Be All You Can Be: A Challenge to Stretch Your God-Given Potential (18 page)

When I was pastoring my first church, a college friend was also serving his first pastorate about twenty miles down the road from me. We got together once or twice a month for meals with our wives. Being brand new at the job, I was making lots of mistakes—blowing it in a big way every day! So when we came together I would share my flops and failures. After two or three dinners, I realized that Mike wasn’t communicating; he and his wife were on the defensive. His wife was saying things like, “Oh, Mike wouldn’t do that,” or, “Mike has never let that happen.” My wife, on the other hand, was saying, “You should have seen John handle that!” and, “John blew it royally yesterday.” Mike never seemed to make a mistake. If there was ever a problem at his church, it was the people’s fault.

I did a series of meetings for him after his first year, and over dinner one night he was talking about the “ding-a-lings” in his church. “That ding-a-ling won’t do this, and this ding-a-ling won’t do that.” After about thirty minutes Mike’s conversation was making me nauseated. I thought,
I can’t let this go on forever
, and I put down my fork and said, “Mike, I want to tell you. Do you know why you have so many ding-a-lings in your church?” He put down his fork and said, “No, but I’d like to know.” So I told him, “It’s because you’re the biggest ding-a-ling of all.” Suddenly, my digestion improved tremendously, but now Mike couldn’t eat!

Two years afterward, he called me on the phone to say he was going to leave these ding-a-lings and go to another state, to a really
good
church. He hadn’t learned a thing from his failures because he saw them as foes. I remember hanging the phone up and telling Margaret, “Mike’s going to another church in another state. I give him six months and he’ll find ding-a-lings there. If he doesn’t start admitting that he’s the problem, that he needs to make some changes, he’s going to have more problems.” Sure enough, he lasted about six months. This time, it was not only the ding-a-lings in his congregation, but it was the ding-a-ling district board, the ding-a-ling district superintendent, and all the other ding-a-lings around him. So he decided to build an independent church. The last time I heard, he was out of the ministry. What happened? He had always looked at his failures as enemies, and he had always blamed them on someone else.

There is truth in the statement that a person is not a failure until he or she places the blame on someone else. Remember Jimmy Durante, the comedian with the big nose? Many people would have taken that nose and hidden in the corner of life—but not Jimmy. Someone asked him one time how he managed to accept his larger-than-life nose, and here’s what he said: “All of us have schnozzles.” He meant that we all have peculiarities. If our “schnozzle” is not on our face, it’s somewhere else—maybe in our mind or in our habits. When we admit those schnozzles instead of defending them, regardless of where they are, we can begin to laugh at ourselves, and when we laugh at ourselves, the world will laugh with us.

Take a moment and write down the last big mistake you made. It should take about three seconds to remember it. How did you react to it? Is it your friend? Or is it your foe?

Too many people, when they fail, erect a monument to their failure and spend the rest of their lives paying homage. Not enough of us view failure as a
moment
—a fleeting experience. Do you make a monument when you fail, or do you look at it as just something that happened in a moment and is over and done with? Charles Kettering said, “Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Repeated failures are fingerposts on the road to achievement. The only time that you don’t fail is the last time you try something and it works. One fails forward.” I like the expression, “fails forward.” Fail forward toward success.

People make monuments out of their mistakes by saying things like, “I tried it, and it didn’t work. They said it couldn’t be done, and they were right.” Mark Twain said that if a cat sits on a hot stove, the cat will never sit on a hot stove again. The problem is, the cat will never sit on a cold stove, either. The cat just won’t sit on stoves, because every time he sees a stove he sees a burning failure. Abraham Lincoln wisely stated, “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”

What else do people put on their monuments to failure besides, “I tried it and it didn’t work,” and, “They said it couldn’t be done”? How about, “I wish I had done that”? There are people who spend their whole lives wishing instead of getting out and doing. They never venture into the arena of action; they sit sadly on the sidelines and wish.

Others say, “I’ll never get hurt again.” They stay so far away from anything that is risky that life will pass them by. They’ll see the joy of the risk takers, but they won’t share in it.

Another common inscription on monuments to failure is, “I can’t change. It’s just the way I am.” This goes on monuments of people who say, “Leaders are born, not made, and I’m not the leader. I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. I can’t help myself.”

There’s a curious thing about people who build great monuments to failure: They don’t want to accept responsibility for the construction. They’re not willing to take blame. They find it much easier to attribute their failures to other people. Their philosophy of life is, “My circumstances make me who I am.”

My fourth observation is this: Too many people have too broad a view of failure. They’re too quick to judge an attempt as a failure. If they don’t see immediate outward positive results, they see a major mistake. Failure is not the external result; it’s the internal activity.

Thomas Edison was once experimenting in search of a natural rubber. In his search he had fifty thousand failures. His assistant said, “Mr. Edison, we have made fifty thousand experiments, and we have no results.” He was ready to quit. He viewed failure outwardly. Edison replied, “Results! We have had wonderful results. We now know fifty thousand things which won’t work.” Thomas Edison knew that there was only one thing that was failure, and that was quitting.

So often, people who fail frequently follow this philosophy: If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all the evidence that you ever tried. They view failure outwardly. What the world judges as obvious failure is many times not failure at all. If you study history, you’ll find that the world has put labels of failure on some events that have been some of the greatest successes of mankind. Some examples: the Iowa banker who told Alexander Graham Bell to remove that toy (a Bell telephone) from his office; the Hollywood producer who scrawled
Reject
on the movie screenplay for
Gone with the Wind;
the fellow who was Henry Ford’s greatest investor, who in 1906 asked that his stock be sold; Mr. Roebuck, who sold his part of the Sears, Roebuck firm for $25,000 because he thought it would never fly. (The last I read on Sears was that they sell $25,000 worth of goods every sixteen seconds.) Do you view failure from the outside or from the inside?

Too many people fail, and then they never use that failure to their benefit. There is such a thing as a successful failure. Anytime you have learned from a mistake, you have made a major step toward success.

I read a great article on leadership not long ago in which the author discussed the fact that one characteristic that distinguishes successful leaders and followers is that successful leaders learn from their failures. Let me just quote a couple of statements. “Leaders use their energy well because they learn from failure, and they can therefore reach higher goals. Almost every false step is regarded by them as an opportunity, not as the end of the world. They are convinced that they can learn and, more important, that their organizations can learn from failure.”

Tom Watson, Sr., who founded IBM, had a top junior executive who spent $12 million of the company’s money on an experiment that failed. The executive put his resignation on Watson’s desk, saying, “I’m sure that you want my resignation.” Watson said, “No, I don’t want your resignation. I’ve just spent $12 million educating you; it’s about time you get to work.” Watson knew that there is such a thing as successful failure.

We successfully fail when
it stirs us to keep trying
. The setbacks that look as though they will finish us off can spur us on to come out on top. A Louisiana farmer’s favorite mule fell into a well. After studying the situation, the farmer came to the conclusion that he couldn’t pull the mule out, so he might as well bury him. He got a truckload of dirt, backed up to the well, and dumped it on top of the mule at the bottom of the well. When the dirt hit the mule, it started snorting and tramping. As it tramped, it began to work itself up on top of the dirt. So the farmer continued to pour dirt in the well until the mule snorted and tramped its way to the top. It then walked away, a dirtier but wiser mule. What was intended to bury it turned out to be its salvation. That’s a successful failure.

We successfully fail when
we see our mistakes and are willing to change
. The greatest mistake we make is not correcting the first mistake. When we see where we went wrong, we should make every effort to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

We fail successfully when
we discover our true selves
. In reading the biographies of great men, I’ve been impressed with two things. One, some of the most successful people in the world started out as failures; two, because they failed, they found themselves and their purpose in life. I’ll give you a few examples. Nathaniel Hawthorne was fired from his position in a customhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. He came home after losing his job feeling utterly defeated, and his wife said to him, “Now you can write the book that you’ve wanted to write all your life.” Out of that came
The Scarlet Letter
. James Whistler failed at West Point. Then he decided to try painting. We all know his success. Phillips Brooks started out as a teacher, but he couldn’t make it in the classroom, so he went to seminary and eventually became an outstanding preacher. These men were successful failures.

Too many people never start because of failure; too few never quit because of failure. Samuel Johnson said, “Nothing will be attempted if all possible obstacles must first be removed.” Have you ever not started something because you wanted all the conditions to be perfect before you began? If this is your criterion for taking a risk, you’ll never accomplish anything. Perfect does not guarantee success; if anything, it’s a hindrance.

Starting is the first step to succeeding. Too many of us don’t make it to the top of the ladder because we don’t try often enough. We’re afraid of failure. In 1915, Ty Cobb set the record for stolen bases, ninety-six. Seven years later, Max Carey of the Pittsburgh Pirates became second best with fifty-one stolen bases. Does this mean that Cobb was twice as good as Carey, his closet rival? Look at the facts: Cobb made 134 attempts, Carey, fifty-three. Cobb failed fifty-eight times; Carey only failed twice. Cobb succeeded ninety-six times, Carey only fifty-one times. Cobb’s average was only 71 percent. Carey’s average was 96 percent. Carey’s average was much better than Cobb’s. Cobb tried eighty-one more times than Carey. But here’s the key: His eighty-one additional tries produced forty-four more stolen bases. Cobb risked failure eighty-one more times in one season than his closest rival and Cobb goes down in history as the greatest base runner of all time. Why? Because Ty Cobb refused failure.

Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs. He struck out 1,330 times. If Ruth was in a batting slump, it never bothered him. He kept smiling, and he kept swinging the bat. During a low period an interviewer asked him, “How do you keep from being discouraged?” Ruth said, “I realize the law of averages will catch up if I just keep swinging. In fact, when I’m in a slump, I feel sorry for the pitcher because I know that sooner or later he’s going to pay for it.”

My nephew Eric was in his first Little League baseball game three years ago. He was the youngest member of his team, so I went along to encourage him. It was Eric’s first time at bat, and he was scared to death. Out on the mound was the biggest kid on the opposing team. The biggest kid is always the pitcher, and his name is always Butch. Sure enough, Butch threw that ball hard—strike one, strike two, strike three. Eric never got the bat off his shoulder. I could see how relieved Eric was when he struck out and got to go back to the dugout. But the coach was mad; he was hollering at Eric for not swinging the bat—forget not hitting the ball—and the fans were just going wild. I decided not to let this happen to one of my relatives, so I went over to him and said, “Eric, I don’t know what this coach has told you, but let me tell you something. The object of this game is not to hit the ball. The object of the game is to swing the bat. Don’t even try to hit the ball. Just go up there next time and swing the bat. Every time Butch pitches the ball, you take the bat and swing all three times, and I’ll cheer for you.”