What happens after we crash is most important. Successful people change in ways that allow them to continue to take advantage of their strengths while compensating for their weaknesses and unsuccessful people don’t.
Later in the book I will describe specific strategies for change, but the important thing to note here is that beneficial change begins when you can acknowledge and even embrace your weaknesses.
Over the years that followed, I found that most of the extraordinarily successful people I’ve met had similar big painful failures that taught them the lessons that ultimately helped them succeed.
Looking back on getting fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs said, “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.”
I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot.
You will think you have failed—but that won’t be true unless you give up.
Believe it or not, your pain will fade and you will have many other opportunities ahead of you, though you might not see them at the time.
The most important thing you can do is to gather the lessons these failures provide and gain humility and radical open-mindedness in order to increase your chances of success. Then you press on.
My final lesson was perhaps the most important one, because it has applied again and again throughout my life.
At first, it seemed to me that I faced an all-or-nothing choice: I could either take on a lot of risk in pursuit of high returns (and occasionally find myself ruined) or I could lower my risk and settle for lower returns. But I needed to have both low risk and high returns, and by setting out on a mission to discover how I could, I learned to go slowly when faced with the choice between two things that you need that are seemingly at odds. That way you can figure out how to have as much of both as possible.
There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.
