Tuesday, September 09, 2008 Who's afraid of failure? By Maeng Tabije, MBM Tuesday Notions
FOR the basketball-inclined, the name Michael Jordan surely rings a bell. For those who aren't, he's one of the best and most famous basketball players in the 1990's.
There's one quotation attributed to him that goes, "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is precisely why I succeed."
What a great lesson in life and in business. What's the message basically? That nobody goes thru life -- and business, perfectly, always on the up-and-up. Even the best professionals make mistakes. The best are only determined by the number of times they practice hard for their kind of work and never getting afraid to apply what they have been practicing for, even with the possibility of failing just lurking around the corner.
Look around you -- how many successful people in business and industry were valedictorians, salutatorians, cum laudes, magna cum laudes, and summa cum laudes? Very few, indeed. So there, without going too deep in academic research, you have all around you the empirical proof that intellect is not the most prevalent secret to success.
Of course, this is not to say that education is not important. It is, but like a delicious viand, all the other ingredients have to be there for the food to be excellent. Take the exotic kinilaw for example. The most important part of this food is the fish, usually bariles (tuna, in English).
You can't imagine having a kinilaw without it, right? But try to imagine for a moment that you don't have vinegar, ginger, salt or onion -- you might as well forget about serving kinilaw in your party.
That's the same with success, education or intellect is important but you need the other ingredients to attain that overarching goal of success: perseverance, inspiration, passion, vision, drive, and more.
A few years back, I read the best-selling book, "Trump: The Art of the Deal", by the sensationally successful Donald Trump. It's basically a diary of his day-to-day deals that made him rise from a virtual nobody to the top of the world in the decade of the 1980s.
It's a very engaging and inspiring book, designed to nudge the dreamers of this world to chase that kingdom in the sky.
To those who may have been sleeping under a rock and haven't heard of him, Trump has some of the most spectacular buildings in New York and New Jersey: the Trump Tower, Trump Plaza, Trump Parc, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Trump's Castle, Trump's Castle Hotel and Casino, Taj Mahal Casino-Hotel, among others.
He also owns the franchise of the Miss Universe Pageant and owns a string of other huge businesses. All these he built up from scratch at a tender age.
Lately, I came across a book titled, "Trump Nation: The Art of Being Donald" by Timothy L. O'Brien. The biggest surprise I got reading that book is the revelation that Donald Trump went bankrupt in the 1990s, buried under a mountain of debt, the mortgage loans he got for all the real estate developments he did in the '80s. No amount of intellect or business savvy saved him from that fate. At the end of the day, he had negative net worth, with scores of banks going after his assets.
But the biggest lesson I got from that book is that Trump did not let failure--bankruptcy -- get in his way. As fast as he fell, he got up quickly and went full steam ahead pursuing other deals. Not wasting his time burying his head in the sand in shame for his downfall, he instead used all his drive, passion and perseverance to rebuild his wealth.
Today, just a few years from the time he was in the dumps, he is up there in the stratosphere again. He may not anymore be as spectacularly wealthy as he used to, but he is still much wealthier than most of us ordinary mortals can ever dream of.
He even has the temerity to write another book, "The Art of the Comeback" and became the star of the highly popular TV show, The Apprentice. What a guy, he has totally erased the word "failure" in his vocabulary.
The lessons in the life of Donald Trump can be summarized in the following great quotations:
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts." -- Winston Churchill
"I have learnt that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed." --Booker T. Washington.
"The worst bankrupt in the world is the man who has lost his enthusiasm. Let a man lose everything in this world but his enthusiasm and he will come through again in success." -- W. Arnold.
(Ismael D. Tabije, MBM, is an international development consultant whose clients include the WB, the UN and the European Commission. Email comments to: idtabije@gmail.com.)
