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“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”

 

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“My own business always bores me to death, I prefer other people’s.”

 

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Oscar Wilde

 

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Well.

 

This is about business using some Oscar Wilde thoughts.

 

Mistakes.

Whew.

In today’s world, while we talk about ‘encouraging mistakes’, the last thing we do is encourage them. In fact. It appears to me that our answer to everything associated with any version of “mistake” or ‘not going right’ <and there are degrees spanning from cataclysmic to simply aggravating> in today’s business world is to fire someone.

We are incredibly good at shifting attention away from our own mistakes as fast as we can to attention <a hot, bright spotlight> on someone else’s mistake.

 

We try and act as if we have never made a mistake ourselves.

The uncomfortable truth is that many of us have become quite good at the casual dismissal of our own mistakes by saying and thinking things like:

 

“My own mistakes bore me … I prefer to skewer other’s.”

 

We trivialize our own mistakes to a ‘boring’ inconsequential category and enhance other’s mistakes to some cataclysmic level.

 

Look.

I have gobs of business experience. And gobs of mistakes.

 

But that’s not the point.

 

Most of my experience and success, quite frankly, was built not off my mistakes but rather other’s mistakes. What I mean by that is my resume, my career, my successes is almost exclusively built upon some ‘ability to fix things’ <history is written by the victor I imagine are the words I am seeking>.

I am a renovator more so than a builder.

To be clear. My mistakes certainly didn’t bore me <although they were incredibly aggravating> because they always taught me, above all, personal responsibility. Responsibility for not only my mistakes but also for whatever I could get my hands on or be involved with.

 

What this translated into is that while other’s invested a shitload of energy skewering other’s mistakes … I went ahead and fixed them.

 

Mine, theirs, people alive & dead and anything I could get my grubby little fixing hands on.

 

Regardless.

 

Firing people because they make a mistake drives me nuts. I assume it would drive Oscar nuts <oops … he did go nuts …>.

 

Nothing in business is simple. I mean … shit … even doing the right thing can be a complex decision & action.

Business is, and always will be, complex.

 

I say that because we have an extremely aggravating habit that whenever we face a problem or an issue or a mistake … we treat it as if it were simple.

 

What’s up with that?

Let’s face it.

 

I don’t care how much experience you have nothing, or very little, is simple. Almost every situation, mistake or success is contextual. That means two things:

 

  • History is, at best, only offers some guideposts to a solution & not a “how to” manual.

 

  • Experience in business is relative.

 

Just because you have done something, and had successes, doesn’t mean you are good at it nor will it reflect an increased likelihood of success in the future. In fact … the best experience isn’t successes but what we have learned from mistakes.

 

Oops.

 

How the fuck do you put THAT on a resume and get a job? <you cannot>

 

All I know for sure is that I have a well loved list of mistakes I have made in business.

 

All I know for sure is the best people I have managed have a well loved list of mistakes they have made in business.

 

All I know for sure is that I, and those ‘best people’, have been fairly successful.

 

Figure that Life equation out.

 

Which leads me back to Oscar … and, oddly, his fairy tales. Oscar wrote his fairy tales … well … differently. Wilde’s fairytale transformations typically turned on loss. A mistake. A non success.

 

The true twist? The loss was most typically tied to a lack of imagination.

 

Is this a fairy tale lesson too adult for children?

Shit. I don’t know.

What I do know is that business is NOT a fairytale and more mistakes are made from a lack of imagination than anything else. As a corollary, that means fixing mistakes is inherently about having, and using, imagination.

 

Ok.

In the end.

 

Oscar had a gift for words. And while I am sure he knew what he was doing as a wordsmith … sometimes those who are so gifted in this way don’t really know what they are doing. In other words they fix things, offer solutions and, well, they cannot offer you some formula or maybe the reasoning is a little hazy or it is quite possible to get from here to there you have to make a least a little leap of faith.

 

And you know what?

That’s what makes the business world great. Not everyone has the same DNA. Not everyone can do the same thing. Not everyone makes the same mistakes.

You need people to create, others to build, others to run & maintain … and you even need some who fix shit <and mistakes> & can try to convince you in order to fix it, well, you need to make a little leap now and then.

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Written by Bruce