Hi Sophie,
This step is about ‘Failing to Fail’, a totally new concept for me, and also ‘not crashing your F22’. This step along with the last 2 are really showing me a picture of how I have been viewing, and living, my life, which I never noticed before, but now it’s glaringly obvious.
I knew I hadn’t been ‘driving’ my life, but these steps are really showing me how and why.
So this one starts with a description of ‘6-Sigma’ perfection, which I am familiar with because of the industry I’ve been in -it’s a quality control model, where you aim for less than 5 failures per million attempts. It never occurred to me to adopt a similar mindset for life, I’ve always felt like ups and downs just happen, not something I could affect or control in one way or another.
He mentioned a quote early on that I saw as a principle – ‘Life is short, yet we act like we have all the time in the world.’ I saw this as one of the reasons I think I’ve lived my life the way I have – like there’s plenty of time to hunker down and make something awesome happen, but maybe not today… and here I am more than halfway through it and I haven’t started yet. He says something else that I had to think about – that ‘trial takes time, but error is fatal’.
I thought that sounded a little extreme initially, but where I see it makes sense is that the experimenting that we do takes time, of course, but I can see it becomes ‘fatal’ either if we never make it out of the trial period, or even if we never try at all. In my work we’re always looking at increasing efficiency and avoiding mistakes, but I never really stood back and took a look at how I conduct my life with that objective.
I saw a principle in a quote he had, I think from Warren Buffet, that ‘There may be mistakes, but there doesn’t have to be a LOT of them’, and also in ‘there may be a LOT of mistakes, but they don’t have to be MINE. It was another look at learning from other people’s mistakes, which would mean learning more about what other people have done, which I can see I should do a lot more of.
Looking at this it occurred to me that when I’m most effective and helpful at work, it’s when I’m describing something I know from errors I’ve either done or seen done in the past – one of the only good things about getting old! But one of the reasons is it’s not opinion, it can’t really be refuted, because it was already tried and failed and the reason why it failed becomes a great thing to share. And yet, in life, the big mistakes people make, and I have made, are rarely things that are new – with most of my biggest mistakes, I really should have known better, based on things I’d learned from other people’s experiences, but somehow in life it seems like we are different or special in some way, like it won’t happen that way for us even though that’s the way it always happens.
I really never thought about this before.
He has a section here called ‘Belt and Suspenders’, which was an interesting point of view about having a back-up plan or scenario, for all kinds of things that can pop up and cause a problem. Like if the belt holding up your pants happens to fail, your suspenders will kick in and do the job, and if the belt is going to fail, it will fail at the worst possible time, so you’ll want the suspenders as back-up. He references all kinds of scenarios, even as simple as carrying a battery jump charger in case your car battery dies.
This made me think about some of the things that have gone ‘amok’ in my life over time, where they could have been avoided had I prepared even a little bit, and there are a bunch of smaller things like that, but even some of the bigger mistakes I’ve made could have been avoided with a backup plan – this made me realize I have not been what I would call a ‘forward thinker’, or pro-active. I always blew this off thinking that some people just are this way, and some just aren’t, but why couldn’t I DECIDE to be that way? It’s not a characteristic like blue eyes, it’s a way to BE. Some of these more obvious things that come up in these steps really make me feel pretty stupid, that I never considered them in these contexts before.
I think there is a principle here in how he outlined a way to create this kind of framework in any area of life – One being, ‘have no single point of failure’, meaning have something like suspenders in place if the belt fails, ‘create redundancy’, meaning have a backup for anything that might fail – for example having two babysitters all checked out and qualified and ready to go, so if the main one can’t make it, you already have the other one ready. And also ‘don’t expect failures’, which I found really interesting, in that ‘if I have the expectation that I WON’T fail, I’ll have a lot less failures’. This is more about mindset, so I had to give this some thought.
Thinking about it in terms of jet engine manufacturers like he referenced, I see that they absolutely have to have this mindset, because if a jet engine fails, people could die and they could go to jail… which opens up the possibility that we could all do this if we have to, or if we make it a big enough priority.
I also saw a principle in ‘keep your finger on the pulse of things’, meaning double – check things, check up on things. He talked about this in terms of business, but I thought about this in terms of money. In this age where things are on electronic payments, and we have debit cards, and we don’t balance our checkbooks like we used to, I have fallen into not keeping my finger on the pulse of things… I keep a running tab in my head, and it really does lead to carelessness… this took me again to ‘how I do anything is how I do everything’.
How did I get so careless, about so many important things? I don’t think it’s laziness, I think it’s much deeper than that. I think it is the easier way out, I’m not as accountable if I don’t take an active role… but deeper than that, it clouds over having to really look long and hard at the fact that I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can do it well, I don’t think I can measure up, and it would take some hard work and being with the process, and there again I want to just be good at it without the learning curve and the hard work, whatever it is.
What else comes up is I won’t be good at it, other people are but I’m not, but that seems like a cop-out as well. Part of me definitely feels like I just don’t measure up, and if I’m not going to be good at it I might as well not try, but I see that I really need to look at this, I’m sure it’s bigger than what I’m seeing. I really want to see outside of the box on this one, and spend some time looking.
In keeping your finger on the pulse, I saw another principle, in ‘the things you worry about never happen’. Very interesting, to think that the very process of monitoring what could go wrong keeps it from going wrong. Definitely a principle there, for any area of life. I know that, very candidly, had I had my finger on the pulse of things more in my own marriage, I wouldn’t have been so clueless and blindsided when things went a little bit south… in the context of these steps, there are things I could have foreseen and taken some action to rectify before it escalated to where it did… and there are things I DID see but ignored, because they weren’t fun to look at – here is where it would have served me well to toughen up and deal with the obstacles, and where it would have served me well to have a mindset going in that there could be big obstacles, so I would have been more ready for it.
I keep digressing here, but this is making me look in a lot of different areas. There is definitely a principle in ‘the process of heading things off before they go wrong, keeps them from going wrong’… I can see now that this is a PROCESS, again one that is never really completed, and one that would really ‘nip in the bud’ a lot of things that come up.
I also saw a principle in ‘learned optimism is important, but you can overdo it.’ Meaning if I jump in and say I absolutely will succeed, there’s no room there – no room for forgiveness, no room for redundancy, no room for a plan B… I never thought about that either – this is kind of the hallmark of positive thinking. In the world of positive thinking, there’s really no room for forgiveness, no need for redundancy or a plan ‘B’, because it’s just going to happen if you’re positive enough to send out the right vibes to attract it. I think that’s why it messes with people’s heads so much – positive thinking makes it wrong to have a plan B or a backup plan, and wrong to even think it might fail, and makes a person wrong to even worry about it or plan for a worst case scenario. It creates a lot of ‘wrongs’… I really never saw that before.
I also see a good principle in ‘Always plan for 3 scenarios – the best case, the worst case scenario, and the most likely scenario’. What would I do if the best possible thing were to happen in a given area? And in the worst possible scenario, what plan of action would I take? I saw a really good principle here, in that ‘when a worst case scenario hits, it’s too late to come up with an action plan’… so true, I totally see that – worst case scenarios would be completely different if they were thought through before they actually happen, when we’re level headed. That should be obvious, but for me it hasn’t been.
I saw another principle in his quote from Seneca… we spend time, but we don’t actually LIVE. We spend time reacting to things we weren’t prepared for… our mind is never just in a place where it’s PREPARED. So interesting, this is another area that shows me how I have not been driving my life. There’s another principle in ‘Do what is difficult when it’s EASY’. Another way of looking at the worst case scenario thing, also I also see this in terms of putting off difficult things till the last minute… they are much harder when there’s limited time to accomplish them.
I saw a principle in this quote from Charlie Monger, which I really like – ‘spending time preparing for the worst makes you much happier’. This seems counterintuitive, but I totally get it. It’s not negativity, it would actually relieve a person from the worry or anxiety that some of us have on a regular basis, just by thinking through those things and having a game plan, to where there’s no need to worry. I think there’s also a principle in ‘Optimism can remind us that there’s a way out, if we have principles, plans and solutions’. This is a much better way of looking at optimism, as a calm, empowered way of being prepared, rather than the mindlessly positive way that I saw it before… in this context, positive thinking is so silly, and yet I bought into it hook, line and sinker.
He ends up again with the 6-Sigma principle of getting optimally to 3.4 mistakes per million attempts… wow, how would my life be at that level? COMPLETELY different, and I’m sure much happier. I can see from this the value of having a plan B, having redundancy, planning for best and worst case scenarios as well as most likely ones, and learning from others’ mistakes… I saw another principle here, in ‘use more books, seminars, mentors, to get wise voices into your head’… this would apply in every area as well.
This one made me really look at a lot of different areas, and again it shined a light into some pretty dark areas, and put a lot of things in a totally new light, and it was again a different way to look at where I am, and where I’d like to be.
-Jodie