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MYTH: WINNERS DON'T MAKE MISTAKES

One of the greatest myths is that a winner wins all the time. On the contrary, I say that if you're never failing, you're already on the road to failure!

One thing any serious athlete will tell you is that it's okay to lose! Not only is it okay, but it is necessary. If you're never losing, you're never stretching. And if you don't stretch beyond your limits, you won't improve. To win, you've got to lose. To succeed, you've got to fail.

There is not a coach alive who doesn't scream this at you time and again, and who doesn't plan his game anticipating mistakes, or injuries or even a loss. In sports, injuries are one of our greatest enemies. Yet even sports injuries can heal to a strength greater than before the mishap. Remember pitcher Tommy John? He recovered from a ruptured ligament and surgery in his pitching elbow with an even better arm than before he was hurt.  Sportswriters started calling it "the bionic arm." "I never, never thought I was done," he says, and he wasn't. These remarkable recoveries happen because a player exercises the injured muscle or joint and concentrates his energy on healing it. And he never takes it for granted again.

Your mind and sense of business play are instruments just the same as Joe Theisman's arm or John Riggins's legs.  You've got to get them skinned and bloodied and then stretch them again to find out how far you can go.

People like to quote Vince Lombard's "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." But Lombardi never said that. Vanderbilt University coach Red Sanders did. Lombardi actually said something different: "Winning is not everything - but making the effort to win is."

Yet old Vince said something else that I agree with completely: "If you can't accept losing, you can't win."  Lombardi understood a critical truth: that losing makes the winner. To become a winner and stay on top, you have to take risks and test yourself. Any time you try to reach beyond yourself, you will lose, a certain amount of the time. But that is how you become the better player - a winner.

I don't mean that you should be a good loser. As some smart businessman once said, "A good loser is a loser."  What's important about how you play the game lies in what you learn from it. Let me give you an example.

I used to be pretty good at tennis, which was my recreational sport away from football. In fact, I could beat everybody in my playing bracket. Soon, though, I began to get bored with the game, until one day I realized I had to move up and take on better competition. To do that, I had to start losing! It was a frustrating, challenging and yet fulfilling experience. I stretched, I lost (several times) and - finally - I won. I went from being a B-plus player to a solid A.

Now I'm a ripe old retired quarterback and my sport is golf. I play about an eight handicap and am fighting for a six. Recently, I began to play some of the worst golf in my life. I wanted to throw my irons into the lake and push my putter all the way down into the cup. But I knew that something good was going to come of it: I was pushing for a better game, I was stretching, I was losing. And sure enough, several weeks later I was playing some of the best golf of my life - the low seventies on some days. Now I'm trying to hold on to that eight handicap.

It's okay to lose because out of adversity come some of our greatest triumphs. Consider Harry Gray, the chairman of United Technologies Corporation. Gray was born to a poor farming family in Milledgeville Crossroads, Georgia. When he was 6, his mother died; shortly thereafter his father left the family and he was almost abandoned and placed in an orphanage when his older sister, living in Chicago, decided to raise him. Out of this impoverished background, Gray worked his way through college and served in World War II under General Patton and now he's one of America's leading executives. He took a stagnating $2 billion company and remade it within a decade into a $14 billion one.  Asked about his achievements, Harry admitted that one of the driving forces behind his success was, "I disliked being poor."

Almost all the great business successes of our time have had a low point in their past. James D. Robinson III, the whiz-kid chairman of American Express, bounced back from a much-criticized acquisition attempt a few years ago. He has since reshaped his company into a thriving combination of financial services. Could Jimmy have gone on not just to succeed, but to shine in such a big way if he hadn't learned so much from his earlier loss? I don't think so.

Yet many people are defeated by defeat. This is a natural reaction to adversity. If you lose, you forget that the game goes on tomorrow, the score rolls back to an even zero-zero, and you have another chance. Instead you think something is fundamentally wrong with you or your approach. Even an upbeat person like me had that problem once in a while. In football, you don't get to play that game again until next year.

Yet every time I began to feel like a loser, I remembered the words of Bobby Layne, legendary quarterback of the Detroit Lions: "I never lost a game, I just ran out of time." Sure enough, you never completely lose a game, because there's always something a loss teaches you to do better.

Layne's comment is particularly appropriate in business, where you always have another chance tomorrow because there is no final gun. Think of your own times of adversity: facing down an angry board of directors, dealing with public ridicule or sustaining a business failure so terrible that you didn't want to go to work in the morning.  Instead of letting these times defeat you, think of these as moments of greatest opportunity, the chance for the winner in you to truly show itself.

General Patton was right when he said, "The test of success is not what you do when you are on top. Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom."

But there's something more important here: not just surviving mistakes - but facing up to the possibility of mistakes. Stretching means taking risks. Whenever you take risks, sometimes you fail. The tiger hiding in the bushes is more intimidating than the one you see in rifle-range.  Overcoming the fear of mistakes is what risk-taking is all about.

Risk-taking is the opposite of gambling. Gambling is betting on luck; risk-taking is using your head. I make the distinction this way: When you look at a business deal from every point of view, figure out the maximum downside risk, determine that you can live with the worst possible scenario if it doesn't work out - then you can take that risk.

J. Peter Grace, chairman of W. R. Grace and Co., is a classic risk-taker. When he saw that his company's traditional South American shipping and mining operations were soon to be doomed by changing political and market conditions after World War II, he shocked the investment world by shifting W. R. Grace into wholly new and untried fields, such as specialty chemicals, one of the new growth industries. "When I went into the chemical business, I was criticized by Wall Street," he says. "They said, What's a steamboat outfit doing building petrochemical plants?' They were all laughing up their sleeve. But if we hadn't done that, we wouldn't be in business today."

Today W. R. Grace is not in a single one of the businesses it conducted back in 1945 when Peter took over.  It has gone from fruit imports, copper mining and a large fleet of cargo ships into restaurant chains, sporting goods and high-tech chemical plants - all because Peter Grace was willing and bold enough to be a risk-taker. He says "My basic philosophy is that you have to be big to take risks, and you have to take risks to grow."

I know. I've been at the bottom, sometimes with a ton of human flesh on top of me. But the time I really felt pressured the most was during all those winning years with the Minnesota Vikings in the 1970s. Why then? Because the more you win, the greater the pressure to continue winning. If you're not winning, nobody expects you to win, so you can go into a football game with the attitude "What have we got to lose?"

But we were winning so much at Minnesota during the 1970s that the pressure got to me. Finally I decided the way to deal with it was to get psyched by saying to myself, "So what if we lose? It's not a big deal. I don't care. I'm just going to go out there and play my football game. If they beat us a hundred to zip, more power to them. But I won't let them win a hundred to nothing because I'm so scared of losing that I just warm my backside and don't take risks - even to the point of making a mistake. After all these years in the game, I still haven't figured how to get into the end zone when I'm on my rear end."

I was practically saying these things out loud to myself in the locker room before the games. They helped me reach a point where I could play with the fear of losing.  The result: we had another winning season.  Business executives often feel the same kind of pressure that I was under. The farther you rise on the corporate ladder, the more you have that you don't want to give up.  Winning breeds caution; paranoia rises with corporate status.  You achieve position, social standing, power, money, club memberships and a nice standard of living.  So all of a sudden, you start making conservative, low-risk choices  You become an ordinary businessman masquerading in an extra-ordinary title. You don't want to offend or lose a client. You don't want to rub any associates or superiors the wrong way. You conform. You quit taking risks. That's when you start getting left behind.  Sooner or later, you get left out of the lineup.  

I contend that risk-taking is what made this country great. The people who came over to settle America - where did they come from? They came from nothing.  They were running away from a class system where all they knew was defeat, to find a new chance in a new land.  They were entrepreneurial spirits. They did crazy things like invent electricity and the light bulb. They took the horse and buggy and came up with mass-produced cars even before we had highways.  Those crazy Wright brothers gave up bicycles and started flying a strange machine around the beaches of North Carolina.

Then you know what happened? American business got big and powerful and cautious. We started thinking like accountants who are bossed by lawyers who warn, "We've got to be safe from all these laws and make sure we handle things just right." Would one of these guys hire a risk-taker like Henry Ford today? Would the Ford Motor Company? They'd be afraid of his daring spirit and the possibility he would make mistakes. One CEO I know of actually signed up for flying lessons because his business was going so well that he was worried he'd lose his risk-taking edge. Fortunately, there are still some entrepreneurial risk-takers in American business. Lew Lehr, the chairman of 3M, also recognized the value of taking risks, stretching and failing when he said: "Flops are valuable in certain ways. Someone said, ‘You can learn from success, but you have to work at it; it's a lot easier to learn from failure.' "

That is so true. One of the tests of a true winner is the player who wins and stretches, not the one who stretches only when he has begun losing. Roger Milliken, chairman of the giant Milliken & Co. textile chain based in South Carolina, is a classic example of the winner who stretches.  Even when leading his industry, Roger is constantly on the lookout for ways to change, improve or diversify his company. He does not sit back on his old successes and replay last year's victories in his head. Roger is always searching.

An example of a team that was winning but did not stretch is the American automobile industry. It stuck to its "proven" success formula for much too long. While Detroit was wedded to the time-honored idea of the big American gas guzzler, the Japanese and Europeans were quietly building themselves a whopping share of the American car market with a new kind of transportation:  small, efficient, loaded with little luxuries. Satisfied that they alone understood and controlled the tastes of the American car buyer, our manufacturers ceased searching and soon began to lose.

Fortunately, Detroit has awakened and is changing today - with change itself. "We're not resisting change," says General Motors chairman Roger Smith, "we're embracing it."

Even in sports, many people make the mistake of stretching only when they're down. The classic case is the San Francisco Giants, who stretched and won under coach Bill Walsh and became the Cinderella victors of the 1982 Super Bowl. The following year, they were in the cellar and did not even make the play-offs. They had not learned the fundamental rule that you must stretch even when you're ahead; it cost them dearly even while they were the defending champions.

FACT: The good news: It's okay to lose.

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