I was rewatching an episode just the other day, and David Brent, the questionably-capable office manager said, "If at first you don't succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried."
Now, I've seen this episode before, and heard that joke plenty of times before, but this time it really stuck with me. But I couldn't figure out why...
...until today. I suddenly realized that that's the kind of advice that I would never, ever in a million years, listen to. And I would never expect you to, either.
It's true, the last six months at our company have been rough, and our efforts to move quickly past those troubles haven't entirely gone as we'd have hoped. It's blatantly clear that we didn't "first succeed" – at least, not lately.
So what does this mean for us? Well, if we were to heed David Brent's advice, we'd probably simply be pretending that we haven't tried anything so far, so that when we do eventually succeed – which I do not doubt for a second that we will – it will look as if we managed it in our the first attempt. So that we look like champs, always coming out on top.
But that's misleading. I don't think that's the right thing to do. I don't think it's a failure if we don't succeed. We all learn from our mistakes. In fact, I'm not sure that we should even call our failed attempts "mistakes", simply because they didn't yield the desired outcomes. They were valid, legitimate attempts. The results may not have been what we wanted, but we did find out what worked, and what didn't. If we removed any evidence that we ever tried, we'd erase our opportunity to review what we have done and lose our chance to learn from what failed.
David Brent sees the evidence of failed attempts as a proof of weakness. But me, I see that evidence as incentive to keep trying. To err is human, and we all are human. And if there's one thing I know about humans, it's that we are persistent. We do not give up easily....
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