Introduction

Staring Down Failure

Matthew Webb was a steamship captain in Britain when he decided to be the first person to swim across the English Channel. Another man had recently attempted the crossing and failed, but Webb was confident he could complete the twenty-one-mile swim despite the icy water and unpredictable tides. He left his job, began training, and early one morning in 1875 he set out from Dover, England.

He swam alongside his escort boat, enduring cold water, jellyfish stings, and heavy seas, swimming for the French coastline. Night fell, and a dense fog rolled in. He couldn’t see land, and with the fog and wind, he couldn’t tell if he was even heading south toward France anymore. As he approached the second day, still swimming blind in the fog, his body gave out. As the escort crew hauled him aboard, the sun rose and the fog began to lift. Land came into view. They were a mere hundred yards from shore. Success was right there, but Webb had failed to see it.

Less than two weeks later, he was back at the Admiralty Pier in Dover, slathering oil on his bare skin and diving into the icy water for a second attempt. Currents repeatedly pushed him off course, forcing him to swim an extra forty miles, but twenty-two hours later, he touched ground in Calais, France. His feat made him famous.

No Trophies in Defeat

I tell that story to aspiring entrepreneurs who ask me about my own success in business. Many of them believe success comes suddenly—you have one brilliant idea and you get instantly rich—but I use the Matthew Webb story to explain that it doesn’t work that way.

To succeed in any endeavor, you must be willing to push ahead and work through all the challenges, little and big, standing in your way. You have to fight through the fog that obscures your goal. You have to keep swimming when your arms are heavy. If you’re going to get anywhere, you have to anticipate failure, overcome it, and learn from it the way Matthew Webb did.

There are always setbacks, complications, and disappointments. In fact, the closer you get to a breakthrough, whether it’s in business or another pursuit, the harder the challenges get. This is when people often quit, and that’s why there is such a high failure rate for businesses.

All too many aspiring entrepreneurs don’t know where to begin. They are paralyzed by fear of failure, thinking, What if I invest all my savings and the business fails? What if I quit my job to start this new venture and I wind up broke? What if I try out for that sports team and I get cut?

Part of the problem is that our culture is built around instant gratification. It rewards us just for trying and doesn’t prepare us for the hard knocks life dishes out. I first noticed this when my kids played Little League. When a player hit a ground ball and got thrown out at first base, he was allowed to stay on base anyway. At the end of the season, everyone got a participation trophy. It didn’t matter whether the kids won or lost, or finished first or last. No one was allowed to fail.

Unfortunately, that’s not how the real game is played. Why train hard or practice long hours if you’ll get a trophy for finishing last? Why work on your hitting if you get to stay on base when you ground out? Disguising failure robs kids of life’s lessons, and the result is that too many young people never develop the necessary resilience and incentive to improve.

People reach adulthood with an aversion to risk and a sense of entitlement. They expect job offers to flow into their inbox. They want high-paying internships. They fail to see the connection between success and hard work. They don’t know how to brush off defeat and try again. They’ve learned that failure is a sign that they should stop what they’re doing, move on, and play it safe. It wasn’t meant to be, they think. Oh well. I tried.

The truth is that the marketplace doesn’t reward failure. It rewards those who are unfazed by failure. Winners aren’t defeated by their mistakes, they are strengthened by them. They examine failure, learn what caused it, and make adjustments so it doesn’t happen again.

Trouble Is Opportunity

I grew up in rural Connecticut in a family with fewer resources than many of the people we knew. My father built our house, a project that took many years. We had plywood floors until I was in high school. My mom and I still joke about how we were always pulling slivers out of our feet.

I started working at a young age, mowing lawns and painting houses. When I was fourteen, I lied about my age and got a job at a restaurant washing dishes at night. The restaurant was about five miles away, so I rode to work on a bike built out of spare parts. When I was older, I taught myself how to play drums and earned extra cash playing in rock bands.

After college, I started a real estate development company with my two older brothers. Eventually, we parted ways and at the age of forty-seven, I run the operation myself.

My company has built restaurants, public libraries, community centers, and sports complexes—the kind of projects where delays and disruptions are an everyday occurrence. Building materials aren’t delivered on time. One subcontractor is late and throws off the entire schedule. The owners insist on one thing while the municipal planner requires something else. Even before the first brick is laid, you are at the mercy of local citizens showing up at a zoning hearing to complain about your project. There are so many people with their hands on so many different switches, that conflicts, obstacles, mistakes, and miscommunication are inevitable.

When you are a construction manager like me, everything that happens is your fault. If the project is late, the penalty comes out of your pocket, regardless of whose fault it was. This can be nerve-wracking, and there have been many times in my career when I couldn’t sleep at night from worry. Even today, I still face moments of intense stress.

In spite of these setbacks, I’ve succeeded because I’ve learned to look at trouble as an opportunity—a time to learn, reflect, and develop new tactics. Each blow my company absorbs is another opportunity to prevail and get better, stronger, and more confident. It’s the only way to grow.

The Path to Success

My goal with this book is to help you think differently about your path to success. That path has stumbling blocks—obstacles, risks, and outright failure—not because of your mistakes or weaknesses, but because that’s the way it is with everybody. From Matthew Webb to Sylvester Stallone to Oprah Winfrey, any successful person will acknowledge that their route to achievement and fame was perilous and slow moving. The only way they reached their goals was to embrace their failure, learn from it, and then get back to work.

The following chapters contain all the essential lessons I’ve learned along the way. These are the things I wish someone had told me when I was starting out.

Here are some of the topics we’ll cover:

• Chapter 1: Risk, Fear, Failure, Repeat. Failure is normal, so we’ll learn how to reprogram your mind to take advantage of setbacks.
• Chapter 2: Two Mindsets. If you’re pessimistic and focused on protecting your assets, a scarcity mindset overwhelms the abundance mindset, which is required in order to see the great possibilities in life.
• Chapter 3: Doing Nothing Is a Big Decision. The status quo is dull and unrewarding, so find your dream and pursue it every day.
• Chapter 4: The Enabler’s Guide to Failure. Enablers look for every excuse to avoid risks, and they don’t want you to take chances. We’ll talk about how to spot enablers and why you must avoid them.
• Chapter 5: Charting Your Road map. Overcoming anxiety about failure starts with developing strong habits and staying focused on your overarching goals. For most people, anxiety is just a rehearsal for being afraid. Stop rehearsing. I’ll give you some tips that will help.
• Chapter 6: The Real Truth about Personal and Business Finances. The best way to deal with failure is to plan for it by being smart with your money.
• Chapter 7: Entrepreneurship 101. Whatever your business, certain things are required for success: integrity, strict accounting, and a willingness to fail.

Whether you are launching a new enterprise or pursuing a new career path, you need to leverage the power of failure to your advantage. You need to harness your fear. I’ll give you the tools, practical strategies, and plenty of anecdotal evidence to teach you how to identify and overcome these problems to find success. Remember: your real enemy isn’t failure or risk, but inertia.

It’s normal to fear failure, but the biggest mistake you can make in business and in life is to be scared and do nothing about it. Instead, be ready to embrace failure and learn to turn it around, because it’s your only route to success. When you...