Fail to win
In Olympic Style Lifting, your job is to throw a significant load into a one-inch wide space over your head. It's like parking a Mac truck in a tight spot while driving 80 mph. Aim, hit the brakes and don't interrupt the process by thinking too hard. As you can imagine, I constantly dropped bars forward and backward when I was training for the 2009 Karnataka State Weightlifting competition in India. In fact, weightlifting training is just failing repeatedly until you don't. As I seldom throw anything heavier than me anymore, aim with that kind of precision, or wear weird tightfitting, spandex coveralls, the skills of weightlifting - other than failing well - are a thing of the past.
Now, my heaviest task is to carry two bags of groceries up four flights of stairs while the cloth bag handles promise to cut through the flesh of my shoulders. It can be just as impressive and failure isn't an option. It got me thinking about my clients and the different way we see failure week in and week out. It can look something like this:
Week 1 - Buy vegetables and then compost them in the vegetable drawer through pure neglect
What the client sees: Failure
What I see: Great 'Step 1'. Maybe a more robust veggie plan?
Week 2 - Buy vegetables and make horrendous food
What the client sees: Failure
What I see: Progress! Maybe better recipes?
Week 3 - Buy vegetables and make tasty food, but eat out anyway
What the client sees: Failure
What I see: Ooo, here we go! Time management, meal plan, or storage containers for work?
Week 4 - Buy vegetables, make tasty food, and eat at home once
What the client sees: Failure
What I see: Woot! Now we're talking! A solid step forward!
In this episode of 'The Next Big Idea', Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson discussed the value of failure and how crucial it is to our success. This was first made plain by Carol Dweck in her distinction of the growth versus fixed mindset (hint: we need to feel comfortable failing in order to grow). As I mentioned to my clients this week, the picture above is my impending food prep for Chicken Soup and Chicken Cacciatore but there are elements of failure baked right in. Note the inevitable jelly beans and the potential for a Gin and Tonic next weekend. I’m not staring at those failures as much as I’m focusing on squeezing in that many veggies!
