Jobs & Bezos – successful failures
Success!
You learned how to tie your shoes.
Your 5-year old soccer team won the title and you got a trophy.
Yes, winning is wonderful. It’s seared into our minds at an early age.
The flip side of winning is losing.
And losing is loathing.
No trophies for losing. No big smiles or pats on the back. Losing usually brings derision of some sort.
You should have done this, or if you’d only worked harder, or maybe you really aren’t cut out to be the world’s chess master… This is the worst kind of comment as it tells you indirectly that you are incapable. Ouch!
When we’re young others push us to succeed. Later comes a day that we all need to be the ones pushing ourselves to succeed.
The formula looks pretty cut and dry. Work hard and do everything you can to win, and whatever you do, don’t lose!
The “don’t lose” part, that’s the issue. Don’t lose means you shy away from playing your big sister Sally in ping pong. You don’t take the calculus class, you take Algebra to get the “A”, you gerrymander voting precincts to makes sure your candidate wins the election. All these decisions deny the opportunity to improve.
In short, they keep you from losing near term, but they deny you from winning long term.
What if you decided to take risks, realizing fully well that they could lead to losing? Sounds daunting, doesn’t it?
Let’s look at two highly successful individuals. Two people that epitomize success.
First up, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. Today he leads a global e-commerce powerhouse with $89 billion in annual revenue. He started by selling books online and narrowing escaped the dot-com bust in 2000. He was failing. He reinvented his company. He took a risk to broaden online retailing while most .com businesses went under. Since then Bezos has continued to learn from his mistakes, and he’s made quite a few. Like the now shuttered fashionista site endless.com that sold high-end hands bags and shoes, or the time he paid $970 million for a video streaming site Twitch, or the launch of the ill-conceived fire phone.
Does Bezos want to fail? Of course not. But he also knows that not taking risks can stifle opportunity and hinder his ability to win.
Losing leads to winning.
Second is Steve Jobs. His Apple III and The Lisa computers were both disasters. Poorly designed, slow, balky and expensive they lost Apple a boatload of money and tarnished his reputation.
But success was paramount to Jobs. He hired a new CEO, John Sculley, to fix Apple. Scully then pushed Jobs out of Apple. Another setback. Jobs left Apple for Pixar. He went back to Apple only to fail some more. The NeXT computer and the g4 cube failed. Apple TV didn’t catch on. Apple’s pages word processor never caught on either. But along the way came little things, like the ipod, iphone and the ipad. The rest is history. The making of world’s most powerful and successful company. It was Steve Jobs ability to fail that increased his ability to win.
Do you have a story of how failure led to success? We’d love to hear it.
