Brand Strategy 101
Lesson 6: Practice Beats Perfect
Move past the fear of doing it wrong and be free to fail.
Reflect
What was most useful for you in this lesson?
Practice beats perfect.
Once upon a time there was a twentieth child of twenty-two children. Born prematurely, the child was constantly sick. At age 4, she nearly died of a long struggle with pneumonia, scarlet fever and polio, emerging with a paralyzed left leg. Doctors gave her little hope of ever using it again. She, however, pursued physical therapy with relentless vigor, until at age 12 she put down her leg brace for the last time and began to walk. The child had learned the lesson of patient, dedicated practice, founded upon a solid bedrock of self belief. She immediately went and applied that lesson to running track, where she lost every race she entered in her first tournament. Wilma Rudolph went on to be hailed as the fastest woman on earth after she won three gold medals in the 1960 Rome Olympics.
Contrast that with tennis champion John McEnroe who, every time he lost, blamed anyone and everything from a noisy cameraman to his friend being in love, even to the sawdust he used to wipe his hands when he played. Anything but blame himself. And once, when he bought a beautiful, black Les Paul guitar, and went out to see a show that happened to feature a brilliant guitarist, John went home and smashed his guitar to pieces. John McEnroe had to be brilliant - perfect indeed - right now. There was no room for him to become great: he had to be great immediately. And if he wasn't, it was unacceptable. To him, practice was something for people with no talent.
But let's not dwell on that. Let's think about Wilma and how she set about her own big dreams with patient relish, perfectly happy to stumble and fall and rise again, each time more sure-footed than the last. For Wilma, practice was something to love. Every fall, every ache, was an opportunity to learn and improve. Every mistake, every failure was another valuable lesson on the journey.
It's all too easy to pay lip service to the idea of learning through failure.
In practice we often become preoccupied with success and immediate results. We become afraid of 'doing it wrong', so we look to avoid mistakes, even to the point of inaction.
We might spend a year eating up every course on our new favorite subject, but fail to apply what we've learned in the field. We focus on learning but forget to practice. Because, like McEnroe, to do it wrong, to make a mistake, to fail, represents a disaster.
As children we tend, more often than not, to learn to attach a deep feeling of shame to the idea of being 'wrong'. We learn to fear failure and to fear fear itself. These ideas can be deeply engrained, and can take a lot of practice to overcome. We often judge ourselves for our feelings and in so doing, we stop ourselves from making the progress we wish to make. For example, let's say I want to set a boundary with a client that I won't work weekends and that they need to give me at least a week's warning on any work they want done. Now I might think of calling them, I might note down what I want to say, but six weeks go by and I haven't said a thing. I have resolutely failed to put my plan into action. And to put it mildly I feel disappointed in myself. Maybe I call myself some names; maybe I judge myself for being so frustrating.
What's missing in this narrative is the reason I didn't take action on the plan. It's not because I'm lazy or dumb, even though I might say so. What's really stopping me from acting in the way I want, deep down, is my opinion that I'm neither worth the result nor capable of bringing it about. I predict that, like so many failures before, I will just end up disappointing my client, getting shouted at and disappointing myself. That doom-laden prophecy fulfills itself, I do nothing, and then I blame myself.
So what's the antidote to that vicious cycle? Wilma has the answer. When Wilma faltered, she did not bully herself. Nor did she blame others. Instead, she was there for herself when she needed it, with compassion, patience and encouragement. Wilma never stopped believing in herself and supporting herself. For her, failure was a valuable and inevitable part of learning. It might be painful, but it did not define her. Rather than feeling shame or guilt, she felt the exciting thrill of patient progress. She felt the motivating joy of learning by doing.
And that is something we have the power to choose for ourselves. We can turn the unconscious negative filter into a consciously optimistic one. How? The method is the same as the result: with practice. A compassionate, patient practice, that is free to fail.
Once we value ourselves we will attract clients who value the work we do.
Once we free ourselves of noisy assumptions, like the need to be the expert, we will provide the value we want.
And once we allow ourselves to fail, with patient compassion, we can practice what we're learning while we learn it.
And if you want to learn a process to patiently put into practice with purposeful people, well, I happen to know a product that might be a good fit. If you're positive. But that's another story.
→ Connect with Nick Ó here
