Failing Your Way to Success

Writing at Great Leadership, Tim Eyre has an intriguing question: Has success eluded you because you eluded failure? A sample:

Nothing focuses the mind like failure. Failure revitalizes leaders -- it gives us a kick in the pants and says, "do something, now!" It is often when everything has gone awry that writers, scientists, business leaders, politicians feel liberated to do their most creative work. No one can truly be creative when everything is going fine. It just seems too risky, at a time like that, to rock the boat. But when you have lost everything, literally everything, and there is nothing else to lose -- well, necessity IS the mother of invention. I don't believe it's just the necessity of doing something in order to survive that brings about the creativity that leads to invention, though. Ironically, success itself can be bad for us -- it blocks our creativity by making us think that we should do more of the same -- more of what brought that success about in the first place. When you have nothing left to lose, then you are free -- free to try that secret, wildly creative idea that you always wanted to try but could never take a chance on risking everything for -- until finally, everything was gone.