Matthew A Overlund - Stop Pulling the Ship!: Go from Getting Things Done to Making Things Happen - Transform Yourself, Your Team, and Your Approach to Leadership

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One of the hardest things you will ever learn is the unexpected cost of success.

Yes, you read that right: the cost of success.

Of course, failure often has a cost. And, its a cost were all too familiar with by the time we reach adulthood. By this point, its been used to define acceptable actions and help us navigate the perils of merely being alive, by developing well-placed respect for danger or dangerous behavior.

It started as young children, as we learned lessons to keep us safe and free from injury:

Dont climb on that, you might fall.

Dont touch that, youll burn yourself.

Dont eat that, its poison and how did you even get that cupboard open?!

As we get a bit older, we move into activities that are dangerous but generally unavoidable, like driving. Now were not only responsible for our own actions but those of the people around us. By this time, weve also started to realize that those other people in the world, well, lets just say some of them are just a little bit off. This generally clicks for us when we see someone driving down the wrong side of the road or backing their car out of the building that they just accidentally turned into a parking garage by a misplaced confusion of the controls.

Shortly after comes the realization that we are expected to move out of the home of our childhood. That we should not only establish a societally-approved definition of success for our future selves, but then we should already be well on the way to preparing for its eventual achievement.

Im not a psychologist. Still, it doesnt take a doctorate in human behavior to see a pattern emerging here: we are training ourselves to pursue the things we want, need, or hope to achieve, and we are also training ourselves to avoid failure.

The problem is that you often cant succeed without first failing and learning. You didnt learn to walk without falling down, probably many, many times.

Once you mastered walking, you didnt go back to practicing falling down. You moved on to learning to run. You had found something that worked, internalized that, and moved on to the next goal.

Thats the contentious relationship: we need the pressure, the motivation, sometimes even the humiliation of failure to learn, but its ingrained in us from a young age to minimize risky behavior and avoid failure as we pursue success.

How do we achieve this?

We learn what works, and we repeat it. We expand on it, we repurpose it, we teach it to others, and in doing so, learn more about ourselves.

Early in my adult life, I had an experience that taught me something about success that has remained with me to this day, and that has served me well in my professional pursuits and achievements.

This lesson also eventually resulted in a catastrophic failure that forced me to reevaluate who I am both personally and professionally, and ultimately led to the creation of this book.

As I worked through my last year of High School in the mid-1990s, I had a growing feeling that college wasnt for me. Academics had always come relatively easy for me, and I was at the age where I wanted something more challenging than more years spent in school. Ideally, that would be paired with a chance to travel out of my small town and see more of the world.