Chapter 79. Forget About Failure

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.

—George Bernard Shaw

Managers, especially at the beginning of their careers, often obsess about failure. They take a bad conversation with a problem employee very personally. They get hurt. They get depressed. They get angry and start hating their profession.

But soon they see that failure is just an outcome. It is not bad or good, just neutral. It can be turned into something good if it’s studied for the wisdom to be gained from it. And it can be turned into something bad if it is made into something personal.

The great professor of linguistics S.I. Hayakawa used to say that there were basically two ...

Get 100 Ways to Motivate Others now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.