Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Fred Colantonio
Anyone can make mistakes or fail sometimes, right?
The history of mankind is often based on misguided perceptions,
unknown perspectives, and wrong assumptions.
Think about it.
There was a time in business, when people, most people, strongly believed
that you would never ever find a job if you had failed at school.
Worse, you would be called stupid forever.
There was a time in movies, literature, and science-fiction,
when the hero would only have one flaw,
it would make him or her vulnerable, human-like.
He would have been perfect without this bad damn thing.
There was a time in life,
when the brightest minds on the planet strongly believed that the Earth was flat.
And they believed it so hard,
they were ready to kill for that idea which turned out to be wrong.
Successful people go through these experiences and perceptions, too.
Except that they can take advantage of what happens to them,
the unfortunate events and the bad stuff.
They turn them into gold
to innovate and build their own success.
Let me give you a few examples.
In business, think about Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Brand.
In the early 1970s, the man was selling cut-price records by mail-order.
Imagine his reaction
when one of the biggest, national postal strikes happened in the UK.
Most businesses could have fallen overnight, right?
Not Sir Branson's.
The British entrepreneur went on and looked up for a store to open,
and so, the story about the whole Virgin megastores began.
Remember Steve Jobs?
Fired from the company he started, Apple, when he was 30.
A lot of people said the man started a 12-year walk in the desert.
Steve Jobs explained he started one of the most creative parts of his life.
He created Pixar, the worldwide animation movie studios
- I'm sure you know about it if you have kids -
and he went on to found Next,
a computer company Apple bought 12 years later.
Jobs came back to Apple
with the success we all know he's had until he passed away.
In movies and science-fiction, remember Neo,
the hero of the Matrix trilogy.
He first fails at believing he is the one.
And when he's asked to jump from one building to another,
as an exercise to open his mind,
he smashes to the floor and crushes to the ground.
Remember Bruce Wayne, the Batman,
he often fails at believing
he can succeed in his mission to inspire and save the people of Gotham City.
In life, there are plenty of people out there
wasting their time, mourning over their failures and past mistakes
while others, no smarter than you and I,
no biologically different,
get up every morning to perform better than they did the previous day,
change the world, and succeed.
Today, I want to talk to you about these people.
They all share one thing:
they are the main character in their own stories.
This is the definition of a hero,
business heroes, movie heroes, everyday heroes.
They all get up to change the world, their own world,
and to go beyond their failures to succeed.
How do they do that?
Well, as you may know, I studied criminology.
And I did put a lot of sociology in my course of study.
I loved it.
For about 5 years,
I learned to observe the attitude of a person within a group of people
and understand the motives that lead somebody to step out of line.
Criminology focuses on the bad reasons and the bad people who cross limits.
For about 10 years in business now,
I choose to focus not on the bad stuff,
but on the good reasons, the great purpose,
and the top notch results anybody can achieve
when it becomes outstanding or amazing.
What I understood
is that in both cases, either bad or good,
the frameworks, patterns, and processes are almost the same.
And I realised over the years
that it is almost the same with the perception of failure:
it can lead you to believe terrible things about yourself and about others,
or it can lead you to excel and reach insanely great success.
Let's start with the people who think failure is bad and negative.
For them, failure is absolute.
It's a general tendency in their behavior.
If they suck at something,
it is very likely that they will believe they will suck at everything.
It's the "I'm a looser" kind of stuff.
Failure makes them feel lame about themselves.
They are ashamed about it,
and they are beyond doubt about themselves.
They are almost sure they are not good and not capable of doing anything great.
Failure, for them, is universal.
Not to stand alone in their misery,
they tend to perceive the whole world as bad and agony,
"It is filled with bad people."
And only the smartest and strongest will survive.
In this mindset, failure is relentless.
It's inevitable.
It will happen to anyone, especially them,
and there are absolutely no ways you can escape it.
Therefore, failure is something you just can learn from.
You can grow from it.
It becomes irrelevant.
It is just something you should hide from and hide in your resume.
This whole belief leads them to fear.
They try to avoid failure at any cost
even at the cost of not living the great adventure of life.
It means that if they were still kids,
they would not go on the bike to learn and ride it
for fear of falling down.
As grown ups, ladies and gentlemen,
failure is their ultimate excuse.
Failure is what they use for not trying.
They would rather not know what they could achieve
than try and dare to fail.
This is what failure means to those people.
And I know a lot about it,
because I believed it was like that for years.
I believed it when I had my first car accident.
Nobody injured.
I believed it when I failed my first year at the university.
And I believed it everytime
I've been rejected by women.
And trust me I've been dumped a lot.
People who think that way are partly right.
It's just that you will never ever count them
in the club of very successful people.
The successful people, have to deal with failure too,
except that they see things differently.
Failure for them is part of the trip.
First of all, to them, failure is relative.
It regards a particular thing at a particular time.
It does not imply they are entirely bad persons.
As resilient writer Paulo Coelho says,
"Nothing is completely wrong... Even a broken clock is right twice a day."
Failure is also intimate.
It concerns them and them only.
They don't try to blame others for their own mistakes.
They don't deny failure.
They don't deny their responsibility.
They don't deny their fear.
They use it and go beyond it to succeed.
Failure, that way, becomes adjustable.
It means that if they screw up once,
it won't necessarily be the case on their next move.
And so, they can use today's failure to build tomorrow's success.
This is what it is for successful people.
Failure is a very powerful learning tool.
Harvard Professor, Tal Ben-Shahar, says this,
"If you don't learn to fail, you fail to learn."
A child learns to walk by falling down first and then getting up.
That's what they say in the Matrix movie
when Neo fails his first attempt to jump between the two buildings.
Eh! Everybody falls the first time!
This is key to the successful ones.
Failure is useful.
They use it as a habit.
They tame it and use it as a stepping stone in their course of success.
It is the badge of experience.
If you think about it, it all comes down to evolution.
Evolution tells us what?
That we require adaptation.
As human beings, if we were unable to adapt to changes,
we would be extinct by now.
Adaptation requires the ability to take advantage of opportunities,
and also the ability to deal with failure.
It means bouncing against the wall sometimes.
It means falling down.
Falling down is not the problem.
Staying on the floor face down and lying there, that's the problem.
Remember Bruce Wayne, Batman?
As a kid, he was trapped in a hole.
His father comes and rescues him.
What does he say to his son?
"Why do we fall, Bruce?"
"So we can learn to pick ourselves up."
So it is OK to fail, and it is OK to fall
as long as we get back up on our feet,
learn from what happened, and keep moving forward.
Ultimately, that's what failure is for successful people.
It's fuel, it's the energy they feel when they know they are on their way.
It's the power that excites them
when they do things that count.
It's the passion they experience
when they know they are on their way.
That is what failure is for the heroes.
How can we go from one side to the other?
From the dark side of the force to the light side of it?
Well, I believe in three things.
First, we have to raise our own standards.
We have to look up and put high expectations on ourselves.
No great long lasting success came easily.
Two, we have to rethink our perception of failure.
Unless you decide otherwise,
failures are not absolute; they are relative.
They are not permanent. They are temporary.
They are not opposed to success.
They are entirely part of it.
Three, we have to take care of resources.
Where can we find the energy to perform such a profound change?
I think the answer might be in the question.
You see, I truly believe and deeply believe
that we can all be the main character in our own stories.
You saw a lot of my heroes in the presentation.
Here is one more.
One of my personal heroes, James Hetfield,
lead singer of the band Metallica, once said,
"Dream big and dare to fail."
And that's what I wish for all of us
because that way, the real question about failure is no longer
"Will I fail?" versus "Will I succeed?",
The real question becomes, "What can I do?"
and how can I hold on long enough
to use whatever happened to me in my life as a contribution to my success?
The bottom line of all of this
is that failure and success are pretty close to each other,
they are both sides of the same coin.
It means that, like success, failure is all about attitude.
It means that what happens to you
is less important than what you will do with it.
How will we flip the coin?
To conclude, I'd like to use a French sentence
- it sounds horrible in English -
that basically says something like:
"We have to let things loose if we want to win."
In French, you may want to say,
(French) "Puisqu'on récolte ce que l'on sème, plantons-nous."
(French) Thank you.
(Applause)