How To Fuck Things Up Like A Pro.

How you make mistakes is much more important than how many mistakes you make.

I believe that overall all leaders make roughly the same amount of mistakes. Yet some leaders go onto achieve success and others sink their ship.

There is a right and wrong way to make mistakes and the difference is transformational.

Here is my 4 part guide on how to fuck things up properly:

1) Recognise it. Very fast.

The standard pace is for chumps. Any business today has to be lightning fast. And nowhere is that speed more important than when it comes to recognising mistakes.

Speed is a game changer here. Being able to identify mistakes at lightspeed lets you minimise the collateral damage and get your ship on the correct course before anyone misses a beat.

The longer you leave a mistake, the harder it becomes to fix, the more expensive it becomes to remedy and the more embedded it becomes in your culture. The quicker you can recognise your mistakes, the more successful you will become.

Time is not money. It is way more important than that.

2) Completely own it.

Sometimes your business is going to do things which are so messed up you never thought you would be associated with such incompetence. And to make matters worse it is all your fault.

So, repeat after me:

Everything that happens, anywhere in this organisation is completely, categorically and undeniably my fault and I accept full responsibility for it.

Any mistake has to be your mistake. You have set the culture, you have set the direction, you have hired the key people and you have given them direction on how to act. So, as a leader, any mistake, anywhere in the organisation is always as a direct consequence of something you have done.

Putting blame anywhere other than yourself just prevents you from recognising the true root cause of the mistake (ultimately yourself) and then taking the necessary action to build a stronger business and culture as a consequence of it.

Leadership is hard and leadership is lonely if you do it right. 

3) Feel the pain.

Feel the pain. Sit with the pain. Don’t run from it. Don’t hide from it. You have to own the pain just like you have to own the mistake.

Just as an athlete sometimes has to feel the pain of losing to drive them onto higher levels, leaders have to feel the pain of their mistakes to become better leaders.

Pain is something we all try to avoid but our most painful moments are often our most important. But if you want to do amazing things in life, you have to embrace your pain and ask yourself what you could have done differently or better.

When we confront something a painful mistake, we are left with a choice between an ugly and painful truth or a beautiful delusion.

Either learn how to embrace being pain or learn how to embrace irrelevance.

4) Pivot hard.

You have made a mistake. You have recognized it quickly. You have owned it and you have intimately felt the excruciating pain. The final step is to pivot hard.

It is all too easy to delude yourself that the world should work differently than it does, that you should not have to change anything because you make a mistake. But, reality reigns supreme. And the real world is the best teacher.

Mistakes are an opportunity to get better, consequently you have to take that opportunity and you have to make changes. You have to pivot your strategy and you to do it hard and do it fast.

By doing so you can turn mistakes into something beautiful and catalytic.

The Hidden Benefits Of Making Mistakes Well 

Firstly, If you know you can spot a mistake quickly, own it, learn from it and fix it you will be far more likely to take risks. Secondly, being able to live with and fix mistakes means you will make faster decisions as a business.

Most companies are risk-averse, overly bureaucratic and their decision-making process is laboured and cumbersome. Being agile and responsive gives you the edge.

Hold Fast

Almost all of the major drivers that completely game-changed our business were implemented off the back of a major, major mistake. If you can always use your mistakes to become better, you will have a huge advantage over everyone else. 

It is not whether someone makes mistakes, but in fact how someone makes a mistake that determines their destiny.

James