Not many books promote failure as an option but this one not only promotes failure as an option but goes through the process of destroying the archetypes fed to us by our parents and our culture. Barry Moltz’s book Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success
I come from a culture that has many archetypes. One of them translates success as acceptance in the society and failure - total rejection and facing ridicule. As a result, the children are groomed to be competitive with a picture of success pre-painted for them and nowhere in this picture can one find failure. This sets them up for a big surprise when failure hits and shatters this picture of success. Bounce teaches us to bounce back from failure in a balanced and graceful manner. Bounce also guides us to define and achieve success on our terms and conditions. Bounce provides us a process to create a path, define steps to achieve success with predetermined criteria that suits our situation.
Takeaways
- Maintain a balance between humility and ego. The knowledge of how one’s ego can bring productivity down in a business environment will certainly help me in future hiring process.
- Be a smart risk taker. Defining preferred outcomes and possible failures will be always on my agenda when I get into a new venture. Every entrepreneur must include both preferred outcomes and possible failures in their pitch to the Venture Capitalist!
BizTrader.com on November 21st, 2008 at 12:37 pm says:
Enjoyed reading your article. I especially agree with your statement about being a risk taker. Many fail to realize that it takes more to being just a risk taker - you have to be a ’smart risk taker’. –Biztrader