The most uncomfortable conversation I ever had with my wife's
parents was not the day I asked if I could marry their daughter. It
was the explanation I made at the age of 21, ten months into our life
as newlyweds – the phone call about why I'd just been fired
from my perfectly good, not-too-difficult warehouse job.

"Well Ron, at first this was kind of funny, you see… Tony and
I had this really hilarious idea… we made up this fax that
explained how the company's stock had just taken a severe
nosedive, they were closing all their branches and would make every
effort to make payroll for the current week… We were just sure the
folks in Omaha would know it was a practical joke, but then the lady
thought it was real and started crying. She faxed it to Arkansas who
faxed it to Minneapolis, and… well, the CEO didn't think this was
quite as funny as we did."

Such was the end of the best-paying job I'd ever had up to that
point, complete with a rather tense phone call to the in-laws.

You would all recognize the name of this particular industrial supply
company if I told you. And, yes indeed, I learned that Fortune 500
companies take their stock prices very, very seriously. There's
nothin' funny about money in Corporate America, no-siree Bob!

Eleven years later, it's a funny story, but at the time it was a
devastating blow to my tender ego. It was really the beginning of a
whole series of events that has shaped my life since. At the time, I
defined success as "Never get fired from a job, and never flunk a
class." If that was the definition of success, then I was
suddenly a 50 per cent failure. It really messed me up. I was taking
summer school at the time, and all the sudden I couldn't concentrate
on my thermodynamics class. I started falling behind… pretty soon
I was flunking quizzes and the relentless pace of a double-speed
summer class was overtaking me. I was forced to drop the course and
forfeit all my tuition money. So I was a 100 per cent failure.

Then, at the next job I found (yet another lowly warehouse position),
one day I stopped in the computer department office to ask if a
little field could be added to the database. My deeply paranoid and
rather incompetent supervisor took great offense at this and fired me
for going over her head. Now I was a 150 per cent failure.

This was a summer of humble pie, at the impressionable age of 21. My
wife was extremely supportive and I eventually got back on track, but
this series of minor disasters left a deep impression. So when a
friend invited me to join him in a business startup that required me
to sell (to an engineer, a 4-letter word!), he didn't have to
remind me how volatile life in a company can be. He also didn't
have to explain that occasional, serious doses of rejection are as
inevitable as death and taxes. So I accepted his proposal with a
strong mix of excitement and fear.

Along the way, I picked up an aphorism by motivational speaker, Zig
Ziglar: "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you can
learn to do it well." This is a fundamental belief that all
successful people share – in stark contrast to my "never get
fired, never flunk a class" philosophy, which is how mediocre people
define success.

In the years since my summer-of-humble-pie, I've failed much,
much more than I've succeeded. A pre-Internet business project,
119 presentations in a row and nothing but "no"s. Two years
in an engineering design job where none of my major projects saw the
light of day. Two more years of fruitless "missionary work" in
Chicago, eating baloney sandwiches and ramen soup, and a whole series
of other large opportunities and projects at the same time, all of
which eventually slipped through my fingers. My boss, whom I both
liked and respected, was at the end of his rope. He wished I would
just sell some sensors or circuit boards or something, and was quite
weary of this un-profitable, cutting-edge networking stuff.

Push came to shove. I was no longer a college student, but a working
man with a baby at home and a mortgage. I pleaded with my boss:
"I want to succeed at this. This is what I want to do. Just give
me a couple more months, I'm sure I can close some of these deals".
He replied, as politely as he could: "You know, Perry, I could have
this fantasy about, say, being a politician. But that's just not what
I am. You're a good engineer and you're a good problem-solver. I'm
really sorry, but you're not a salesman." He showed me the door.

One week later I started yet another job at a teeny startup product
company with very little name recognition, no reps, no distributors
and few customers. My position: national sales manager. I was the
best they could afford at the time. We figured there was a market for
industrial networking boards and software, and I was allowed to sell
anywhere I wanted, as long as nobody had to buy me a plane ticket.

This time it clicked: my career took an 180-degree turn virtually
overnight. Business started moving, and four years later, it's
still growing at a healthy pace. I have ownership in the company,
which is great because the shareholders are in the process of selling
it to a much larger company. That's a great "game over" for just
about anybody!

They say you learn more by failing than succeeding, and there's
truth in that. But you can only understand what doesn't work in
the context of what does. There were very definite reasons for that
"180." Here are some things I learned:

-Don't partner with uncommitted people. In 1996, I had a clear
shot at doing the first DeviceNet retrofit (a new network technology
at the time) in all of Ford Motor Company, and I spent a month
collecting signatures and drawings so it could move forward. The
company I represented lost the drawings and basically puked all over
the whole project. I needed a facial egg scraper. I was committed,
they were not. It was really doomed to fail from the beginning, I
just couldn't see it at the time. Things were quite different
later, when I had engineers on hand who would commit to finishing
projects successfully.

-Don't sell things that people don't want. Most folks have
heard that Harlan "Colonel" Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken
fame pitched his chicken recipe to more than 1,000 people before he
got a single taker. As the story was told to me, he added salt to his
ten spices, and then the very next prospect – presentation #1009
– was a taker. The recipe he had before the salt addition was
very, very close to what it needed to be. Likewise, you can start
with a really, really great idea, but after the first pass, it's still
not usually what people want. Minor tweaks to the design make a big
difference, especially when it hits the "sweet spot."

-Hard work and determination alone are necessary, but not sufficient.
Colonel Sanders could have made 1,000 more presentations, driven his
car until the transmission fell out, spent every dime of his $105
social security cheques, prayed for success and recited positive
affirmations every morning in front of his mirror. But he still would
have come up empty-handed, had he not been willing to change what he
was selling.

-Look for opportunities that capitalize on your true talents. The
boss who showed me the door once said to me, "You're always
trying to solve problems. Why can't you just sell connectors?" In
that job, my engineering background was more of a distraction than an
asset. I should have seen the handwriting on the wall right away, but
I ignored the warning signs. Once I got into a situation where my
technical skills were essential, life got a whole lot easier.

Each of us has a list of "THINGS I WISH I'D KNOWN 10 YEARS AGO." You
just read a few of mine. But as I look at this list, most of these
are things I would have known much sooner, had I only been paying
closer attention.

How about your list? It's seductively easy to be preoccupied with
the way things should be, while ignoring the way things really are.
The diligent student of Harsh Reality rarely fails a final exam.
Failure is not much of a failure at all, so long as we learn from our
mistakes.

Do you have a terrific failure story (or success story)? Share it
with me: email newsletter@... - I'm sure other members will
enjoy hearing about it in the next issue.

Best,

Perry