Court Failure To Succeed
Failure is not a plague to be quarantined, but a life-saving bacteria that needs to be befriended in most cases. No risk, no reward. No failure, no success. Acknowledge failure and we all will be richer

By Ramesh Kumar

Globally renowned physician-turned-spiritual guru Deepak Chopra is believed to have exhorted his constituency not to heed to the adage of ‘we learn from past mistakes’. The Chopra prescription was simple and straightforward: Focus on success and don’t waste time on failures. Ever since my colleague Atulya Sharma spilled this Chopraspeak a few weeks ago at a get together – aptly titled ‘Freedom to Succeed’ - I began to ruminate.

Chopra’s utterances are not the gospel truth. It is his personal observation. Fear of failure is a major issue with everyone from all walks of life. Accept it or not, every success is built upon failed initial attempts. It is debatable whether such failures are made public or not. Non-disclosure does not remove its existence. And there is nothing to be ashamed about it. Failures are not a waste of time, energy or effort but sheer learnings and one cannot afford to ignore knowledge and wisdom gained in the process.

Game of Dice
When we embark on a mission/task, of course we have a blueprint - a rough draft of what we want to achieve or where we want to reach at the culmination of this exercise. Yet, there is no guarantee that we may end up with what we aspire for. None except the Almighty can categorically claim such clairvoyance of end results. So, to put it differently, we all take chances with the hope that we will succeed in whatever we do. It is a pure game of dice: sometime, we win and sometime, we lose.

Still the fear of failure haunts us perpetually. We fail often enough. But none of us want to be seen having courted failure. It is a big stigma or embarrassment. Hence we try to brush our failures under the carpet and try to present our successes only. As if we are all made fail-proof. A bit of self-deception and therefore is not a positive trait.

Take Chances
Success and failure are the two sides of the same coin. Success results from tinkering with previous failed attempts. Listen to Richard Darkins, the renowned evolution biologist, on taking chances and the route to success. “Chance is a major factor in evolution. It is also a major factor to the success of a product. In species, this chance may be as massive as catastrophic change in the environment or as molecular as genetic mutation. Translating to product management, it simply means: launch. By definition, if a product is never launched, chance can never help it to succeed. Don’t wait for it to be perfect. Get it good enough and start creating opportunities for success. Launch! The worst case scenario is that you fail fast and cheap. In the best case, you survive and begin to evolve.”

Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman of First Capital offers another gem on the road to success: “Ask most successful entrepreneurs how they come up with the idea for their business, and you’re likely to learn that what they initially set out to do is very different from the company you are familiar with. Paypal started out as a service to beam money through Palm Pilots, while YouTube was originally a video dating site.”

If Kopelman were to be believed to succeed in life or business, you cannot afford to be rigid, but flexible. One needs to be ready to tinker with the original roadmap. Paypal and YouTube gambled on their future and reached where they are today. There is every possibility they would have landed belly up with a thud and mud on their back as they were trying to tweak their master plans. They were taking a chance as they firmly believed that not taking a risk is a risk! So when Kopelman says that every business plan is wrong as soon as it is written is a serious declaration based on empirical evidence.

Samuel J Palmissano, Chairman, President and CEO of IBM Corporation, says that, “a focus on innovation works,” in the recent IBM Global CEO Study on ‘The Enterprise of the Future’ conducted encompassing 1130 CEOs spread across the world in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit. Innovation, by nature, is a risky proposition. The enterprises of the future, the study points out, constantly searches for new ways to compete with no guarantee: what is lying at the end of tunnel, none is privy to. That’s life.

When we talk about succeeding and admit that risk is an integral part of such an exercise, failure always lurks round the corner. Failure is not a plague to be quarantined, but a life-saving bacteria that needs to be befriended in most cases. No risk, no reward. No failure, no success. Acknowledge failure and we all will be richer. Deepak Chopra believes it or not, it is immaterial.