What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (7 page)

In an attempt to build momentum, the team started seeding the tree with wishes. This had little affect. They then became more aggressive in their promotion and more actively invited passersby to contribute. Again, this had little impact. But the students’ disappointment was amplified by the fact that not more than fifty feet away a similar project was getting lots of attention. Another team had created a huge web of large rubber bands from which they invited students to suspend their secrets. The rubber-band web was brimming with hundreds of brightly colored papers, each with a different secret. They fluttered in the light breeze, in sharp contrast to the nearly naked Wishing Tree next door.

The Wishing Tree team decided to chalk this one up as a failure. However, they didn’t stop there. They extracted as much as they could from this experience by making a provocative three-minute video documenting the failure. The team described all of their attempts to make the Wishing Tree successful and compared their failure to the success of the “Web of Secrets.” They very publicly celebrated their failure and shared what they had learned about the “stickiness” of wishes versus secrets. (Stories, products, and Web sites are “sticky” when they hold your attention and don’t let go.) They also made it clear that this was just one step along the path to the next idea, and the next, and the next.

Because even great ideas require a tremendous amount of work to reach a successful outcome, it’s incredibly hard to know when to keep pushing on a problem, hoping for a breakthrough, and when to walk away. We all know that persistence is to be admired, but when does it become foolish to continue working on something that’s never going to fly? Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia, describes the dilemma wonderfully: “If you throw gasoline on a log, all you get is a wet log. But if you throw gasoline on a small flame, you get an inferno.”
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That is, it’s important to know whether you’re putting energy into something that has the potential to pay off. This is one of life’s biggest challenges. We often stay in dead-end situations way too long. This occurs when companies commit to a doomed product or project, or when individuals stay with jobs or in relationships that make them miserable, hoping the situation will improve.

So how do you know when to quit? This is a huge philosophical question. It’s always a mammoth challenge to separate your desire to make something work from the reality of the probability that it will work. Of course, the more you put into a project, the more likely it is to succeed. But some efforts will never pan out, no matter how much time, money, or sweat is injected. The most scientific answer I’ve found is, listen to your gut and look at your alternatives. Essentially, you have to negotiate honestly with yourself. Do you have the fortitude to push through the problems in front of you to reach a successful outcome, or are you better off taking another path?

So quitting is hard—but it’s even harder to do it well. I’ve seen people quit gracefully and others quit so clumsily that they leave a huge crater in their wake. As discussed in detail in chapter 8, you are likely to bump into the same people again and again in life, often in unexpected ways. This alone is reason enough to make sure that when you quit, you do so with careful thought about the consequences for those around you. Besides the impact that quitting gracefully might have on you later, it is just the right thing to do. You can never rationalize quitting in such a way that you hurt your colleagues, friends, or former business.

A colleague told me about his assistant, who was doing a terrific job. He gave her great reviews and spent a lot of time talking with her about her career path within his group. She made it clear that ultimately she hoped to move into a different field, and my colleague was supportive of this. In fact, he told her he would be delighted to serve as a reference for her anytime. With this as a backdrop, my colleague couldn’t have been more surprised when his assistant came in one day and gave two weeks’ notice. The team was in the midst of a huge project, the deadline three weeks away. She was going to leave one week before the project was completed, putting the entire team in a very difficult position. My colleague asked her several times if she would consider staying one more week to help him get to the end of the project, which involved dozens of people directly and several thousands indirectly. She refused, saying, “I know you’re going to be unhappy that I’m leaving no matter when I go, so I decided to do what I want.” My colleague felt as though he’d been kicked in the stomach. It was nearly impossible to fill in the holes she left during the last week of the project, and everyone worked around the clock to try to fill the void. All those who worked with her will remember that decision. Despite the fact that she did a terrific job while she was with them, the damage she did to her reputation during the last weeks of her employment dwarfed all the positive things she had done in prior years.

In sharp contrast, I’ve seen others quit jobs with remarkable style. Even if they were leaving because the job wasn’t a good match, the grace with which they left made such a positive impression that everyone involved would be pleased to give them a glowing recommendation at any time in the future. They provided enough notice to fill any gaps, they took the time to put their work in order so that someone else could pick up where they left off, and they even offered to help with the transition. These folks are heroes. They mastered the art of quitting well, and used their skill to turn a bad situation into something positive.

So how do you prepare yourself for inevitable failures? People who spend their time on creative endeavors know that failure is a natural part of the creative process and are ready when it happens. Jeff Hawkins gets worried when things go too smoothly, knowing that failure must be lurking around the corner. When he was running Handspring, everything was going swimmingly for the release of the original “Visor”, a new personal digital assistant. But Jeff kept warning his team that something would happen. And it did. Within the first few days of the release of their first product they shipped about 100,000 units. This was remarkable. But the entire billing and shipping system broke down. Some customers didn’t receive the products they paid for, and others received three or four times as many units as they ordered. This was a disaster, especially for a new business that was trying to build its reputation. So what did they do? The entire team, including Jeff, buckled down and called each and every customer. They asked each person what he or she had ordered, if they had received it, and whether they had been billed correctly. If anything wasn’t perfect, the company corrected it on the spot. The key point is that Jeff knew something would go wrong. He wasn’t sure what it would be, but was prepared to deal with anything that came their way. His experience has taught him that failure is inevitable, and that the key to success is not dodging every bullet but being able to recover quickly.

This theme comes up again and again when listening to those who have been successful. They are willing to try lots of things, and are confident that some of their experiments will lead to great outcomes. But they also recognize that there will be potholes along the way. This approach can be used for big and small challenges. Consider the following story, told to me by a friend: There was a man who appeared to have endless luck with women. He wasn’t particularly charming, funny, smart, or attractive, so it was quite a mystery. One day my friend asked him how he managed to have such a steady flow of women in his life. He confided that it was simple—he asked every attractive woman he met for a date, and some of them said yes. He was willing to take his share of rejections in return for a handful of successes. This brings the lesson to its basest level. If you get out there and try lots of things, you’re much more likely to find success than someone who waits around for the phone to ring.

This story is consistent with advice my father always gave me: being a squeaky wheel rarely changes the outcome, but it does allow you to get to the conclusion sooner. Don’t sit around waiting for a yes that will never come. It’s better to get to no sooner rather than later, so you can put your energy into opportunities with a higher likelihood of success. This applies to job hunting, finding business funding, dating, and most other endeavors. That is, if you continue to push the limits, and are willing to fail along the way, you will very likely find success.

These stories highlight an important point: a successful career is not a straight line but a wave with ups and downs. Michael Dearing describes this wonderfully with a simple graph that maps a typical career, with
time
on the x-axis and
success
on the y-axis. Most people feel as though they should be constantly progressing up and to the right, moving along a straight success line. But this is both unrealistic and limiting. In reality, when you look closely at the graph for most successful people, there are always ups and downs. When viewed over a longer period of time, however, the line generally moves up and to the right. When you’re in a down cycle, it’s sometimes hard to see that the temporary dip is actually a setup for the next rise. In fact, the slope of the upward line is often steeper after a down cycle, meaning you’re really achieving more than if you had stayed on a steady, predictable path.

Carol Bartz, the former CEO of Autodesk and new CEO of Yahoo!, uses another great analogy to describe a successful career path.
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She thinks you should look at the progress of your career as moving around and up a three-dimensional pyramid, as opposed to up a two-dimensional ladder. Lateral moves along the side of the pyramid often allow you to build the base of your experience. It may not look as though you’re moving up quickly, but you’re gathering a foundation of skills and experiences that will prove extremely valuable later.

One of my favorite stories about the cyclical and unpredictable nature of careers comes from Steve Jobs. As the founder of Apple and Pixar, his success stories are legendary. However, many of his finest successes grew out of failures. He described these stories beautifully when he gave the commencement address at Stanford in 2005. Here is an excerpt of his speech:

We had just released our finest creation—the Macintosh—a year earlier, and I had just turned thirty. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at thirty I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down—that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me—I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film,
Toy Story,
and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.

This story is echoed time and time again. Essentially, most individual’s paths are riddled with small and enormous failures. The key is being able to recover from them. For most successful people, the bottom is lined with rubber as opposed to concrete. When they hit bottom, they sink in for a bit and then bounce back, tapping into the energy of the impact to propel them into another opportunity. A great example is David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue.
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David initially started an airline called Morris Air, which grew and prospered, and he sold it to Southwest Airlines for $130 million. He then became an employee of Southwest. After only five months David was fired. He was miserable working for them and, as he says, he was driving them crazy. As part of his contract he had a five-year noncompete agreement that prevented him from starting another airline. That seemed like a lifetime to wait. But after taking time to recover from this blow, David decided to spend that time planning for his next airline venture. He thought through all the details of the company, including the corporate values, the complete customer experience, the type of people they would hire, as well as the details of how they would train and compensate their employees. David says that getting fired and having to wait to start another airline was the best thing that ever happened to him. When the noncompete period was over, he was ready to hit the ground running. Just like Steve Jobs, he was able to turn what seemed like a terrible situation into a period of extreme productivity and creativity.

Failing, of course, isn’t fun. It’s much more fun to tell the world about our successes. But failures can serve as incredible opportunities in disguise. They force us to reevaluate our goals and priorities, and often propel us forward much faster than continued success.