If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got

So today I attended my regular Toastmasters meeting where one of the members gave a speech on learning from experience. He touched on a couple of points around failure which led me to some conclusions:

1. Learn to fail


2. Fail early, fail often


3. Learn from failures
   

This got me thinking...As a card carrying member of Generation Y (albeit on the cusp), I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me at every turn. Fortunately, as a child I did well at most of what I attempted. Unfortunately, what I didn't get early on was failure experience. We're often told failure is not an option, and I'm not saying it's something to aim for, but lets look at ways to frame failure as something to learn from.

Learning to fail involves trying something in the first place. As a Canadian living in Australia, I'm very aware of cultural differences, especially the ones engrained attitude of 'Having a go' which revolves around giving something the 'old college try' without fear of failure, which may well happen. So far, I've been reasonably successful at playing it safe, but if I want to move forward, it's time to take some action, and not treat failure as a personality characteristic.

Failing early has to do with the way we learn. Everyone knows we learn through experience and making mistakes. In theory, we should be able to increase the pace of learning by increasing the rate at which we try, right? More than likely, this will also increase the rate at which we make mistakes, and by that I mean different mistakes - new mistakes. But failing in your twenties is probably a lot better than failing when you've got a spouse, kids, and a mortgage or two. There is so much more time for recovery.

Learning from failure is probably the key element to take away from all of this. That means doing things differently. They say one definition of insanity was doing things over and over and expecting a different result. If you're not getting results from your current sales pitch, change it up. If you're not increasing traffic to your blog, try something new. If you've tried sending your resume to a hundred agencies and cold calling organisations to no avail, why not try tapping your network or running a personal campaign for a change?

Learn from failures by:

• Identifying the mistake
• Examining why it happened
• Take steps to prevent the same mistake again
• Move on!

In the end, if you learn something, it's not a complete failure is it? Failure is not a person, it's a thing, so go on, set some goals and have a go!

How do you learn from your failures?

Reverse Engineering and You: Breaking your career steps down in to manageable chunks

A new organization can use reverse engineering look at its competitors' activities, failures and experience and use observation, research and development to identify the path to success.

Why shouldn't this process also be applicable to career advancement? If you're aiming to become a Marketing Director for a large consumer goods organisation, why not buddy up with someone already in that position (how are those face-to-face networking skills coming along?) and de-construct their career?

Maybe find a job description for your dream job or career nirvana (for now or forever) and assess the criteria -- which are already true for you? Where are the gaps? What do you need to do to make the required skills and experience part of your set? You could freelance on your own, building up a network and reputation as you go along, or you could do some short-term contracting.

Hey, if you convince a few people to mentor you, you can probably be privvy to the good, the bad, and the ugly of their career path, and you might get a little insight as to how you can evaluate your next project or career opportunity and avoid losing your footing.


Either way, each journey begins with a single step