Listen up guys and gals. This might be my first proper post on here, but I think if you read it through, absorb it and put it to action, this may well be very beneficial to you. Well...I can only hope eh? :-)
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We all make mistakes.
It's in our nature as humans to not always be perfect, and anyone who ever says they are is a BSer and a liar. Obama isn't perfect, Einstein wasn't perfect, even Her Majesty The Queen isn't perfect. One thing I do know however is that by making mistakes, we become better people because of the experience.
The blog title is perhaps the most important life lesson I can think of. That you learn more from your mistakes than your successes.
Just think about it for a second.
Say it again. You learn more from your mistakes than your successes.
When I first entered the working world, starting with a part-time job at a tile shop in Crayford, Kent, I was a young, naive boy - I still am at the age of 18/19 and I think everyone still is at this age- I knew nothing about sales, customer care, working in a team properly, managing clients, and generally anything that you need to know to be able to function without someone guiding you with great care, every step of the way.
I made a lot of mistakes along the way, right up until the time I left for my position as BDM at More Than Healthy. Perhaps I would enter the customers address wrong because I didn't ask them to spell it, assuming I knew it already. I might have wrongly re-stocked an SKU, which caused a huge mess up on our computer systems...meaning we would be down on stock when it came to Stocktake. Sometimes I over promised, or misinformed the customer about a particular guarantee or quality of a product....I could go on.
Everytime I made a mistake, my manager Becky (or any other team member infact) was there to tell me what I did wrong, and I listened as intently as I could. You feel bad when you make mistakes, you say to yourself you'll never do it again and that you'll remember to correct it before you see it going wrong again. I wrote a lot of my mistakes down on a notepad (I felt that it would allow me to remember them easier).
Perhaps it's the emotions we feel when we make mistakes - the feeling of guilt, regret or humiliation that make the event so much more impacting on our working habits/skills/whatever you want to call them - and the reason why we don't remember our successes as much is because the feeling of being good at something absorbs us into the moment and we don't really remember how we managed to do it and how we can pass on how to be successful to our protegés.
This isn't to say we don't learn from our successes. When we are successful, we take the good points away from the experience. When I made my first sale at More Than Healthy to a large company, I learnt that it was important to maintain and build an excellent relationship with the buyer before they would consider something. This isn't always true of course, as in some instances you can just give it the ol' "gift of the gab" and they'll buy it. I learnt that money coming into the business, made the business more profitable as it expanded the opportunities for us to do advertising, marketing and PR (duh!).
But. And a big but. All these successes were, more or less, based on my experiences when I was unsuccessful.
I suppose you could do one big circle and say that "Success is based on learning from failures..and a lot of hard work". Just think about it. When it really comes down to it, you can get lucky some of the time. It was luck that allowed me to sell £500 of the 10% commission stuff in one day at Topps, just because I was there at the right time to deal with the customer. It was luck, and a few good connections, that allowed me to get to know Summer Rayne Oakes, one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to sustainability and environmental issues, and someone I've definitely learnt more from than a book could bloody ever teach me!
When we make mistakes, I've learnt it's important we acknowledge them first of all. How can we learn from a mistake if we can't say to ourselves "Ok, I f***ed up."? Keith Chegwin said that and recovered from alcohlism, to come back and write a best-selling book. When I went to my first big wholesalers sales meeting in Nottingham, back in December, and in my haste to be successful and make our first big sale, I made a deal there and then to sell our product at a far lower price than what we sell to everyone else at. My directors in the business were not happy, and I had realised I had fucked up. The deal ended up being blown apart and we never got it.
I don't look at the "what-ifs" because that doesn't further my understanding of how to not make the same mistake again. I now know I shouldn't have made the deal without consulting my superiors first, and I took this away from it knowning that next time, no matter if it is in this company or not, I would seek permission to do the deal first.
Next time I had a meeting with a distributor, I made sure that my superiors were happy with the deal before it went through. We got it, and I felt successful.
I learnt more about how to run a company and do sales from my failure, than I had because of my success, and my success was BASED on my previous failure.
I feel like I could go on here, but I think my arms are a bit tired now and the post is getting a bit long.
If you take anything, ANYTHING away from this blog post, take away the following two sentences because they may be of use to you no matter what you do.
1. You learn more from your mistakes than your successes.
--- Admit the mistake, know what went wrong, and take that way as an experience.
2. Most successes are based on failures.
--- You can't expect to be successful immediately. There are a select few of people who have had success without failures, but I can't really think of anyone of the top of my head. When you are successful, realise the errors of the things that happened on the way to being successful and learn from them.
Life is a big lesson. I realise that at such a young age, I shouldn't really be saying these kind of things because I've only been alive almost 19 years. That doesn't mean I don't have the experience of someone aged 25.
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So yeah, I hope that helps out one way or another.
Constructive comments, praise or criticism about this blog post is welcomed. Because hey, if I don't get them...how am I supposed to be a great blogger if I don't know what people think should be changed (i.e. my failures)?
All the best and until next time,
Dave Cocozza
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