Chapter 21

SUCCESS AND FAILURE

ISN’T IT AMAZING how a person can go through life thinking he’s attending to important things like a good little boy, vying to succeed in the way success is defined, only to find in the face of his impending death that his view of reality is horribly skewed? Physician, researcher, and author Dr. Elisabeth Kübler Ross, and others who have spent years working with people who are dying, have repeatedly heard what people regret about their life as they face death. Guess what? The regrets of dying human beings, when they’ve got time to think about it, are far more about qualitative matters than quantitative things. Most worry not about the promotion they didn’t get, the deal they didn’t do, the number of employees they didn’t have, the stock they didn’t purchase, or the car they didn’t buy but about the way they didn’t act, the people they didn’t serve, the relationships they didn’t build, and the things they didn’t say.

The dilemma is not that setting and driving toward goals or enjoying the material fruits of our labors is something deplorable but more that we view these as “The Point” rather than a vehicle which we can, toward the end of our lives, believe has been truly valuable. In a big-vision small business, we can and should take care of the quantitative matters—payroll, revenues, profits, and the like—not as an end in and of themselves but to foster viability that, in return, allows us to somehow be of service or do something of real value in our world. And we can define our success accordingly.

“I know I shouldn’t compare myself to others,” says Wendi Gilbert, partner with her husband, Paul, in San Francisco’s Heart at Work Productions. “You just don’t know what someone else’s goals are or whether they’re truly successful. They don’t wear or share their struggles or challenges, necessarily, so what you see isn’t the whole story. Comparing your business to someone else’s is okay for marketing information but not for making a decision about whether your business is successful. That has to be measured according to your own goals.” What’s more, adds Paul, “Once they become relatively successful, people tend to forget the struggles and glamorize those early or lean times, when it’s those challenges that probably taught them more about success. As a business owner, the reality is that you have to keep trying, and maintain a perspective that there are no real successes or failures—everything is just a learning experience.”

“When I’m looking for senior management, if they have nothing but successes, that scares the heck out of me. I want someone who’s seen it all, who’s ridden the rocket up and down. Because you learn a lot more coming down.”

BRUCE FERNIE, FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN, TEALUXE INC., BOSTON

Many people make the mistake of interpreting perfectly normal feelings of discomfort as failure and give up prematurely. But big-vision small-enterprise owners who have been in business long enough to experience several cycles know that being expanded beyond your comfort zone is part of the terrain—and provides yet another opportunity for qualitative growth and mastery. “You never get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You just have to know that it’s a phase you’re going through at any given time,” says Jessie Zapffe, proprietor of Golden Bough Books in Mount Shasta, California. “Discomfort isn’t about failure, it’s about growth and expansion. You’re stepping out into new areas of your own capability, and that’s not comfortable. But it’s better than dying on the vine because a part of you isn’t being used.”

Think about your assumptions regarding success and failure as if the quality of your life, as you judge it at your end, depends on it. How often do you measure your success or failure against external, culturally defined standards instead of those that are aligned with your real lifestyle preferences, priorities, and needs? How can you know something or someone else is successful without being privy to the vision and goals of his business, for instance, or the heart, mind and happiness of the individual involved? The person whose apparent success you covet may be killing himself from the stress of pursuing goals that mean nothing to him, but that may never enter your mind. This is a critical flaw in our wonderfully abundant culture—to assume someone is successful and happy because they have specific tangible tokens of accomplishment; yet as outlined earlier, research shows that pursuing and owning these things doesn’t in itself deliver happiness or meaning and can actually increase depression and an inability to sustain relationships.¹⁴

Is a quantitative definition of success truly success if it ultimately leaves you sick, lonely, dissatisfied, or unfulfilled? In the development of your big-vision small enterprise, reflect on and create your own definition of success, so the standards that you set and the actions that you take in striving toward and accomplishing it are rewarding and meaningful.