving out for the meeting.  It's only because I took the first small step out the door, in the rain, that the course of my career changed dramatically.  As for my friend -- he learned the hard way that no job is too small.  How about you?

Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference has never tried to fall asleep with a mosquito in the room.--TBD*

*TBA is my acronym for "to be attributed" -- still looking for the author.

Transformational Change

It's common to attribute great innovation to creativity, intelligence or wealth.   Not everyone though can be brilliant, geeky, and a billionaire -- on the other hand,  it sure seems to help. Two transformational figures that come to mind are Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

What chances
do the rest of us have for creating great change?

One can only stand in awe looking at the legacy of change created, and being created, by these two men.  

The innovations of Steve Jobs are widely recognized, but Elon Musk is still far from being a household name. 

What's important in looking at these two icons, is not to be intimidated, but inspired. Their ability to create change is really no different from the rest of us.  Clearly they they have had phenomenal resources to enable them to start and scale faster once they have an initial idea. But how they start the idea process and work with it is something we can draw from by drilling down past the personas and wealth.  

First principles and the iterative process.

Two things these men share in common are zero base thinking (what Musk calls First Principles)  and an iterative development process.  

Iteration is the act of repeating a process with the aim of approaching a desired goal, target or result. Each repetition of the process is also called an "iteration", and the results of one iteration are used as the starting point for the next iteration. --Wikipedia

The core of iteration is that your concepts, ideas, products or processes are in a constant state of improvement.  You create something great today and tomorrow you approach it as starting point for improvement rather than the ending point.  Musk says it's, "Constantly be thinking about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself."

Zero base thinking is just what it sounds like, it is starting with a blank piece of paper rather than building upon the best practices and examples around us.  Most of us think and communicate by way of analogy — comparing new experiences and ideas to those we already know exist.  Musk says the benefit of “first principles” thinking, "allows you to innovate in clear leaps, rather than building small improvements onto something that already exists." 

“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”--Elon Musk

Watch this video interview with Kevin Rose where Musk gives an example of the first automobile. While everyone else was trying to improve horse-drawn carriages, someone looked at the fundamentals of transportation and the combustion engine in order to create a car.

"All men dream, but not equally.  Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible." -- T. E Lawrence