If You Never Fail, You Never Risked Enough!

[Daniel E.]

Help! I Was Rejected After My Job Interview
by Ronnie Ann, MBA
Work Coach Cafe blog

Dear Work Coach,

Well I didn’t get the job. Feeling pretty darned upset about it. But the HR was good and informed me about it in good time. Well…can’t begin to tell u how insecure I am feeling!

This is the first time I have been rejected in a job interview. Guess I needed it. Sigh!!!

Phoenix

***

Hi Phoenix!

I’m so sorry you didn’t get it. At least, unlike many companies, they let you know. Not much consolation I’m sure – but on the positive side, you aren’t in limbo any more.

As for your first interview rejection…it’s actually a good thing to have that under your belt. From day one, I was good at interviewing and have gotten many exciting jobs in my lifetime. But I also got rejected. So what? A talented person like you who is good at follow-through and clearly interviews well, will get plenty of job offers. And seriously…if they didn’t think you were right for them, then they are NOT right for you. So it probably saved you a painful experience. (Other than the rejection, of course.)

Right out of grad school I interviewed with the Senior Vice President of a major New York bank. He asked me if I’d ever failed at anything. Cocky young thing that I was, I smiled and said “Not that I can think of.” And he told me “Too bad. It’s how we learn and grow. People who never experience failure have never risked enough.”

If you never fail, you never risked enough. So congratulations on going for what you wanted and let this be the thing that spurs you on to get what you really want. That’s the real key to success. It’s not about any one job…it’s about how you handle each step of the journey.

I wish you much luck, Phoenix. I mean…look at what you call yourself. No stinkin’ rejection can keep you down!

Ronnie Ann

 

[Daniel E.]

Failure, success and neither
by Seth Godin

The math is magical: you can pile up lots of failures and still keep rolling, but you only need one juicy success to build a career.

The killer is the category called 'neither'. If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you'll never have a shot at success. Avoiding the thing that's easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you're after.

And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us.

 

[Daniel E.]

A hierarchy of failure worth following
by Seth Godin, Seth's Blog

Not all failures are the same. Here are five kinds, from frequency = good all the way to please-don't!

FAIL OFTEN: Ideas that challenge the status quo. Proposals. Brainstorms. Concepts that open doors.

FAIL FREQUENTLY: Prototypes. Spreadsheets. Sample ads and copy.

FAIL OCCASIONALLY: Working mockups. Playtesting sessions. Board meetings.

FAIL RARELY: Interactions with small groups of actual users and customers.

FAIL NEVER: Keeping promises to your constituents.

The thing is, in their rush to play it safe and then their urgency to salvage everything in the face of an emergency, most organizations do precisely the opposite. They throw their customers or their people under the bus ("we had no choice") but rarely take the pro-active steps necessary to fail quietly, and often, in private, in advance, when there's still time to make things better.

Better to have a difficult conversation now than a failed customer interaction later.