Happy Birthday Steve. Steve Jobs would have turned 57 today which is a reasonable enough occasion to highlight a few more of his choice embraces of failure. Written about before, but here is another particularly insightful perspective “Nobody’s better at failure than Steve Jobs” by the Boston Globe (thanks Dad) on Steve Jobs retirement…

“Jobs…has failed time and again, occasionally in spectacular fashion. He’s introduced products that bombed. He sent his companies in directions that went nowhere. And once, …Jobs’s career demonstrates how failure can be a constant companion, even for winners.’’ 

• Apple III – “Plagued by faulty construction, and thousands were recalled. ‘When the III was going down, it looked like the end of Apple,’’ said Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet networking technology and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.”
• Cube – “overpriced, hard-to-upgrade Cube desktop computer”
• ROKR – “an ill-fated partnership with Motorola Inc. to build a cellphone compatible with Apple’s iTunes music service.”

Obituaries tend to focus on all of the high points, but I know that Steve would be proud to be just as well remembered for his failures many of which sowed the seeds for his greatest triumphs…

• Lisa – “Designed as a dream machine for advanced users, its $10,000 price frightened off customers, and few were ever sold”. But Lisa broke important ground for his ultimate icon, the Mac.
• Sculley – Ousted as CEO. “At 30, I was out. And very publicly out,’’ Jobs said. He was kicked out of Apple itself, an event that led to one of the greatest second acts in American business. Fifteen years after he returned as chief executive, he’s lifted Apple from near-bankruptcy to a stock market value of $300 billion, second-highest of any US company.
• NeXT – “NeXT machines were costly, and incompatible with other desktop computers. NeXT sold a grand total of 50,000 machines, and threatened to leave Jobs as a footnote in the history of digital technology. The NeXT’s incompatible operating system software was a blessing in disguise, robust and highly reliable compared to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software, or the software then used on Apple’s Mac computers. Apple executives knew the Mac badly needed an upgrade. So in 1996, they struck a deal with their ex-boss Jobs to buy NeXT for $429 million. The NeXT computer didn’t survive, but its operating system became the basis for the Mac OS X software that runs Macintosh computers today

Monty Python are the high priests of silly. Even going as far as to institutionalising the Ministry of Silly Walks. Perhaps what is really needed is the ‘Ministry of Silly Products’ as Newsweek recently catalogued in their piece ‘Silly Products That Made Millions’…

1. Pet Rock
2. SantaMail
3. Doggles
4. Snuggie and Slanket
5. Bottled Water
6. Slap Bracelet
7. Slinky
8. Silly Bandz
9. Topsy Tail
10.   Designer Diaper Bags
11.   The Million Dollar Homepage

In walking the walk of embracing failure, I can proudly assure you that I have bought half the items on this list.

Beyond beige, in the spectrum of failed colours, is downright dingy and grimy, and Science Musings’ Chet Raymo urges us to even embrace that in his post “All Together Now, Let’s Sing”…

• “Funny, isn’t it, how God gets credit for all things bright and beautiful, but not those things we detest and fear. The Victorian hymn should always be accompanied by the Monty Python version, of which three verses follow:”

  All things dull and ugly,
  All creatures short and squat,
  All things rude and nasty,
  The Lord God made the lot.
  
  Each nasty little hornet,
  Each beastly little squid–
  Who made the spikey urchin?
  Who made the sharks? He did!

  All things scabbed and ulcerous,
  All pox both great and small,
  Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
  The Lord God made them all.

Perhaps a colourful parody by the Pythons, but sometimes the fool speaks the wisest words.

In the spectrum of failure, beige seems connotate a pigment almost less colourful than white.

India Knight’s piece “Sing – nice and softly – if you’re glad to be beige” (paywall) shines a complimentary spotlight on this unsung colour-fail…

• “Disastrous news: John Lewis’s director of marketing said last week that the company was about to shake off its ‘fuddy-duddy’ image in order to broaden its appeal. This is a little like hearing that your mother is having a makeover and is especially keen to experiment with hotpants and hair extensions. It’s just not okay. It is actively upsetting. It is wrong. Just be grateful that the company has scotched reports that it is considering dumping its Never Knowingly Undersold slogan — a slogan that is as soothing as a cup of cocoa and has been in use since 1925. ‘We have been accused of being beige at times,’ Craig Inglis, the firm’s first director of marketing told Marketing Week magazine, ‘so we’re trying not to be.’  The general fear of beigeness gets right on my nerves. Beige is the woman who’s been your PA for 20 years and does her job brilliantly, and so what if she’s not going to win any awards for glamour. Beige is the sturdy car that’s faithfully taken your family on holiday for years without looking like a penis extension on wheels. Beige is cardigans and sensible flat shoes, so you stay warm and don’t develop bunions. Beige is St Delia of Smith, a vacuum cleaner that works, an ordinary house in gleaming order. It’s how most people live, and probably how most people are.  What do celebrities miss when they reach the stratospheric heights? Beigeness. A cup of tea and a plate of beans on toast, a sunny afternoon in a suburban garden, beige friends who won’t judge or bitch but ask you if you fancy a biscuit.  Beigeness is massively underrated. The general idea is that everything — people, clothes, shops, buildings — must permanently be the height of fashion, “modern”, young, like a middle-aged woman who can’t deal with turning 50 and starts borrowing her daughter’s clothes. Aside from feeling a bit sorry for her, I have no interest in that woman, nor in anything unbroken being supposedly fixed.”

On the Leadership/Management side of things here, I often find myself in defence of the importance of ‘Management’ as, like beige, it is often underrated in the face of the more dazzlingly colourful concept of ‘Leadership’. But with India’s eloquent recasting of beige in a new light, one can more positively say…

Leaders are bright, Managers are beige. Both together produce the richest picture.

After Seth-urday pieces on Dream Bubbles and Embracing Failure, it seems time for one on Leadership and Management. Especially, since Seth has obliged with an appropriate piece of his own today…

• “There’s an argument for transparency. If you make it easy for people to see right through you, the thinking goes, you are easier to trust. The market, though, often seeks out the translucent. Things that glow. We’re drawn to the glow, to the illumination and warm feeling it brings. We’d like our tools and our replaceable institutions to be transparent. We want the bank and the radiologist and the tax man to be totally clear and invisible, so they can get out of the way and we can focus on what’s true. But the brands and experiences and legends that lead to stories and affection and connection–it would be better if they glowed instead.”

Leaders radiate the translucent glow of inspiration, Manage expose the insight of transparency. Both together enlighten the most powerful truths.

Whether losing a limb or a lover (massive downside blow), or winning the lottery (massive upside windfall), Dan Gilbert (TED lecture) says that studies show that people return to a similar level of ‘happiness’ that they were at prior to the event after six months. Yes, either grieving the loss or celebrating the gift can throw things out of kilter in the near term, but core relationships, values and outlooks are not readily shifted by even these dramatic events.

Many would consider the ultimate loss to be ‘Locked In Syndrome’. It is beyond quadriplegia in that not only can one not move their body, they can’t even more their head or face beyond eyelid blinks. And yet, studies show that even in such dramatically difficult circumstances, such patients achieve happiness. MSNBC reports in its feature “Many locked-in syndrome patients happy, study shows”…

• “You are awake, aware and probably unable to move or talk — but you are not necessarily unhappy, says the largest study of locked-in syndrome ever conducted. A surprising number of patients with the condition say they are happy, despite being paralyzed and having to communicate mainly by moving their eyes.”

A riveting portrayal of this emotional cataclysm is voiced in the memoir (also adapted to a prize-wining film…see above) “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by Jean-Dominique Bauby who concludes that “I decided to stop pitying myself. Other than my eye, two things aren’t paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.”

Happiness is a choice. If it can be for Bauby, then it’s hard to imagine anyone’s life that it can’t be. 

For all of those you who failed to get the Valentine they wanted to day…

Pain, acceptance, persistence. All echoing Seth’s post, but by fellow Godin fan, Hugh MacLeod in his post “You Broke My Heart (and it was ok)”

• “As Nelson Algren famously said, ‘The Horror is, there is no Horror.’ If I made a list of the five worse things that happened to me, they turned out not to be that big of a deal eventually. I find that reassuring, somehow. Like a rabbi once told me, "This time will pass, just like all the other ones’. It’s when you don’t feel pain at the time, that’s when you have to be worried…”

It also echoes my earlier piece ‘Impact Bias’ with the note that “a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggest that if it happened over 3 months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.”

One of BNET’s “12 Ways to Turn Around a Terrible Day” advises one of the first rules of embracing failure, “Keep perspective.”  It goes on to propose, “Ask yourself: “Will this matter in a month? In a year?”

In the after glow of possibly the best Grammy Awards of all time, I present the nominees for the best embrace of failure in song.

Past musical honorees in this blog include…

• The Impossible Dream
• Pick Yourself Up (Nat king Cole and George Shearing version)

This post’s selections include…

• “That’s Life”, Frank Sinatra

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king.
I’ve been up and down and over and out and I know one thing.
Each time I find myself flat on my face.
I pick myself up and get back in the race.

• “I Get Knocked Down”, Chumbawamba

I get knocked down

But I get up again

You’re never going to keep me down

• “The Sound of Failure”, Flaming Lips (from album ‘At War With the Mystics”)

She’s starting to live her life

From the inside out

The sound of failure calls her name

She’s decided to hear it out

Standing there in the graveyard

While the moon sprays its fireworks in your hair

The sound of failure calls her name

She’s decided to hear it out

• “Learn How To Fall”, Paul Simon

You got to learn how to fall.

Before you learn to fly.

And mama, mama it ain’t no lie.

Before you learn to fly.

Learn how to fall.

But, the winner would have to be Lady Gaga’s “Judas” from her Grammy nominated ‘Born This Way’. She revealed in an interview…

• “’Judas’ is a metaphor and an analogy about forgiveness and betrayal and things that haunt you in your life and how I believe that it’s the darkness in your life that ultimately shines and illuminates the greater light that you have upon you. Someone once said to me, ‘If you have no shadows then you’re not standing in the light.’ So the song is about washing the feet of both good and evil and understanding and forgiving the demons from your past in order to move into the greatness of your future.’ Gaga added to the song’s meaning as honoring one’s inner darkness in order to bring themselves into the light.”

As it happens, another song on that album, . “Marry the Night,!” also embraces failure drawing its inspiration from being dropped by her very first record label. Hmmm…oops, Mr. Producer. No one is immune, but the stars turn it to advantage.

The big story this week in basketball is a Cinderella tale. And it’s not even March Madness time yet.

The emergence from bleak obscurity of Jeremy Lin (no relation) into the NBA joining the New York Knicks would have been deemed outlandish if someone had written that movie script (and someone will write the script be you me).

Lin’s triumph has the pundits’ brains whirring (after all how could the great and vast assembly of hoop wisdom have missed this gem?). And many of the insights about Lin revolve as tightly around embracing failure as he revolved around Derek Fisher in the play of the week.

This new wunderkind is himself is a catalogue of failures…

• Neglected by college recruiters (despite leading his team to a California state championship) and he was only offered ‘walk on’ opportunities at Pac-10 schools.
• Undrafted out of college.
• Demoted to Warriors (the first NBA team to try him out) D-League development team.
• Waived by both Warriors and Rockets (who picked him up for a short period at the outset of this season).

But all that was just a preclude to becoming the most talked about story in New York since the Super Bowl, and the most talked about player of the year. And that rags-to-riches story is rich with failure…

Failure by Knicks spurring creative options

• “’Players don’t come out of nowhere,’ Bryant said. What he was trying to say was this: The talent’s there, but sometimes the opportunity isn’t. It takes the right circumstances and timing, the right coach, right system. And sometimes, it takes desperation to try anything. And for these New York Knicks, well, Jeremy Lin constituted anything.” – Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports

If the Knicks hadn’t suffered quite so much with the injury to star guard Carmelo Anthony on top of an otherwise lacklustre season, finally topped off by the short-term absence of their superstar Stoudemire, then they would never have resorted to such a drastic measure as considering Lin.

The comment also underscores a critical dimension to ones dreams coming true – luck. Talent – check; hard work – check. But it does take the third ingredient of luck to separate the budding from the shooting stars.

Failure of tactical retreat

“It wasn’t easy. Lin received limited minutes and seemed lost on the rare occasions he did play. He was eventually sent to Reno for two extended stints in the D-League, and Lin credits Bighorns coach (and former Warriors head coach) Eric Musselman for helping him regain the swagger he showed over the summer.” – Slam Online

In fact, NBA.com noted that playing a full 4 years in University (opposed to many superstars who leap to the NBA early) gave him more time to develop his skill and maturity as a player before being immersed in the meatgrinder pressures of the big league.

Failure of hard knocks

• “Lin was struggling, and would take more serious jabs from the other players. Away from the media, [Coach] Smart instituted a rule during intrasquad scrimmages that no foul committed against Lin would ever be called. ‘He’s tough as nails,’ Smart says. ‘I thought it was necessary for him to understand that as a no-name guy, you won’t get any favors. So you’ve got to work through all that. And he’s done that.’” – Slam Online

Many commentators have noted his trademark “poise” and speculate that it was hardened in his tough career. Unlike the superstars who take a non-stop escalator to stardom, he has suffered so many blows and setbacks, that no difficult situation phases him now.

Failure to ‘look the part’ enhances his appeal

• “[Lin] still gets stopped at Madison Square Garden security, suspected of being one of the team’s trainers – not its point guard…Out there, all alone, those gangly arms, that baby face – well, Lin hardly looks the part. That’s the beauty of him, of this story. That nothing is how it’s supposed to be, how we’ve ever witnessed a star burst onto the scene.” – Yahoo Sports
• “I just think in order for someone to understand my game, they have to watch me more than once, because I’m not going to do anything that’s extra flashy or freakishly athletic." – Jeremy Lin

In a superficial world, failing to look the part can be a major liability. A hardship minorities and others on the spectrum of diversity have had to content with for ages. But that same Asian ethnicity that duped scouts’ preconceived notions, now lays the foundation for uniquely lucrative endorsements and audience growth.

This week is ‘Failure Week’. At Wimbledon High School…

The Evening Standard reports in its article, “Failure, A New Springboard to Success”…

“Wimbledon high school for girls is pioneering an educational innovation: “Failure Week“, a festival of disappointment and thwartedness designed to accustom the girls to the possibility that they won’t always come out on top – and teach them to turn life’s lemons into lemonade. The idea, says headmistress Heather Hanbury, is to show that failure is nothing to be afraid of – that it is something to be confronted and overcome on the way to success. For high-achieving girls, she says, ‘fear of failure can be crippling’.”

The issue of young girls having a higher fear of failure was the subject of a recent study by the Equality and Human Rights Commission….

“It found that although a child’s social background was the biggest determinant of whether they would succeed, gender also had an effect. Some 46% of white working class girls feared educational failure, compared with about a quarter of white middle class boys.”

I applaud this innovative event not just as a devoted acolyte of embracing failure, but also from personal experience working also with secondary school girls for many years as an assistant coach of rowing for Sir William Borlase’s Grammar School. We give our own ‘Broken Blade Award’ each year that recognizes spectacular failure (most often as the result of all consuming, outrageously ambitious effort).