Falling Forward

What amazes me about spring is that regardless of how brutally hard the winter has been, without exception, the leaves bud, the flowers bloom, the grass turns green and even the weeds (unfortunately) sprout. Winter cannot and does not prevent spring from falling forward!

I’m left with the question then, where do they (the trees, the grass, and the flowers) all get their strength from?

Of course the answer is that within nature itself is a hidden strength that sometimes becomes invisible due to circumstances, but without fail overcomes all the challenges of winter and eventually springs forward, demonstrating to all of creation that nothing, not even the harshest winter, can hide it or prevent it from rising again. It’s an amazing lesson for us all.

Have you ever asked the same question about life?

I know of so many people, that regardless of their difficulties, who are able to “fall forward”. Falling forward simply means that, as was written by some wise individual, “It’s not how many times you fall down but rather how many times you get up that matter”. So for some, the challenges of life may cause them to fall but regardless they are able to summon the strength to get back up and go forward. And there are some who do it over and over again.

Where do such people get their strength from?

Strength to overcome life’s challenges may come from several sources.

1. Strength cultured over time from life’s experiences.
2. Strength through the example provided by others.
3. Strength from a genetic advantage (mental, intellectual, emotional).
4. Strength from our learning in books and stories we read.
5. Strength provided by our family.
6. Strength from our practice of meditation and prayer.
7. Strength given by our network of friends.
8. And sometimes, just an “unknown strength” we did not know we had.

Several years ago I was involved in a restructuring of one of my businesses with the Smith Group of Companies. We were close to bankruptcy and I was close to burnout. For many years (after I had been appointed President), I was part of a CEO peer group. Upon my first appointment as President in my late thirties, I believed it was necessary to create an advisory relationship with other CEOs to help me in developing my judgment and decision making as I assumed greater roles and responsibilities. I remember attending one of my CEO sessions, and going into it, I was weary and worn from dealing with such debilitating business issues. I was expecting some pity, sympathy and TLC from my “likeminded CEOs”. What I got instead was a strong rebuke and increased pressure to stay focused on the job at hand. I left that meeting somewhat disappointed and for a while discouraged. Later I spoke with one of my “CEO Buddies”, Sab Ravalli, and he explained it this way.

Sab said it would not have been helpful if all they did was express sympathy and took some pity on the struggles in front of me. Rather, the best support they could provide me given the situation was to help me stay focused, to ensure I was thinking properly, and my judgment and decisions were sound. He explained the difference between “good time friends” and “real friends”. Real friends give, good time friends take. It was easy for me to criticize what they had done since I was not able to see and understand at first the actual support and strength they were providing.

I have never forgotten that lesson from Sab. I have several friends in my personal and professional networks who have helped me stay on the straight and narrow. In times of discouragement, confusion, weakness and vulnerability, the strength that I needed was given by those friends. And of course it would be wrong for me not to say that my wife Linda has been such a great source of strength in my life, more than I ever deserved.

There is an advantage that LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  provides. As business and social networking sites, it allows me (us) to list and identify all the friends in our network. At any one time I/we can draw on those in our network or we can make ourselves available to those who need real help. I have a site on LinkedIn that has identified hundreds in my professional network. I also have a business Facebook site that identifies some (“a few”) real friends in business. And I have a family Facebook site that gathers all of my immediate family together. If anything, it has shown me that in my network, I can draw on many for strength. It is a great feeling and provides much reassurance since though the joy of spring and summer is upon us, winter will undoubtedly come again.

The challenging part is that much time is required in cultivating good friends and there is a danger that social networking sites cause us to neglect that. Just as a good harvest requires much planting, fertilizing, weeding and cultivating, so does the development of our professional and personal networks or relationships. Remember that technology is intended to be an enabler, not a replacement!

Nature does have a lot of inner strength. But it is amazing what results from a healthy relationship between nature and humans. My garden will grow for awhile unattended, but with my full involvement it will flourish.

The ability to fall forward is very much then dependent on the total sum of your channels of strength. Those who have fallen and get back up quickly and even stronger seemed to have understood that.

With Freedom Comes Responsibility!

I had left Hyderabad at 9:00 pm in the evening on my way to Mumbai in order to connect to a 2:00 am international flight to Frankfurt to get home to Toronto. I finally arrived at Frankfurt 8:00 in the morning. With only 1.5 hours between connecting flights, I rushed to the lounge to take a shower, make a change of clothes and have some breakfast. As I entered the sitting area, it was then the news of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan reached me. As I watched the TV monitor, I like everyone else was shocked!

My daughter Joanna is in Mokpo, South Korea. My son Richard was in Chile. My wife Linda was at home in Oakville, but with the time difference I was not able to connect with anyone. My immediate concern was Joanna. I didn’t know if the earthquake and/or tsunami had affected S. Korea in any way, and of course of greater concern was the potential risk arising from the damage to the nuclear reactors. Upon arrival at Pearson International Airport at 1:00 pm, I finally was able to connect with Linda, and she assured me that Joanna was fine. However, much to my surprise, I was told Richard was being evacuated out of the Chilean village he was staying, and directed to higher ground to avoid the danger from a potential tsunami that was expected to reach the area at midnight. After much worry and continued loss of sleep, the warning for Chile had been lifted. I could finally relax that both kids were safe. Yes, my kids were safe, that’s all that matters. But as I watched the news, tens of thousands of people had died, hundreds of thousands of people left homeless, and a world in mourning, I felt helpless and sad. While my family was safe for now, I realized, the emotions I was carrying, was nothing compared to the mom or dad, the son or daughter, who had to face such tragedy was feeling.

I was left thinking how can I help? What can I do? I had this driving need to contribute in some concrete way but was left doing what most of us might do, texting on my cell phone a number that automatically contributes a small amount of money to a charitable fund for relief efforts to those hurt or displaced by such a awful circumstance. But certainly I could do more!

Several weeks have passed now. Other events crowd the news. The situation in Japan remains grave, the death toll rises, the threat of a nuclear meltdown increases, and the needs of hundreds of thousands homeless and hungry Japanese grow. But our attention has been redirected to a war in Libya, a war ignited for control of the country and for a dream of democratic freedom. Other wars continue, some costing the West $2 billion a week, but to be truthful I struggle with the reason, why, the purpose, the need for such destruction (with this type of destruction not being natural but man made).

But then another war (albeit peaceful) broke out at home, with a federal election being forced upon us in Canada (an emotional war).  This will be our fifth election in seven years. Another $300 million dollars spent. A billion dollars expensed over seven years. While I appreciate our democratic freedom to vote, and will do so at the polling booth in a few weeks, I can’t help but question why?  Why so many elections? Why such uncertainty? Why such waste?

Our governments (plural) report there is no extra money to address the growing needs of the infirmed, the unemployed, the widowed, and the homeless or to invest in new jobs. There is no money for schools, health care, transportation and seniors. However, over $1,000,000,000 has been spent to finance five elections in seven years. With election campaigns come promises of expenditures in areas where previously there was no money available.

So I am brought back again to my question: Why?

When we decided to begin writing this column several years ago, I was told it cannot be used for any political reason or influence. So I won’t.

What I will say is that with freedom comes responsibility. Our governments seem to have lost sight of that. I hope we don’t. I hope that when we are asked to vote, to exercise our democratic freedom, that so many are fighting to obtain, we as CMAs show leadership and understand our responsibility that is attached to that freedom.

Get out and vote! Please!

The Benefits of Failure

A friend of mine was telling me the story of being in a Chinese restaurant and upon receiving his fortune cookie and opening it, he was taken back by the wisdom written in so few words on a tiny bit of white paper. It said: “It is better to pursue a great vision and fail then have no expectations and succeed.”

If certain people hadn’t experienced failure in their lives, we today may not be enjoying the benefits of their failures. There are great stories of those whose lives were stamped with the mark of failure only to have become some the world’s foremost leaders in various elements of life. 

Tom Hendry from Cutting Edge Innovations is quoted as saying: 

“Well, I believe that every human being was born to achieve. Yet many times I have met people who believed that they were talentless, unintelligent or that their lives were ruined by adversity and ultimately failure."

"Failure is inevitable to every one of us, whether it be personal, in relationships or in business. Everyone fails at something. No one is perfect. It is also failure that will drag us kicking and screaming out of our comfort zones. It will take us on a journey deep within ourselves and that is where we will find our strengths. This is where we find the Benefits of Failure. It is also where we will find our greatness."

A good example of the above is the life of famed Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling. 

Rowling’s life is defined from being on government benefit with a young baby to amassing £500 million in 2009 (not that money is the ultimate definition of success but rather simply one measure). All because she didn’t give up when publishers initially rejected her book “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”. Consider the following about her life.

• Her parents were impoverished.
• She left a bad marriage with a young baby in the mid nineties.
• She lived in a small flat in Edinburgh, Scotland.
• She was living on government benefit £78 per week.
• The benefits of her 'failure' gave her the ‘freedom and drive’ to achieve through her writing.
• She wrote first book “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” but it was rejected by most publishers.
• Determination, resilience and persistence kept her going. Her book(s) were eventually published by Bloomsbury Publishing.
• She gives back a great deal to charity, especially single parent charities.

In 2008 Rowling delivered an inspirational address to the graduates of Harvard. This is an edited excerpt of the first half of that address.

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. 

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. What I feared most for myself at your age was failure.

The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. 

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.