"Maintain the Capacity to Fail"

I don't know how people survive without reading books. I know I couldn't.

My love affair with books can be traced back to my oldest brother, Kevin, who is such a prolific reader he makes me look like a kindergartener, and to the St. Louis Public Library. When I was growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the St. Louis Public Library provided this incredible service known as the Bookmobile. Every two weeks this brown library on wheels that looked like a miniature mobile home would pull up into the parking lot of my grade school. And every time I would step into that small library and be taken off to another world. Up until I was 11 years old, 98% of my life was spent within a six-block radius of my house. It was three blocks to my grade school, and three more blocks to Shiloh Park, where we played soccer, baseball, and basketball. All my friends lived within those six blocks. But when I stepped into that Bookmobile, I was suddenly with Thomas Edison, Jackie Robinson, Teddy Roosevelt, Marie Antoinette, Martin Luther King, Jr., Madame Curie, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I would check out the maximum number of books allowed, read a book a night, and repeat the process two weeks later.

I haven't changed. In the past 60 days, I've read the biographies or autobiographies of Thomas Jefferson, Bill Belichick, Mike Wallace, Johnny Carson, Sidney Sheldon, and Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A's. Right now I'm reading the biography of Steve Jobs. By far, the most common lesson taught in each of these books was that every person experienced enormous failures on the road to incredible successes. The most powerful one was the one I least expected: The Other Side of Me, the autobiography of Sidney Sheldon. Sheldon has sold more than 300 million copies of his books. I assumed falsely that he never had a tough day in his life. However he wrote his first book at the age of 53, and it "only" sold 17,000 copies in the first two years. His second book, The Other Side of Midnight, he wrote at the age of 56, and it became a runaway international bestseller. He didn't expect it to be a bestseller. He was simply putting value in the marketplace to see what might happen. All 18 of his books have been on the New York Times Bestseller lists. He also created and wrote the television shows, I Dream of Jeannie, The Patty Duke Show, and Hart To Hart. But along the way he experienced huge failures, as did every other person I studied. The first movie he produced, Dream Wife, starring Cary Grant received such poor reviews that MGM did not even promote it and it died an early death. He quit MGM shortly after that experience. Two of his first four Broadway plays flopped badly. He lost his job, as did all the others I read about, at the age of 40 and had to sell his home and move to a small apartment. He succeeded, like all the others, because he maintained the capacity to fail.

My best friend in the consulting industry is Alan Weiss, who is the number one guru in the world today on how to run a successful independent consulting practice. I once asked him how he went about starting up new initiatives within his own practice. He looked at me and said, "I am absolutely unafraid of failing. And that allows me to keep trying new ideas." Alan, like the people I read about, had been fired once. He spoke up and his boss didn't like it. But that didn't keep Alan from "speaking up" in the 20 business books he has had published since that day.

When someone tells me they can't afford to fail in a certain project they are working on, I know they are in big trouble. If you can't allow yourself to fail, then you can't allow yourself to achieve greatness. No matter how old you are right now, you must go into every situation with the capacity to fail. If you refuse to fail, then you are stuck in that awful place known as mediocrity. I've learned to fail often in order to succeed sooner. (I actually learned that phrase from the great design company, IDEO.) Last year I placed 135,000 flyers about my book, Corporate Catalysts, in the business journals in Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, and Atlanta. I don't know what happened to the other 134, 998, but I know one of them led me to a great company, ULINE, and another one led me to Leading Authorities, the terrific national speakers bureau based in Washington, D.C. Last week I did my first teleseminar. I'm used to seeing people's faces, but I wanted to try something new because I think it's exciting to create a value-added situation where everyone can chime in and no one has to travel. It was fun. A little like swimming in the dark, but I can't wait for the next one, which had to be moved from March 23rd to March 30th.

Perhaps the person who has taught me the most about maintaining the capacity to fail is my literary agent, Jeff Herman. I've never met anyone quite like him. He's more patient than Job, and maintains a longer-term vision than the Founding Fathers. When he believes in a person and/or an idea, he will stick with that person through thin and thin. He works in the rejection industry, otherwise known as the book publishing industry. Every year hundreds of thousands of book ideas get turned down by literary agents around the world. Then tens of thousands of ideas from literary agents get turned down by acquisition editors at publishing companies. Then of the 50,000 books that get published every year only a very, very few ever slice through the public conscious long enough to sell well. And yet Jeff has had more than 500 books published by more than 100 authors including Jack Canfield, co-author of the Chicken Soup series. He simply is more patient in sticking with a person and/or a book idea than most other people. He also provides great advice in his book, Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, & Literary Agents 2006, which is in its 16th Edition.

In my own case, my book ideas that Jeff has represented have been rejected more than 50 times. However, yesterday I found out that my second book, which will a 250-page hardcover business book, will be published in May 2007. It's called, Management Essentials: Practical Lessons Learned From 1,500 Executive Coaching Sessions (Kaplan Publishing, Chicago). By being capable of failing, a dream is coming true after all.

Republishing Articles

Each month my e-newsletter gets republished in approximately 20 blogs, on-line publications, and internal publications for businesses, universities, and not-for-profit organizations. If you would like to republish all or part of my monthly articles, please send me an e-mail at dan@thecoughlincompany.com with "Republishing Article" in the subject heading. I will send you the article in a word document. All I ask is that you include my name as the author of the article and a short paragraph at the end of the article about me with a link to my website.

Take care and have a great month!

Dan Coughlin

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