I’d Rather Use “Experimented” Or “Experimentation” Than…
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 19, 2014
Before writing this article I decided to take a quick look back through the 1,140 or so articles on this blog to see how many times I used the word "failure". It seems I've only used it 28 times ever, and as it regards the concept of actually failing, only once, and that's if I don't count a short article I wrote in 2006 titled Another F-Word Needs To Be Eliminated.
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I love listening to motivational videos on YouTube. Heck, I've created one or two myself. Many of them talk about all the failures people had on the way to success.
Frankly, I've never responded well to that word. I tend to believe that words carry connotations that sometimes can't be overcome just because someone decides to use it in a different way. For instance, back in the 70's, drugs were called "dope", yet that never overrode the belief that people who took drugs were dopes. Notice they don't use that word anymore.
A guy I like a lot is Neil deGrasse Tyson. In one of his presentations on YouTube he talked about Edison and other scientists and how none of them failed at anything, even though many motivational speakers use that term when talking about Edison. What he said was that, as scientists, what they all do is experiment. They test things over and over, not only to see if they can get it right but to see if they can reproduce results they got before.
Another presentation I watched was by Steve Wozniak, who helped Steve Jobs build the first personal PCs. He said that as someone who wrote code, he's write some of it, then test it out to see if it worked or what it did before pushing forward. If it didn't work he wrote it a different way, and if it did he tested it by throwing in other things to see if his code would support moving forward. He does talk about failure, but the failure of products to sell because they weren't initially great, things that were corrected with time via more experimentation.
When I look back on my life, I have to ask myself how many times did I actually fail. Mistakes; I made plenty. But how often did I fail, and why?
Back in 2011 I wrote a post on this blog titled The Biggest Cause Of Leadership Failure in response to what someone else said and I stated in that post that I thought the biggest failure was ignorance. Ignorance doesn't mean stupidity; it means you haven't learned what you need to learn to overcome things you might have erred on. If you learn from those lessons, and continue trying to learn, then you remove ignorance and, in retrospect, you didn't fail; you experimented.
Back to myself; where have I possibly failed in life? I'll start with business. I've lost 3 jobs in my life, which is why I eventually decided to go into business for myself. I lost all 3 jobs for reasons that ended up having nothing to do with me; one of those I didn't take very well for years. And yet, those jobs helped make me ready to try to do things on my own, and in June I'll have been in business for myself for 13 years; experiments.
When I wrote my book Embrace The Lead, I sent it out to multiple publishers and got turned down 63 times. So I self published, got lots of copies, and sold a lot of them at speaking engagements. I've sold some of the paperback copies via my website, and I still sell a book here and there as a pdf. I also learned why no one would pick it up (you need a title; stupid! lol) and how you're supposed to market yourself to potential publishers, though I decided to go my own way later on. I made my money back and still have books to sell; experiments.
In my personal life, I'd say the only real failure I've had comes to my diet and exercise. I know what to do for both, have done them and had great results, but I didn't keep them up. Same goes for my medication; I'm always forgetting to take it. In these cases I've learned a lot, but for whatever reason I won't follow through. Here I must acknowledge failure because the experiments have already been conducted and I know what works and what doesn't. Oh well, no one's perfect.
How do you judge your life based on this criteria? Do you see yourself as a consistent failure, or someone who's learned lessons from bad things and have used them to improve your lot in life? And do you believe a shift in terminology can carry as much weight as I do, or am I just being a bit too sensitive? Let me know, and enjoy your week.
I love the idea that you just took the bull by the horns and self published your own book. That is the way on the future I think and since you have already ‘been there done that’ that puts you on the cutting edge. Keep up the good works!
Oh yes, Neil deGrasse Tyson my second favorite astrophysicist. LOL!
There was a song once that said, “There’s no such thing as a failure who keeps trying…”
Troy, I remember we talked about astrophysicists previously; how many people actually do that? lol I’ll try to market my next book when I’m ready but I’m already expecting that I’m going to have to self publish again. Still, I’ll experiment rather than fail.
Was going to leave a comment and a question on your “The Biggest Cause Of Leadership Failure” post as something caught my eye but it seems comments are closed. Regardless, everyone should read that article as it is very well written and brings up the question if “85% of all those who have been put into leadership or management positions had never led anything else in their lives.” then how does one get leadership experience for the first time? Or where you meaning on a corporate level?
Nope, it was an across the board thing. The point being there’s many people without experience who are put into leadership positions without having a clue what to do because they never had any previous opportunities in life. Thus, when some of them fumble around it’s not really their fault, thus leadership training, something I do, will help to make them better leaders.
It is strange, with today’s advanced HR techniques that more importance isn’t given to those candidates with a list of ‘failures’, and how they have turned those experiences into real life education that show a rebound mentality. it’s no wonder people give up on the Corporate world and strike out on their own – perhaps their confidence in themselves is something kissing in so many work forces. Great article, Mitch.
Thanks Oliver. Truthfully, it’s not HR’s duty to track things like this. It’s the job of the manager, director, whatever title that person has who’s over others. Still, this thing about experiments and experimentation doesn’t quite fit the corporate model in most businesses that don’t do research. In this instance it’s more of a personal thing that every person needs to use in evaluating themselves and not beating themselves up all the time.
I think it is important to access yourself. In order to make good (and better) decisions and take better actions you need to access what is working and what isn’t.
I don’t worry about saying I am a failure at something or weak at something. If I am not doing well at something I want to be better at I have to try. Sometimes that works better than others.
Somethings are a bit more of a struggle. I keep searching and experimenting to find better solutions. But you don’t always find a great solution right away. If it is something that doesn’t matter, maybe you just quit, I don’t think that is so bad. If it does matter you have to do your best, even if it is a struggle until you find a great solution.
I don’t see that as failure, but I also don’t pretend success is better than reality. I want to know where I need to keep striving.
Hi John,
I don’t think we should ever hide from the problems that crop up in our lives, especially when we’re trying to better ourselves. I do believe however that the words we use on ourselves and towards others are more influential than people think they are. Using the word “failure” keeps a lot of people from continuing on their quest because people are afraid to fail, and no matter how many times people hear of others pushing through failure, it sounds challenging.
I’d rather change the word to “experiment” because that’s really what we all do, probe things and take chances, record the results, and hopefully push on. I believe it’s more of an encouraging word, scientific. Semantics maybe, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
Hi Mitch,
Yes, I do you believe a shift in terminology can carry a lot of weight. I enjoyed your using the word “experimentation” rather than failure. Experimenting sounds like a normal thing one would do in a lab. Maybe it’s all one big science experiment!
Thanks for the different perspective!
Carol
Thanks Carol; that’s how I choose to see things I’ve done that haven’t quite worked out. It encourages me to try doing it another way. Scientists do it all the time, so why can’t the rest of us?