FAILURE-THE ENGINE FOR SUCCESS

Failure is not a negative. It is a positive. It teaches where else to go and what else might be done. It is the engine for success. Failure is often the orphan in any success and disregarded as a key component in achieving that success. But, that is factually incorrect.

How one deals with failure is dependent upon mindset. It can be a hugely negative roadblock or simply a stepping stone to progress. Remember-life is usually a series of failures in some form or another. Every event is not an Everyone a Winner. That is not how life works.

Consider that in sports, everything is a series of failures-the pitch, the play, the time the event-until…the athlete makes adjustments until success is achieved. Business is usually composed of constant failings until a market, a product or a service gains success. More than 50% of restaurants fail upon initially opening-those that finally prosper have learned from their mistakes-ask Gordon Ramsey. 

Life is dealing with setbacks and then moving forward. If you cannot do that, then you are guaranteed failure as that is where you chose to stop growth.  

Consider Thomas Edison, he spent more than five years of failure to finally discover a filament that would work in a light bulb. Or as he put it;

 "Before I got through," he recalled, "I tested no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths, and ransacked the world for the most suitable filament material."

"The electric light has caused me the greatest amount of study and has required the most elaborate experiments," he wrote. "I was never myself discouraged, or inclined to be hopeless of success. I cannot say the same for all my associates."

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

During the Iran Rescue period, we began totally clueless in terms of what we needed to get the job done. With each bright idea that became a dumb idea, we progressed toward the options that finally worked. Considering that ninety percent of the operation was overwhelmingly successful, not a bad evolution and one built on dozens of failures as demonstrated during the training process.

The management of failure was overseen by General Vaught and his dominate personality and direction. Under excruciatingly intense pressure to develop a viable solution, he witnessed all the parts of the force-USAF, USN, Army, Marine meld together at each aspect of the required operation. Strong personalities and emotions emerged after every mission failure.

In the after action hot wash, he would not allow negativism to emerge. He required all the players to write down what went wrong, why it went wrong and what improvements of outright rejections were needed. Each discrete task had to be done to advance the force so failure was never an option.

His approach was to consider the failure a roadmap for success by pointing us in different directions or concepts. He dampened the negative and made success the lodestone of the next iteration. There were many iterations before success on a specific point was reached. There was not a single part of the many moving parts that did not undergo mission failure in its beginning design. Consider the refuel option as an example.

We knew refueling the helos was a necessary task. How would we do it 850 miles inside Iran while insuring secrecy? We considered large pre-fabricated fuel pods in the helos. We built prototypes, flew them and discovered that they grossly effected the flight control. Scratch that.

We built fuel pods for the EC and MC 130’s. The problem was that with the very limited amount of those refuelable airframes, we could haul fuel or people but not both. Scratch that.

The bright idea de jour was then to conduct an airborne drop of 500 gallon rubber blivits attached to field expedient pumps. All attached by cargo parachute to the mothballed Army Mechanical Mule. Six C130 aircraft were configured to carry the needed fuel quantity. Upon execution one night, with several senior observers in the western desert, each load pulled out the on-board parachute cable from its imbedded anchors in the fuselage, crumping and exploding upon impact. Scratch that.

In the hotwash, a USAF member remembered that a special configuration of C130 floor mounted fuel bladders had been developed for service in Antarctica. It was discovered that three of these systems were still in storage. These were pulled out, refurbished and became the ultimate functioning system. So easy and yet so hard.  

If you fail two out of three times at bat in the Major Leagues, you are almost assured a place in Cooperstown. Lincoln lost more elections than he won. We were losing WWII until we figured out how to win. You will probably fail in more endeavors than you succeed, but you will improve at every failing until you do succeed. It’s all in attitude management.