Mat Pelletier - Embracing Failure: Harness the Power of Fear in Life and Business

Matthew Webb was a steamship captain in Britain when he decided to be the first person to swim across the English Channel. Another man had recently attempted the crossing and failed, but Webb was confident he could complete the twenty - one - mile swim despite the icy water and unpredictable tides. He left his job, began training, and early one morning in 1875 he set out from Dover, England.

He swam alongside his escort boat, enduring cold water, jellyfish stings, and heavy seas, swimming for the French coastline. Night fell, and a dense fog rolled in. He couldnt see land, and with the fog and wind, he couldnt tell if he was even heading south toward France anymore. As he approached the second day, still swimming blind in the fog, his body gave out. As the escort crew hauled him aboard, the sun rose and the fog began to lift. Land came into view. They were a mere hundred yards from shore. Success was right there , but Webb had failed to see it.

Less than two weeks later, he was back at the Admiralty Pier in Dover, slathering oil on his bare skin and diving into the icy water for a second attempt. Currents repeatedly pushed him off course, forcing him to swim an extra forty miles, but twenty - two hours later, he touched ground in Calais, France. His feat made him famous.

I tell that story to aspiring entrepreneurs who ask me about my own success in business. Many of them believe success comes suddenlyyou have one brilliant idea and you get instantly richbut I use the Matthew Webb story to explain that it doesnt work that way.

To succeed in any endeavor, you must be willing to push ahead and work through all the challenges, little and big, standing in your way. You have to fight through the fog that obscures your goal. You have to keep swimming when your arms are heavy. If youre going to get anywhere, you have to anticipate failure, overcome it, and learn from it the way Matthew Webb did.

There are always setbacks, complications, and disappointments. In fact, the closer you get to a breakthrough, whether its in business or another pursuit, the harder the challenges get. This is when people often quit, and thats why there is such a high failure rate for businesses.

All too many aspiring entrepreneurs dont know where to begin. They are paralyzed by fear of failure, thinking, What if I invest all my savings and the business fails ? What if I quit my job to start this new venture and I wind up broke? What if I try out for that sports team and I get cut?

Part of the problem is that our culture is built around instant gratification. It rewards us just for trying and doesnt prepare us for the hard knocks life dishes out. I first noticed this when my kids played Little League. When a player hit a ground ball and got thrown out at first base, he was allowed to stay on base anyway. At the end of the season, everyone got a participation trophy. It didnt matter whether the kids won or lost, or finished first or last. No one was allowed to fail.

Unfortunately, thats not how the real game is played. Why train hard or practice long hours if youll get a trophy for finishing last? Why work on your hitting if you get to stay on base when you ground out? Disguising failure robs kids of lifes lessons, and the result is that too many young people never develop the necessary resilience and incentive to improve.

People reach adulthood with an aversion to risk and a sense of entitlement. They expect job offers to flow into their inbox. They want high - paying internships. They fail to see the connection between success and hard work. They dont know how to brush off defeat and try again. Theyve learned that failure is a sign that they should stop what theyre doing, move on, and play it safe. It wasnt meant to be, they think. Oh well. I tried .

The truth is that the marketplace doesnt reward failure. It rewards those who are unfazed by failure. Winners arent defeated by their mistakes, they are strengthened by them. They examine failure, learn what caused it, and make adjustments so it doesnt happen again.

I grew up in rural Connecticut in a family with fewer resources than many of the people we knew. My father built our house, a project that took many years. We had plywood floors until I was in high school. My mom and I still joke about how we were always pulling slivers out of our feet.

I started working at a young age, mowing lawns and painting houses. When I was fourteen, I lied about my age and got a job at a restaurant washing dishes at night. The restaurant was about five miles away, so I rode to work on a bike built out of spare parts. When I was older, I taught myself how to play drums and earned extra cash playing in rock bands.

After college, I started a real estate development company with my two older brothers. Eventually, we parted ways and at the age of forty - seven , I run the operation myself.

My company has built restaurants, public libraries, community centers, and sports complexesthe kind of projects where delays and disruptions are an everyday occurrence. Building materials arent delivered on time. One subcontractor is late and throws off the entire schedule. The owners insist on one thing while the municipal planner requires something else. Even before the first brick is laid, you are at the mercy of local citizens showing up at a zoning hearing to complain about your project. There are so many people with their hands on so many different switches, that conflicts, obstacles, mistakes, and miscommunication are inevitable.

When you are a construction manager like me, everything that happens is your fault. If the project is late, the penalty comes out of your pocket, regardless of whose fault it was. This can be nerve - wracking , and there have been many times in my career when I couldnt sleep at night from worry. Even today, I still face moments of intense stress.

In spite of these setbacks, Ive succeeded because Ive learned to look at trouble as an opportunitya time to learn, reflect, and develop new tactics. Each blow my company absorbs is another opportunity to prevail and get better, stronger, and more confident. Its the only way to grow.

My goal with this book is to help you think differently about your path to success. That path has stumbling blocksobstacles, risks, and outright failurenot because of your mistakes or weaknesses, but because thats the way it is with everybody . From Matthew Webb to Sylvester Stallone to Oprah Winfrey, any successful person will acknowledge that their route to achievement and fame was perilous and slow moving. The only way they reached their goals was to embrace their failure , learn from it, and then get back to work.

The following chapters contain all the essential lessons Ive learned along the way. These are the things I wish someone had told me when I was starting out.