It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.
—J.K. Rowling
6 BOUNCE FORWARD
Mario Capecchi’s parents were American-born poet Lucy Ramberg and Luciano Capecchi, an officer in the Italian Airforce. They were living in the Italian Alps near the German border when World War II broke out. Mario’s father was reported missing in action while manning an anti-aircraft gun in the Western Desert campaign. His mother was ordered to one of the notoriously dehumanizing concentration camps established at Hitler’s direction. She became a political prisoner punished for belonging to an anti-Fascist group. Knowing she was in danger, Mario’s mother sold her belongings and made plans with a peasant family near Bolzano, Italy, to take care of her son.
After a single year, the money was exhausted and the family was unable to care for him. Mario recalls: “They didn’t have the resources to keep me and maintain their own family. So I went on the streets.” At four-and-a-half years old, he was left to fend for himself on the streets of northern Italy for the next four years, living in various orphanages and roving through towns with gangs of other homeless children, stealing food from carts while others distracted the vendors. It was a nearly feral lifestyle. He almost died of malnutrition. He recalls: “Just surviving from day to day pretty much occupies your mind.”
Eventually, his little gang landed in a hospital, with conditions only slightly better. To ensure that the children didn’t run away, they were not given any clothing. He survived on a daily bowl of chicory coffee and a small crust of bread.
His mother was liberated from the concentration camps by U.S. troops in 1945, and she searched for Mario for a year before finding him at the hospital near Bologna. He was feverish and malnourished. She showed up on his ninth birthday, carrying a Tyrolean outfit for him, complete with a small cap with a feather. He still has the cap. She took him to Rome, where he had his first bath in six years.
In 1946, Capecchi’s uncle sent his mother money so they could immigrate to the United States. They moved to Pennsylvania, where Capecchi attended school for the first time. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics from Antioch College in 1961 and a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard University in 1967.
In a remarkable example of bouncing forward, sixty years later, in 2007, Mario Capecchi—illiterate at nine years old—was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. He had discovered a method to breed a mouse missing a specific gene, known as a “knockout mouse,” which through genetic engineering has a gene that can be turned off.
Don’t Bounce Back—Bounce Forward
Bouncing Forward is a key practice of people who have the ability to overcome even the most extreme hardships. Rarely do people do this alone, as nearly every great story of overcoming obstacles includes relying on their close ties to help them through dark times. Yet people who bounce forward have an inner compass that never falters. Success seeks them out. They have aspirations and the willpower to remain focused on the future and use their networks to keep them motivated.
At any moment many of us are dealing with insecurities and uncertainties. Mounting performance pressures in the workplace, radical changes in the global business world, plus strained economic forecasts mean we need to figure out how to thrive and not simply survive. It’s not just about having the mental stamina to bounce back but about moving forward—bouncing forward.
Figuring out how to bounce forward assures that you aren’t simply surviving career challenges but prospering to tell the tale, as Capecchi demonstrates. Simply surviving setbacks brings greater risk of not being able to reach your career goals. Self-doubt sneaks in. Not surprisingly this makes it harder to stay focused on your dreams.
Beyond having a good support system, bouncing forward is a multifaceted, deliberate and dynamic mix consisting of:
- Grit: perseverance and commitment (passion) for long-term goals
- Resilience: ability to adapt and recover quickly from difficulties
- Motivation: the drive to initiate and maintain goal-oriented behaviors
All aspects of these three fundamentals are important to cultivate. The interdependent relationship among grit, resilience, and motivation are amplified when you combine them. In addition, having someone who believes in you is the super glue that holds all of these elements together. No doubt, this is why, sixty years later, Capecchi is still holding onto the felt cap his mother gave him when they were reunited.
How do you respond to losses and setbacks? What kind of problem-solving techniques do you depend on when you find yourself in rough situations? In moments when you’ve had to confront life-altering challenges, what have you taken away from that experience? Finding effective ways to deal with our emotions and fears builds stamina amid a changing world without turning us into naïve optimists. We all have dreams, and we’ve all had setsbacks on the way to those dreams; what we need are the right motivational strategies to bounce forward and make them a reality.
Silver Linings
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
—Aldous Huxley
Alan Horn was still celebrating a successful run as the film chief at Warner Brothers in the 2000s when he was pushed into retirement. He was told he was too old, too out of touch. He could have retired; instead he became chairman of Walt Disney Studios. Disney’s pipeline is now overflowing with blockbusters.
In a groundbreaking moment in early 2011, Jill Abramson became the first female executive editor in The New York Times 160-year history. She was prepared, skills-wise. And she knew a lot about how to gather her reserve for new challenges. In 2007, she was run over by a truck while crossing the street in Times Square. She had to learn to walk again, an experience she said gave her an amazing insight into what you can make yourself do and how you can heal from profound injury.
She needed those reserves of resilience when she was publicly fired from the Times in 2014. Just two years earlier, Abramson was ranked number five on the Forbes list of most powerful women. Abramson felt being hit by a truck was far worse than the top brass at the Times firing her. Of going from the highest to the lowest point in her career in only a few years, she said, “You can recover from most experiences.”
That includes recovering from rejection. After both Twitter and Facebook turned him down for employment, Brian Acton co-founded Whatsapp. In an interesting twist, Whatsapp become Facebook’s largest acquisition to date when it was acquired for $19 billion. Acton netted over 40 million shares of stock in Facebook, a 20 percent interest in the company.
Experiences like these show us that career failures can become a springboard to success if you respond in the right way. The common thread in each of these stories is that, despite a setback, resilient people don’t get stuck in shame, grief, or blame. They keep going.
Part of human nature is to go through a period of shock, denial, and self-doubt after a job loss or career setback. Getting stuck in feelings of anger is easy. Instead, consider the abilities, attributes, and attitudes found in highly resilient people. They focus on what they can learn from the experience.
Andrew Zolli and Anne Marie Healy detail in their book Resilience that those who are “psychologically resilient” can certainly feel great sadness after a loss, but are able to move on, even adapt and grow without becoming stuck in grief or blame. In exploring what makes people resilient, they identified personality traits like optimism and confidence. People who had personal belief systems rooted in ego-resiliency, defined as the capacity to overcome adversity, did better at reappraising and regulating their emotions. Simply, they had enough control over their feelings that they could focus on the silver lining and bounce not only back, but forward to the next step.
Pursue Mastery
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
—Truman Capote
Increasing pressures and uncertainty in the workplace tell us that if you haven’t already experienced a career setback you should anticipate one at some point. Setbacks come in many varieties. Frequently they are outside your control. Failures, false starts, disruptions, missed opportunities, and the workday blahs are only the beginning. None of us seek out failure, but those of us who embrace the experience often triumph.
Carol Dweck, the psychology professor at Stanford University whose theory on mindsets we discussed in Chapter 2, would say that our beliefs about our abilities and ourselves determine how we interpret our experiences. Psychologists who study motivation and achievement tell us that our beliefs also shape what we can achieve. Abramson’s ability to learn to walk after a devastating accident taught her not to set boundaries on what she could accomplish. Surviving years living on the street shaped Capecchi’s world-view as a medical researcher decades before he won the Nobel Prize.
According to Dweck, people hold two different views on their own abilities: fixed or growth. Your view of your abilities determines how you approach setbacks and failures. Those who held a helpless view believe abilities are a fixed trait—a person can only have so much. Dweck calls this a fixed mindset. Failures and setbacks undermine the self-confidence of those with this mindset because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change.
On the other hand, people with a growth mindset think abilities can be developed through hard work and education. They enjoy challenges. There is no limit on mastery for this group. They embrace learning and consistently see potential to develop new skills.
Dramatic, catastrophic events reach deep into our personal resolve and become life-changing, but what about the small failures we experience over the course of our careers? What we learn from those setbacks is equally important. For example, look at Steven Spielberg. He seemed destined to be a filmmaker after he shot his first movie at age 12, fulfilling the requirements for a Boy Scout badge. But his first big commercial film, Jaws, left him traumatized. He was convinced that because of Jaws, his film career was over. No one had ever taken a film 100 days over schedule and blown the budget as badly as he had. He said he had full-blown panic attacks because he knew he had made so many mistakes. Eventually, he acknowledged that there were things that he didn’t do well, particularly managing budgets and people.
Putting aside his ego and despite the fact that in the end Jaws was a massive box office success, he took a position reporting to George Lucas. Lucas was known for staying on budget and maintaining a disciplined schedule. A mentor was just what Spielberg needed on the road to becoming one of the greatest directors of all time.
Spielberg didn’t interpret his failures in managing budgets and people as the end of the world. Once he acknowledged what skills he needed to master, he came up with a plan for how to get those skills by securing a mentor. He went for mastery rather than giving up.
People with a growth mindset are confronted by failure the same as anyone, but those failures only encourage them to seek advice or try a different strategy—to overcome and move forward.
Fits and Starts
These two mindsets lead down two very different paths. As people who’ve had several false starts in their careers can testify, jobs that sound great can fizzle out, lead you nowhere or, even worse, become dead ends. On the other hand, there are those who thrive on challenges.
The late comedian Joan Rivers once famously said, “I had a lot of false starts.” When she began her career, female performers were expected to conform to certain norms. As Rivers explained, “When I started it was a very difficult thing for a woman to be fairly good-looking and funny; it just was not accepted.” When interviewed for the PBS comedy series Make ‘Em Laugh, she said, “You were either funny-looking, and then you could do jokes—that was the tradition I came out of—or you were attractive and you were a singer.” Rivers had to break through the conventions of the day.
Not many of us have Rivers’ chutzpah to break through and create opportunities not only for herself, but also for a future generation of female comedians. Slipping into a pattern of false starts is easy. Finding any job can take priority over finding the right job, leaving you stranded in a bad job or neglecting the steps that will take your career to a higher level. Next time you are tempted to set aside your dreams, just remember one of Rivers’ favorite pieces of advice: “Love the process.” Skip the shame and resist the urge to brood over failures. Angst and rumination are just part of the process of growth.
Finding Meaning in the Commotion
Career disruptions can be anything that changes the course of our daily routines. Life-enhancing events, like the birth of a child or the offer to move overseas for a job, interrupt the order of our daily habits. Disruptions beyond our control, such as the company being acquired or economic downturns, make us feel vulnerable and anxious.
Between disruptions and workplace shifts, it’s not uncommon to hear complaints of feeling overwhelmed by all we have to manage, making it difficult to know what to prioritize. Many companies are exploring the impacts of living in a VUCA environment. VUCA, a term borrowed from the military, stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. To put it another way, we are living in crazy and intense times.
The resulting stress has led many of us to seek meaning in all the commotion. Looking for meaning in work has often been singled out as the mantra of the Millennial generation. Whether it is Boomers, Generation X, or Millennials, our research shows everyone is redefining how they think about success at work. A challenging economic cycle has created a shift in thinking about careers. Success has been redefined as less about accumulating status and more about finding meaning in our careers. In a recent Career Advisory Board Report, nearly three-quarters of the young adults surveyed said they agreed, “Meaningful work was among the three most important factors defining career success.”
By adopting a way of thinking that focuses on meaning or the broader purpose their work enables, we become more engaged and are less likely to leave our current positions. The Shift Index validates this way of thinking. Developed by Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, its purpose is to help executives understand and take advantage of long-term forces of change shaping the U.S. economy. The Shift Index tracks 25 metrics about technological and political developments, information, and talent and their impacts on performance. In their search for the kinds of traits that will excel in this new uncertainty, they believe that individuals with the “passion of an explorer” will be the most resilient.
These passionate explorers have three attributes:
- Commitment to having a lasting impact on their industry or function;
- Actively seeking out challenges to improve performance; and
- An ability to build trust-based relationships.
Connecting your work to a larger purpose can help you stay engaged at those times when work feels overwhelming. Identifying the meaning you find in your work is a good way to shift your approach away from the commotion and stress to the big picture of what your job does for you and others.
The One That Got Away
Another type of setback is missed opportunities. The interview that didn’t turn out as you’d hoped. The introduction you worked for months to connect to . . . and then you dropped the ball and never closed the loop. The investment opportunity you passed up that now is worth millions. Missed opportunities can cause us to look backward and dwell on what could have been instead of on what can be. We all know the feeling when you relive the events of a meeting or an interview in your mind and the outcome in your mind is different from the experience. Small scale or large, lamenting the past seems to be hard-wired into humanity.
Martin Seligman, author of Flourish and guru on positive psychology, points to athletic coaches for inspiration. He observed one coach who developed a character strengths exercise to debrief his team following games. During the debriefing sessions, team members reviewed the game’s successes and challenges by discussing the character strengths used or not used throughout the game. Team members then identified in themselves, teammates, and coaches examples where the strengths like team work, patience, and fortitude were called upon. Additionally, they identified missed opportunities for using various strengths. The idea was that by identifying the missed opportunities they would increase awareness of future opportunities to use strengths.
Adam, a freelance social media strategist, told us that, although he maintains an active presence on LinkedIn, he admits that he often forgets to check his LinkedIn inbox. Inevitably, weeks later he’ll discover messages about potential work. Those opportunities were missed, but rather than linger and lament, Adam figured out a way to rebound: he put a prompt in his calendar to check in, and now he has a few new clients. Whether the size of your missed opportunity is a state championship or a project assignment, making the most of it means recognizing what the mistake was and working to fix it in the future.
The Workday Blues
Perhaps the most common workplace issue comes from the most motivated of employees. Maybe you are the person with that burning passion to do well. You come in early, are the last to leave, and haven’t taken off a day or weekend since you started. While you’d planned to scale back after you got the promotion or when the project was finished, you never did. Consequently, it’s five or ten or fifteen years later and you are burned out.
Face it. You are a workaholic, or perhaps this sounds like someone you know. No desire to hang out with friends much less expand your network. Permanently stressed. No longer performing at your best. And it’s become a chronic situation.
Exhaustion, frustration, lack of energy, and sleep deprivation are all signs that more demands and less resources have gotten the best of you. In order to overcome the blahs, consider the following advice from Manfred Kets De Vries at INSEAD: take relaxation seriously, cultivate a rich non-work life, and consider unplugging.
Setbacks at work can take their toll. Let’s explore the three psychological components of bouncing forward. We hope you will find bouncing forward to be even better than bouncing back.
The Recipe for Springing Back
Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
—Unknown
Don’t just bounce back. Adopt an attitude whereby you accept that work is going to stretch your capabilities to the limit and that you have the ability to not just cope but also flourish. Bouncing forward to the future requires that we cultivate ways to manage the inexorably accelerating pace of change. We need more than just the internal resources to recover quickly from setbacks. Patience, along with the ability to anticipate the future, helps us to maintain momentum. Developing this kind of energy force keeps us from feeling devastated or judging ourselves too harshly when setbacks occur.
In order to persevere in the pursuit of your dreams, it’s optimum to have a reflexive ability to recover from setbacks while having the stamina to keep going in good times and bad. However, in order to be prepared for the future, you will need an understanding of grit, resilience, and motivation and the ways in which they combine to create the multiplier effect you need to succeed.
Grit
Extraordinary achievement, as psychologist Martin Seligman describes it, is very rare. He found that, while bell-shaped or normal distributions held true for ordinary things like school grades and height, they totally failed in describing achievement. When measuring achievement of top performers in a wide range of fields, those considered geniuses far outdistanced excellent performers, and left above-average in the dust. The only way to achieve true genius in a field is to dedicate to the mastery of it.
This is the underlying rationale for grit: a never-yielding commitment to self-discipline. As Seligman explains, the more time you spend on the task, the more all those hours multiply your progress.
Angela Lee Duckworth is a graduate of the highly competitive Ph.D. program in psychology at The University of Pennsylvania, where Seligman is a professor. Duckworth discovered that the more education a person has, the more grit they have as well. It’s impossible to tell whether education results in the mental fortitude seen in grit or if, as a result of failures, people with grit use learning as a response to overcome a challenge. What is also of interest is her discovery that older people have more grit than younger people.
Reprinted by permission of the Publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com.
As Heraclitus of Ephesus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, said several millennia ago, “The only thing that is constant is change.” In general, the older we are the more willing we are to accept that the world changes. As we age, experience teaches us that change is inevitable. Heraclitus also said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” The upshot is that experiencing changes prepares us for more change, and we learn that different isn’t better or worse, but just different. Our endurance for staying the course can increase even as the challenges and changes keep coming, or as new ideas distract us.
Fostering grit is about developing that endurance. Not to be confused with motivation, which is merely the willingness to do something; grit is the determination to do whatever it takes over time. Your grittiness increases achievement by acting as a multiplier of skills and knowledge, at the same time increasing skills and knowledge, which results in increased chances of success.
Resilience
A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.
—Jack Dempsey
Ask anyone to tell you a story of survival and you are bound to hear heart-rending tales of wars and disasters, untimely deaths, acts of courage, incurable illnesses, and the strength of the human spirit. In the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Into each life some rain must fall.” Longfellow assured us that we all would experience adversity. How people respond to adversity has fed literary traditions throughout time, because, while there is no one standard response, there is a definite archetype of a hero. The hero’s most defining trait? Resilience.
Why are some people resilient and others not?
Harvard journalist Diane Coutu says resilience is “one of the great puzzles of human nature.” Coutu explored how Holocaust victims were able to develop a “plastic shield”—an inner psychological space that protected them from the intrusions of abuse. Combined with an ability to form attachments to others and maintain some semblance of a sense of humor, they were able to hold onto a critical sense of perspective. Coutu reports that resilience is not just genetic, as people can become more resilient over their lifetimes.
Of the many stories we have shared, perhaps the one that best exemplifies the incredible importance of resiliency is Melody Gardot. Her life story inspires us with the ways in which optimism, hardiness, a positive view of the future, and the ability to make the best of a situation can be used to master extreme resiliency challenges.
Melody’s difficulties began when she was hit by an SUV that had ignored a red traffic light and smashed into her while she rode her bicycle. Her pelvis was broken in two places and she received serious head and spinal injuries. Her injuries were severe and left her unable to sit up for more than 10 minutes at a time. She was confined to lying flat on her back in her hospital bed for a year.
Melody suffers acute sensitivity to light and sound because of the neural injuries, requiring her to wear dark sunglasses and sound-dampening devices at all times. She had to relearn simple tasks such as brushing her teeth and walking. The accident resulted in both long-and short-term memory problems and difficulty with her sense of time.
Her doctor suggested that she consider using music as a kind of recovery therapy. She had played the piano before the accident, but since she now couldn’t sit comfortably at the piano, she picked up the guitar, and the focus of her music making evolved. She found jazz.
Now a professional musician with a full-length album called Worrisome Heart, she uses her resiliency as a springboard for her musical success. Melody’s lyrics tell her story: “Some lessons we learn the hard way. Some lessons don’t come easy, and that’s the price we have to pay.” Through it all she hasn’t forgotten her good fortune. Melody says, “I forgot a lot of things, but I don’t forget that.”
Melody Gardot’s unswerving ability to look forward and embrace new realities is consistent with what we heard from others when they told us stories of overcoming adversity. Above all, they didn’t perceive their situations as misfortunes. They accepted hard times with a steady hand. Rather than feeling despair, they accepted the new normal and looked for ways to make the best of it.
Looking back at Melody’s story, you can see that she does not specifically say “Life is meaningful” or “I’m going to make the best of this situation,” but rather she shows us in her recovery her ability to make meaning out of a difficult time. She epitomizes resilience.
She never looks back to blame the driver of the vehicle that hit her. She is not a victim. Rather, had it not been for the accident, she might never have discovered her true passion in life.
Resilient people invest a lot of effort in what Coutu calls an uncanny ability to improvise in seeking solutions. They understand that, when searching for answers in difficult situations, the more realistically they grasped the true situation, the more quickly they were able to move into a problem-solving mode.
Motivation
What motivated you to read this book? Chances are the first answer that pops into your mind is not about money. We’d speculate that the more likely answer is your intrinsic desire to be better at what you do. You are reading this for yourself, not for others. Sure, you want to be more employable. But even more than that, you want to be the best you can be.
Many companies are still focused on compensation as a primary motivator. However, extensive research substantiates that money is not the answer. Ironically, financial incentives can actually have a negative impact on intrinsic motivation, when tasks are especially interesting or enjoyable. The consequence is that rewards may help you accomplish the things you don’t enjoy doing but for the things you love, intrinsic motivation is a stronger predictor in inspiring performance. Money matters, but it’s not all about money for most of us.
You might think of what defines your motivation as what gets you up in the morning or the things that keep you going at work, even when progress is difficult. Perhaps you like the community-building aspects of your job or knowing that it has an impact on society, or maybe you are becoming better at something that matters to you. These factors take the focus off money.
In our research and experience, tapping into our intrinsic motivation provides grounding between resilience and grit. Your self-directed desire or intrinsic motivation is the compass that keeps you looking forward to tomorrow.
What does a person who is intrinsically motivated look like? Perhaps like Jack Ma, one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet. His e-commerce company, Alibaba, attracts 100 million shoppers a day. He is now the richest person in China. But before he started Alibaba, he often had to call on his inner reserves. His frustrations and setbacks included failing his college entrance exams three times. He applied to the police academy and was told “You’re no good.” He applied for 30 different jobs and was rejected for every one. He says the most discouraging was when Kentucky Fried Chicken opened in his hometown in China, and of the 24 people who applied for jobs, 23 were accepted. He was not.
When he started Alibaba, there were more obstacles. No bank would work with him to process payments. But Ma was determined to succeed, so he started Alipay, his own online payment system. Many people told him that “this is the stupidest idea you’ve ever had.” Today over 800 million people use Alipay, which transfers payments in different currencies between international buyers and sellers.
How did Ma do it? We’d say it was the combination of grit, resilience, and intrinsic motivation. He exhibited a tremendous determination that wasn’t swayed when someone called his ideas stupid. His drive, combined with enthusiasm and ambition, helped him find new goals to strive for until he finally found success.
To facilitate your own intrinsic motivation, consider the five sources of meaning for humans at work: the impact of your work on society, the customer, the company, the team, and “me.” According to McKinsey, connecting to one or more of these five sources of meaning can help you tap into your enthusiasm.
Mental Strategies to Help You Bounce Forward
Now that you’ve learned the three fundamental components of bouncing forward, it’s time to consider the practical strategies to deploy them. The very heart of bouncing forward is acknowledging that jobs are fluid and not perfect. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have more happy days at work. Cindi Leive, editor in chief of Glamour magazine, says, “The idea that your job is going to make your heart sing on a daily basis is just not true.” Some days are going to inevitably test your spirit. But, as Leive notes, “You can aim for a pretty good heart-singing-to-bummed-out ratio.” Your grit, motivation, and determination can see you through. Here are some mental strategies that can help you persevere toward more happy days at work.
Renounce
Brian Ray, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, has received many letters of rejection from scholarly and literary journals for his research papers and short stories. He’s learned more from rejection letters than from the acceptances, he says. Some ideas need time to marinate, some spoil, and some aren’t that great to begin with, Ray has learned. Now he’s the author of two novels. Ray says his trick is always to be working on an article or a book. Keep on practicing.
Getting comfortable with feedback is a skill we can all benefit from. As we discussed in Chapters 3 and 5, if you aren’t receiving feedback at work, ask for it. And when you hear something you don’t like, use it as an opportunity to bounce forward. Renounce the fixed mindset that you always have to be right or in control. Instead, adopt a growth mindset where you learn as much from failure and feedback as you do from success.
Pounce
In his breakthrough book The Resiliency Advantage, Al Siebert advocates adopting a curiosity habit. First, he asks, “How do you react to surprising incidents?” Do you hunker down and try to stay the course, or do you wonder what’s going on, look for answers about cause and effect? Curious people ask a lot of questions, which is a great way to gather information and stage the best action for the best outcome—pouncing.
Fred Rogers, host of the popular long-running public television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, said: “Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth the effort.” Mr. Rogers’ curiosity was apparent to all because he never stopped asking questions. He seemed to perpetually possess the spirit of a three-year-old who peppers his parents with the question “Why?” over and over again.
When opportunities present themselves, be curious and pounce.
Trounce
There are those who come through and win in the end and then there are those who lead “wire-to-wire.” The term wire-to-wire originated in horse racing when races started and ended with a wire across the track. Wire-to-wire winners distinguish themselves by leading the way—trouncing the competition—with their excellence the entire time.
The road to trouncing isn’t being a wire-to-wire leader every time out of the gate. Most of us are still developing our winning strategy or rebounding from our last unspectacular finish. One key to preserving and prevailing in pursuit of our excellence is to never stop trying. Geno Auriemma, women’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut, tells his players: “We have to make sure that we forget about the last shot and keep shooting.” As any basketball player knows, you can’t score if you aren’t shooting. For this coach, trouncing his competition is about consistency of numbers. They may lose some games, but in the end, his players will out-shoot their rivals.
Setting the stage for winning comes from practice and repetition. Just like basketball players, we can’t expect to score if we aren’t prepared to shoot. Being prepared to shoot comes from a relentless commitment to practice. Not just practicing before games, but practicing every day. Not just weekdays, but every day. Not just this year, but year in and year out.
Max Levchin’s successful online payment company PayPal wasn’t his first. As the co-founder tells it: “The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn’t fail. It still didn’t really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal.” It seems that all that practice paid off.
Announce
Anyone who has trained for a marathon knows that you don’t go out on the first day of training and run 26 miles. Jeff Galloway, author of Marathon: You Can Do It, has helped over 200,000 people, including Barbara, train for the Marine Corps Marathon. He suggests you start with a few miles at a time, interspersing walking and running to build stamina, and as Barbara discovered, it gets easier to run further distances. Instead of thinking of your career as an epic marathon to be run at one time, try working in sprints, as in taking on a special project that will add depth to your skills.
Many of us become focused on the finish line of retirement. We are hoping to get there as soon as possible. Often, by the time we reach the finish line, we are exhausted, too drained to pursue our post-career bucket list. Sprinters also have a finish line in mind, but their strategy is to focus and work hard through the sprints while taking time to rest and recover in between, thereby building their endurance for the next sprint. They know when to be working and when to be resting. Once you’ve committed to the sprint, then announce your intentions to others.
Announcing your intentions to others can help you find the motivation you need to stay focused on your goals. Enroll a few people directly in your sprint goals, perhaps from your “five to thrive” from Chapter 4. When you announce a goal, people will jump in to help you and keep you on track. In a sense, joining a group like Weight Watchers is an “announce” strategy.
Announcing can have other benefits. Don was chronically late to meetings and his manager mentioned it on a performance review. He decided to fix it, but six months later, in a peer review, people mentioned he was always late to meetings. “That’s not fair,” he thought, because he knew for a fact he hadn’t been late in at least six months. So at the next few meetings, when he walked in to a team meeting, he’d announce his arrival cheerfully with something like: “Three minutes to start time and I’m here. Wow, could have knocked off five emails in that time.” He was announcing he had changed, and people noticed on the next peer review.
Denounce the Small Stuff
Most of us agree that we shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. But staying motivated and connected to the big picture of how you are creating meaning in your life isn’t easy. Legendary management guru and Common Cause founder John Gardner observed that people in the workforce are staler than they know and more bored than they will admit. The redundancy of the job, the lack of inspiration, and the petty frustrations have sunk them. The small stuff has won.
Consider this quote from Gardner, who has studied personal renewal for over 30 years: “Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you.”
We all need to be able to hold onto inspiration to stay motivated. Too often the first year in a job becomes the fifth and then the tenth, indistinguishable from one another. Not sweating the small stuff let’s us put our focus elsewhere and think about the big picture.
Maintain the Faith
Most people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they’re in the past doesn’t mean you can’t treasure the possibilities . . . maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now’s the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.
—James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still
Careers are built on more than a chain of personal bests—they are built through a combination of grit, motivation, and resiliency. When you are in the midst of a setback, think to the future and your dreams. In what way might you look back at your current situation and consider it one of the best learning experiences of your life? How might you think about a situation so that, even if you were given the choice never to have faced this setback, you would still choose to go through it again?
Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale, former president of the Naval War College, ranks among the most highly decorated Navy pilots in U.S. history. Nothing defined his life as a celebrated leader as much as his experience during the Vietnam War. In September of 1965, Stockdale’s fighter jet was shot down over North Vietnam. Parachuting from his disabled fighter jet, he landed with such force that it fractured his back and severely damaged his leg. He was captured and taken prisoner.
He spent nearly eight years as a prisoner of war (POW), most of it in solitary confinement. Stockdale endured tremendous physical torture and trauma, including a broken shoulder, a broken bone in his back, and a leg that was broken twice. However, he said that was peanuts in comparison to the shame he felt of breaking with his personal code of honor. He says, “Shame is a heavier burden than any physical wounds.” In the midst of torture, the shame he experienced came from his internal unrealistic expectations not to break with the Military Code of Conduct.
In writing about the experience in his memoir, In Love and War, he says his imprisonment was the defining event of his life. In retrospect, he says he would not trade the experience because he knew it made him a better, more humble leader.
All those days in solitary confinement gave him plenty of time to think about what was happening in terms of “what is up to you” and “what is not up to you.” Ultimately, he determined that the torture they were enduring was not up to them since it was not in the realm of their power or free will. This realization allowed him to assess his values and come to terms with his code of honor.
The rules that Stockdale developed and shared with his fellow prisoners while in captivity were summed up in the acronym BACK US. The code was composed of rules that took into account the reality of prison life. For example, the US stood for Unity Over Self, so that he and fellow POWs would be able to recall in the midst of interrogations never to agree to offers of leniency on your own behalf unless what was offered was offered to all of them.
Luckily, we don’t need acronyms forged during wartime to remember that we can learn from our own setbacks. We can’t control the fact that jobs are at risk and entire industries are in the midst of disruptive change, but we can remember to take lessons from our experiences. Those lessons can help us stay motivated through life’s ups and downs.