What can happen when you don't give up

"Take on Me" by A-ha is a flop at number 137 in the charts from 1984.

Or it is?

"Take on Me" is a song that could have easily remained a failure. However, something important happened and in the parallel universe as we know it... the song is a timeless sonic phenomenon listened to over 1 billion times by people around the world!

How come?

How did the idea rise back from Flop to Phenomenon?

The first release in 1984 was an absolute flop, the execution terrible. Despite the failure, the very idea of the song was still deemed beautiful in the eyes of its beholders, the band. But to carry on with it required guts, assertiveness and self-belief from the band to say "we're not done yet" and to protect it from their inner critic and the press that wanted to knock it off just because it has been knocked down.

It required #humility too to be able to say 'we could have done it better'. It required the ability to process shame and to put it to rest instead of blowing it out of proportion. And so, everyone who contributed to the creative process, from the band to Warner Music, came together again to deconstruct their steps, find weak decision points, and sprinkle their love for idea with logic. This resulted in a great example of success-through-iteration!

The idea was tweaked and both the song and the video released again in 1985 to become one of the most popular, never-ageing tunes of all time. Talking of embracing?#feedback?to improve your?#success?rate!

On route to success, however, there was another challenge. A critical piece in victory, namely #time.

Take on Me, the second version, wasn’t an instant hit either. On the contrary, it took four slow agonising months to reach no 1 in the US.

That's 3000 hours of permanent trepidation, sitting on a mental seesaw of "we will make it/ we will not". The band sat firm and tuned into #self-belief whispering a whimpering "give it time". .. which finally came on 18 October 1985.

Overnight success is a myth.

It's an alluring but unhelpful phrase. It's more like a thousand nights, endless hours of intense collaboration, creativity and courage.

7 things I learnt from Take on Me:

1) #Love your idea unconditionally with warts and all

2) Create a mental boundary between the #idea and the #execution

3) While ideas need love, #iteration needs logic

4) Rejection is not the final stop; it might be just one of many steps on the journey to success

5) Nurture your #relationship with all involved through thick and thin. You know what they say - When the going gets tough, the tough get going

6) Deconstruct, chunk down and re-assess each idea component, decide what stays and what goes

7) Give people time to get used to #new ideas

I would love to know - what are your lessons on how to turn failure into success?

Thank you and cheers to those who take creative risks and give us this colourful and rich world!

About the Author

Alex Lazarus is the founder and Managing Director of Lazarus & Maverick consultancy working globally with CEOs and senior leadership teams to ignite new thinking that moves the business forward. She is the former Marketing Director (Disney) and holds a Masters of Science in Coaching & Behaviour Change from Henley Business School and is currently writing a book on how to turn complexity and paradoxes which we encounter in our lives and in business into a creative force and personal transformation.