The Career Failure Fallacy

A coworker stuck his head in my office and told me I would be fired sometime that day. At least I wouldn’t be blindsided. The new plant president hemmed and hawed and beat around the bush forever. It was ridiculous, he didn’t want to come out and directly tell me that I was fired, and I was pissed so I didn’t help him one bit. Making him sweat was my one small victory that day.?I would be married in three months. It’s particularly humiliating to get fired for the second time in your twenties. My Fiancé was not exactly enthusiastic. When you break this kind of news to your parents it’s worse than just bad grades on a report card. It would take me nine years to finally rebuild my confidence.?

?“Failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of it.”?????????-Ingram Walters

The Fallacy

In my mind, Americans and especially “American business”, live with their head in the sand when it comes to failure and success. Most of us have grown up with and lived under the rules of this fallacy. When I was a teenager this is what I was taught by my parents and what I believed success was: you went to school, made good grades, this was followed by college where you knew exactly what to major in and made good grades. You knew precisely what you wanted to do and got a good job upon graduation. This was followed by marriage, and children. This was the was “the way” you were supposed to do it. Any deviation from that and your life was ruined, you were a failure. No exceptions. We all know that this is ridiculous, and everyone has experienced failures. Notwithstanding and at the same time there is a stigma in American society associated with failure. I love Ingram’s quote above. Ingram is a new acquaintance and a great friend of a great friend of mine. He is a successful entrepreneur in North Carolina. Failure is the vehicle from which we learn. Here is another favorite quote of mine: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”??????????????-Theodore Roosevelt

Have you had a failure in your career? If not, you will and that is to be expected, it’s a normal part of learning and growing. The problem comes in when we don’t properly view these learning experiences as learning experiences. We overwhelmingly view career failures, setbacks, and missteps as negative. Many people become ultra-conservative after a perceived career setback. That’s what I did. I let a couple of career setbacks destroy my self-confidence and subsequently stayed in a terrible job situation for 8 years and even after I moved on, I remained conservative. It's a miracle that I ultimately rose to become a President of one company for 14 years and then followed that with a 6-year stint as a CEO.

There is a world of difference between having a failure or being a failure

There is a difference between having a failure and being a failure, and people get them confused. Don’t get them confused. I opened this post with a failure that I had. A failure that I gained valuable lessons from. Let me tell you what being a failure looks like. I met Paul in college, he was a great friend of my brothers. He was exactly like me and everybody else that we grew up with, except he was better looking than most of us. Today Paul lives in a shed behind the hardware store where he works. The shed has no running water, he has to go into the store to use the bathroom, I don’t know what he does for showers. He’s never been married and doesn’t have any children. A few years back my brother and I were home for a family reunion. He wanted to see Paul. Paul rode his bicycle over - he doesn't have a car or driver’s license. Sadly, most of the people I know who have really struggled have had problems with drugs, alcohol, untreated mental illness, or some combination. I’m not sure what Paul’s issues were, I didn’t ask. I hadn’t heard about him in years, so my brother let me know about his personal situation prior to his arrival, but just the same it was jarring and unsettling to see him when he came over. It was hard to believe what I was seeing. This is the kind of failure that you don’t recover from. You can and should totally recover, rebound, learn from, and grow from your career failures. The danger from early career failure is that you can become overly conservative, which oftentimes significantly limits your career. I've got friends who I thought would rule the world only for them to have a couple of early career setbacks, become conservative and remain so for the rest of their career. The friends I’m thinking about actually did “fine” and everyone would consider them successful, but I don’t think they came close to their potential. I don’t know if they think back and wonder about what could have been, but I do.?

Is the fear of failure holding you back?

A few years ago, I went to my 40th high school reunion in Florida, I had never been to any of the previous reunion’s and hadn’t kept in touch with any of my high school friends. I actually knew and connected with a good number of people there as well as a couple of close friends who I had spent a lot of time with. My friend David had been my lab partner in biology (everyone was jealous of me because David was my lab partner) he went on to be our valedictorian. After graduation he received a full scholarship to the US Military Academy at West Point. I was anxious to see him and hear about his life. We finally connected and left the loud ballroom and found a table outside. He had been thrown out of the Military Academy in his first year. WOW! I didn’t see that coming. He actually said, “there was this girl in town”, so, because our high school was in Florida, I’m thinking about Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville lyrics “some people claim that there’s a woman to blame”. After that he moved back home, got conservative and never accomplished what I would have thought our valedictorian could have and should have achieved. Then there was Jim, whose picture I noticed on our high school wall because he was on the school board. He owned a boat in High school and made money catching and selling fish. He never went to college but immediately went into the charter fishing business out of high school. He ultimately bought several boats and purchased a marina to run his operations. He told me that he made a lot of money from the land when he sold the marina.

The American aversion to failure is not healthy and keeps people from taking appropriate levels of risk in their career. I’ve had plenty of people who worked for me over the years who never took any risk at all. They had a huge aversion to risk, and this kept them from getting a top job and reaching greater career success. I’m only talking about taking a moderate level of risk. I assume you need a steady paycheck like most Americans do. That was the situation that I was in when I made the move that changed my career trajectory. I’ve got a couple of friends who were in similar situations to mine. Like me they were stuck in their jobs. They both took career risks. One borrowed money from his father and the other sold his house to finance his new venture. Those were not options for me for two reasons. First, I didn’t have a business that I wanted to get into and second, I didn’t have the Father or house option. Nonetheless, I made a complete job and industry change, and my career took off at my new company.

Are you following the right advice?

There has been a lot written about failure in business. It seems like everybody writes about the failures that celebrity entrepreneurs have. It must be easy and fun to celebrate failures when you have a billion dollars in the bank. You and I, we don’t have that luxury. And the celebrity entrepreneur’s path is so outside of what I and my friends did that I can’t even begin to think about how anyone would go about replicating it. A business writer will study a ridiculously successful entrepreneur and then regurgitate a list of the top things that made them successful. I don’t think this is at all helpful. I don’t think that reading about Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will help most of us. I enjoy reading about their exploits and their path for sure, but when you boil it down, most of these celebrity entrepreneurs took a lot of risk in their 20’s when they didn’t have financial responsibilities and families. They made it and were independently wealthy by the time they were in their early 30’s. By the time most of us were in our early 30’s, we had children and debt. There is a huge difference between the path they took and the one that I recommend to my clients. I recommend a path that leads to a level of career success that you will be proud of and that will enable you to provide for yourself and your family.?After I was fired, most of my friends felt sorry for me, however, I did have one friend who said “congratulations, great things will come as a result of this”. That friend was right!?Look at your own career and plot it on a graph. My career was an amazing series of ups and downs but the ups and down were mainly on the job satisfaction side of things. My earnings continued to rise throughout my entire career and I always rebounded from failures and setbacks.

Be careful whose advice you are following. I’m sure you’ve had the following experience. If you went to college then you probably shared this experience. The best teachers in college were always and without exception the teachers who had lived what they taught. Jim Tanzey was by far the best accounting teacher in the business school. He had practiced accounting full time for years and when I was in college, he both taught accounting and had an accounting practice. My business law teacher was a lawyer, but he had owned and run a contracting business. He was fantastic. When my daughter was in school and studying integrated marketing communications she talked about her favorite semester in college. All 5 of her teachers only taught part time and each of them had their own marketing agency. The people who preach what they practice are the best teachers. It was true when I was in school and it’s true today.

Yes, I'd like Rocky Road ice cream to go with my career path please!

I can’t think of a better analogy to my career path than Rocky Road ice cream, but you can have the soft serve. There were two missing ingredients from my career path. The first was my aversion to risk and the second was my lack of self-awareness regarding my workplace values. I’ve covered the need for everyone to take appropriate levels of risk in their careers. You will never be fully engaged and happy in the workplace if your personal values are not being met. For an excellent exercise that will help you identify your workplace values, click this link: Workplace Values Exercise.