Humor makes it a whole lot easier for you to accept who you are and what happens to you. But if you can laugh at adversity and enjoy this kind of rough-and-tumble learning in your personal life and work, you’re a rare bird. Not many enduringly successful people find their own foolish foibles funny. Builders may seem to be able to grin and bear it under the most difficult of circumstance, but they suffer like the rest of us. Although we might put them high on a pedestal, crediting them with superhuman attributes, it’s usually just so we don’t feel pressured to aspire to their heights. We tear them down just as quickly as icons when they fail to live up to hyped-up expectations.

Many Builders face lifelong adversity, phobias, or flaws that they never overcome—but they do find a way to manage them. They refuse to let their goals and dreams be held ransom by their feelings in that awful moment when everything has gone wrong.

“The hurt of it all is there and to pretend that it’s not isn’t healthy,” said physician Martha Reitman, talking about her own journey as a Builder. “When you get a body blow, you’re going to go into shock for awhile, and then all the gradual stages of mourning occur—from hurt, to guilt, to anger, to recovery. Acknowledging that is critically important if you’re going to deal with it. That’s when you can start to get solace from the doing. You can rebuild, you can make use of this—and that’s very affirming. It’s a question of where to take it,” she said.

Some enduringly successful people keep a “positive attitude” regardless of the situation. These folks are rare. It’s a helpful skill if you can muster it, but most Builders have a hard time choosing an attitude when they first hit a setback. Whether you’re the president of a nation who loses after the first term or a manager or artist who gets a bad review, it hurts. What makes Builders different has to do with having a ThoughtStyle that moves them from negative emotion to constructive action quickly. It’s what they eventually choose to do rather than how they feel about their recovery.

If it’s not your nature to be able to flip a switch to “think positive,” then thinking you should be able to won’t help. Thinking positive may mean that you miss the opportunity to learn and get the full benefit of the insights to be gained from the failure or to understand what happened. The positive spin may even backfire, sending your emotions into a downward spiral because your mind has unfinished business. Builders go to work dealing with it directly instead of struggling to put a smile on their face. They don’t pretend to be happy when things go wrong AND they refuse to completely surrender to the current disappointment. It’s not that they feel good; they just harvest what they can from the setback and keep taking action.

“It’s natural to feel like hell when things turn out badly,” laughed Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning archbishop, sitting at the Waldorf Hotel on a frozen day in New York. He leaned forward, almost whispering, “But don’t let that stop you. Emotions are a storm that sweeps through your life.” This defeat you’ve had matters less than what you ultimately want to create, he said.

Builders don’t try to “fix” that they feel badly; they believe that learning from the experience and getting on with their goal is the “fix.” They feel the pain but cherish what they’re building more than the misery of the moment—they believe their dreams deserve to be created and that they have an essential role in it, no matter how awful they feel today.

Despite the hazing, Builders shift their focus back to what they want to ultimately achieve—that thing they are committed to building. Instead of struggling to choose their attitude, they shift their focus to what works, and when they do that, their attitude improves as well!

Builders harvest failure. They turn their thoughts to understanding what happened so they can drive even faster without future wrecks. Sure, they focus most of their energy on passions and strengths, but they don’t waste their mistakes by dismissing them. They put all of their experiences to use—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

People like Dale Carnegie, Earl Nightingale, and Napoleon Hill were fathers of the self-improvement movement whose prolific advice about success could be considered a must-read when you’ve hit the wall. They were fascinated with harvesting failure, a treasure too often ignored by incessant denial and positive thinking. These guys make abundantly clear the idea that, if you haven’t had lots of difficult challenges in your life, you’re either not willing to admit it or you’re not passionately engaged.

“Do or do not. There is no try,” says Yoda, the bewitching philosopher warrior created by George Lucas in Star Wars. Yoda is quoted at least as often as the founding fathers on this topic.

Some complain that his philosophy doesn’t equip you to survive a slump or recover from a mistake. In a culture that seems bent on perfection, entitlement, and instant gratification, it is often forgotten that most overnight successes require decades of failure to achieve their dreams. In Yoda’s case, it sounds as though the aspiring Jedi Knight must magically summon the Force to do things perfectly the first time or not make the attempt.

“Quite the contrary,” said Dr. Milton Chen, executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Edutopia. “The point of doing rather than trying is to make no mistake about your intentions. Your effort must be an intentional one—filled with sincerity and emotional commitment rather than half-hearted compromise,” Chen said. “Pay attention to the quality of your offering. Do your best even though it may not be perfect or good enough today. Making a real effort is what makes it a valuable learning experience, not just the outcome.”

Failing an attempt at suicide at age 15, Jack dropped out of school. He had suffered a never-ending rollercoaster of depression and illness that left him secretly hoping that his life would end. There were no antidepressants, no magic prescriptions for Jack’s condition. Suffocating migraines would send him into a panic in which he would lash out helplessly at everyone and everything. He once tried to set the house on fire and, during another episode, he chased his older brother with a butcher knife determined to kill him.

His family was “very poor,” he said, but did their best to help. They had moved twice at the advice of doctors—first to drier, then to wetter climates—in search of an environment where the sickly teen could recover and grow.

Upon the advice of a friend, his mother took young Jack down to a lecture on improving one’s health naturally. Embarrassed, he dragged his feet. By the time they arrived, the meeting hall was full. Jack felt relieved until the lecturer, nutritionist Paul Bragg, set two chairs out on the stage and said, “We don’t turn anyone away.”

Bragg focused on the trembling teen. “Do you want people to stop bullying you? Do you want the ladies to admire you?” Jack was captivated. The message would become his life’s mission. Bragg recommended something that medical doctors at that time warned would cause heart attacks, hemorrhoids, and even impotence: It was called daily exercise.

This was 1929. The teen chose to change his life despite the warnings. As America’s Great Depression deepened, it was perhaps reckless to start a business that conventional wisdom cautioned against. He would have to invent new ways of eating and new types of equipment that would make his exercise regimen possible. It was the beginning of a seven-decade career that is still going strong today. Jack La Lanne became the father of a revolution in health.

La Lanne faced and overcame many Tripping Points on his way to long-term success. He faced brutal public criticism to pursue his dream when traditional medicine thought it was dangerous. But it didn’t start out as a revolution. It was a recovery. In the beginning, he crawled from the depths of depression and debilitating illness. He started by getting off sugar and meat, and then creating a whole new way to think about feeding himself at a time when there were very few alternatives. At first, he wasn’t able to muster the energy to do very much, but he inched forward, taking a small step—however tiny—each day to gather strength. His courage enabled him to save himself and, eventually, improve the lives of millions of others.

It’s easy to do something because today we feel terrific, but skip it the day we feel badly. La Lanne still claims to hate exercise, although he hasn’t missed a workout in 70 years. He “can’t wait until it’s over every day, but I’d be miserable if I didn’t do it,” he said. Why does he?

“Would you be willing to change,” he shouted, “if it saved your life?” The feisty 92-year-old paced back and forth in his suite at the Sheraton Palace before his lecture at the Commonwealth Club as if he were still an excited teenager. La Lanne believes that a daily commitment to your passion, no matter how difficult, is the only way to enduring success.

Builders get back on course for the long haul because it matters more than their mood of the moment. Some psychologists call this externalizing the issue rather than taking it personally, or internalizing it. Wrong! Winners take it very personally—they just don’t believe that the race is over. Professional athletes and coaches are popular authors on this topic because they are so familiar with a continuous process of losing and winning one play at a time in public.

“You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge,” said Carl Lewis, Olympian of the Century. “What matters more than this one race is how to take the year. You feel lousy about your performance but you analyze what happened anyway and use that experience to win the next one.”

Athletes, like pilots and sailors, tack left and right toward their dreams, never assuming they will get to their destination in a straight line. Builders don’t obsess about the daily dilemmas. As the cliché goes, it’s a marathon, not a sprint to enduring success.

One of the tripping points that make the adventure particularly difficult for people is what Builders describe as an overly self-critical tendency toward perfectionism and persistence for its own sake. Of course, both attributes are necessary and noble aspirations for which high achievers strive. It’s true that you can’t get much of anything done without perseverance. Stories of persistence making the vital difference are legendary and the pursuit of perfection is something to which many high performers aspire.

At the same time, an obsession for perfection is listed in the leadership and success literature as your worst enemy and persistence as your greatest asset. But perfection and persistence can both be just another addiction. We persist at all sorts of bad habits—like believing we must be perfect. Remember, drug addicts and alcoholics are persistent, too.

The answer is neither perfection nor persistence, but obviously what to persist at. If the focus is on understanding meaning and learning from your tripping points, then there is growth. Builders achieve enduring success when they pour themselves into constructive habits—limiting their “addictions” to the passions that serve them.

Author Jack Canfield graduated from Harvard with a passion for helping kids whose self-esteem had been brutalized. He couldn’t get publishers excited about his healing remedy for all ages. He churned through dozens of rejection letters for his first book until finally one publisher offered him tentative acceptance. He learned to persist at the right thing: Chicken Soup. Today he’s coauthored more than 100 books in the famous Chicken Soup series and holds the Guinness World Record for seven New York Times bestsellers listed in the same week! For Canfield, what it’s really about is having lasting impact on improving the lives of millions of people.

We apologize for the sappy clichés. Perhaps it’s a blinding glimpse of the obvious. But, honestly, we heard it over and over and over again from Builders all over the world. People who have achieved enduring success drone on endlessly about learning from their mistakes.

When we complained about the trite nature of this idea to Quincy Jones, one of the biggest winners of Grammy Awards in history, we were sitting in a small study crammed with photos of celebrities in his hillside home perched above a smoggy Los Angeles. We had been trying all morning to hear ourselves think above the jackhammers pounding our ears from construction on a new house next door. The bone-rattling noise suddenly stopped for a moment and Q, as he likes to be called, sighed heavily and threw back another Bloody Mary. He pulled out a celery stick from his glass and crunched it for a moment:

“Shit yes, man, of course it’s old news. You’ve got to get something out of everything that you fail at. But when was the last time you actually took that advice?”

Point taken. It’s amazing how even the best ideas don’t work if we don’t actually put them to use.

Every Builder said setbacks are to be searched for lessons. At a minimum, the lesson may be not to do the same thing again, or at least do it differently. Perhaps what becomes clear is how committed you are to doing what you’re doing, allowing you to see different options that you wouldn’t have recognized otherwise.^[2]

What we heard from extraordinarily accomplished people was, “You’ve paid the tuition for failure, so it’s time now to harvest the learning.” Be greedy about wringing out every drop of useful content so you can do better next time. We use that emotionally charged word greed deliberately, because it shifts our ThoughtStyle from seeing a failure as just a liability to something that might be a transforming asset. Enduringly successful people told us to change our point of view about failure so that we could harvest everything that might actually be of use. Too often, people struggle with their embarrassment and leave it at that, or find themselves less confident about trying again.

In contrast, Builders use it all. Every experience teaches something. They don’t use a weakness or a setback as a reason to distrust themselves. They don’t marginalize themselves or the problem. If you fail to dissect the problem to see what is working and what doesn’t—if you keep throwing away the experience—you may be doomed to repeat it.

Technology pundit Esther Dyson’s version of a pep talk is to say that anything worth doing will kick you into a constant state of trial and error, so take good notes as you stumble through. When you make mistakes, just “be sure to make new ones.”

The auto industry is often known for resting on its laurels when business is going well, says Daimler Chrysler CEO Dieter Zetsche. Then when business falters, they scramble “to listen to customers and make things better.” Success can make you sloppy and stupid if you allow it to, he said. Failure is a better teacher.

Builders think of both success and failure as feedback. They don’t judge either as a complete win or loss. There is a gift and a warning in each one. We’re not saying you shouldn’t celebrate and mourn when it’s appropriate. It’s just that Builders don’t jump to the conclusion that success is a prize awarded to us from others—as an entitlement—or that failure is a death sentence handed down from above that proves they are unworthy. Instead, Builders put the content to work for them. The question is not whether they won or lost this round, but what they will do with the feedback.

As we arrived at the corporate headquarters, a burst of wind sent the fall color swirling outside. The huge plate glass window of the conference room looked like an aquarium exhibit with the gold and scarlet leaves chasing all about. A short, balding man burst into the room and headed for the coffee service in the corner.

“We ta-ta-took longer than we thought,” he stuttered, extending a warm handshake. The son of working class Irish immigrants, Jack Welch had a mother committed to boosting his confidence about everything, including stuttering, convincing him that his words couldn’t possibly keep up with his intellect. The famed former CEO of General Electric (GE) was always the “shrimp” on the sports teams, as he would later describe himself. Perhaps a smaller stature fueled his enormous ambitions “to get out of the pile—define my own success and set myself apart from the crowd.”

At 26, Welch landed his first leadership role at GE. Fresh out of school with a Ph.D., “I thought I was a pretty clever fellow,” he admitted, but he never imagined that his first major achievement as lead engineer would be to blow up the factory. Welch recalls the “terrible explosion” when the chemical reactor flew through the roof, sending glass flying and employees sprinting from the building. The plant was trashed, but there was no serious damage to life, except Jack’s shattered ego.

His boss said he should go tell his boss’s boss what happened. “It was the longest drive and the longest night,” Welch recalled. “I learned a lot from that experience. I went down to see him, told him what happened. He was a Ph.D. chemical engineer, professorial sort of guy, and all he was inquisitive about was what went wrong, and did I understand it, and what could I do about it, and could I design the commercial plant now that I’d blown up the pilot plant.”

Welch said, “He did nothing but bolster my confidence—and he taught me something. I never ever go after anybody when they’re down. Like, we even had jokes at GE about anybody who piles on—we threw the flag out—in meetings. Pull the white handkerchief out because it’s just not something that we accept. Now, that doesn’t mean if somebody is acting like a jerk some day some other way—and too cocky—we won’t take him down a peg, but that’s a different game.”

A guy like Welch, never once accused of being a push-over, might not have learned that lesson so profoundly any other way.

Builders find it irresistible to try, fail, improve; then try again, fail again, and get even better. The process summons Darwin to mind as a common leadership metaphor. In theory, each generation rewards the winning mutations because they lead to survival, while the innovations that don’t work never live to see another day. The only problem with drawing on Darwinism as a personal lesson for Builders is that natural selection leaves you, well, dead.

A better analogy might be capitalism, for all its flaws, which allows the entrepreneur to rewrite her DNA so that an entrepreneur or visionary can, even after bankruptcy, rise to try again with only the temporary sting of stigma attached. Amber Chand is just such an example. She deals in art—international handicrafts—which she locates, merchandises, and distributes all over the world.

In 1994, she ran across some beautiful baskets in Rwanda, in central Africa. “What was extraordinary about these baskets was that after genocide, when the country had been annihilated, 50 women got together under a tree—widows—their children had been macheted to death and their husbands had been killed. These women said ‘either we will go mad with our pain or we will find a way to support each other.’” They were from the Hutu and Tutsi tribes—two groups that have been killing each other for decades.

“They had nothing. So they came together and they began to weave baskets. The baskets were such a symbol of what happens when people can come together and say, in spite of our differences, we must find a new way, we must find a way to build peace,” Chand said. She called them the peace baskets.

“Subsequently, I made a commitment in Geneva that my company, Eziba.com, would do everything in its power to promote and present to the world the peace baskets of Rwanda to show that peace building is possible after the most devastating event and to show that women can be the emissaries of peace,” Chand said.

“And this is the way women come to the peace table. They may not be sitting with the governments where they’re not represented, but they are weaving and embroidering and stitching and coming together in their communities and finding ways to heal the community. As a business, I knew at that moment it was my responsibility and my company’s responsibility to find a way to support that effort,” she said.

“So for the Rwandan widows, who now are celebrating on the streets of Kigali, saying, ‘Look! The baskets are selling out. We must be very talented. We didn’t know that.’ And suddenly you see this light go up in the faces of the people, saying, ‘We are of value.’ And that is when you can begin to see businesses thriving because it’s almost like we are (providing) value and equality and respect as fundamental elements of the exchange of trade. And I said to them, ‘My friends, if your baskets start showing poor quality, we’re not going to carry them. And they go, ‘Really?’ And I say, ‘We’re a business. We’re not a charity.’ So that is the other piece of it.”

By 2004, ten years after starting Eziba, the company appeared to be growing. As the holiday gift-giving season approached, they scrambled to prepare for what is every retailer’s biggest part of the year. Somewhere in the bowels of the organization, a manager accidentally selected a mailing list to send catalogs to the people least likely, rather than most likely, to buy Eziba’s products. The mishap wasn’t discovered until the deafening silence in the call center left them short of cash. The mistake sent Eziba into bankruptcy. The worst part, according to Chand, was the struggle to make sure that so many people, like those women making baskets, somehow got paid.

Two years later, she has re-launched a similar dream called The Amber Chand Collection: Global Gifts for Peace and Understanding. “This is the highest and most painful form of innovation,” she sighed. “Our failure had nothing to do with a bad business or a bad idea. Why waste everything that we have worked so hard to learn? It deserves another chance.”

Builders become more resolute after losing a battle they believe in because they learn from the loss—it gives them a better idea of what matters, what works, and what doesn’t. Short-term “reality is an insult to the vision,” said James G. March. “You have to be self-delusional to create change—it’s a useful craziness guided or founded on your clear identity and knowing what you must do.”

March is a retired professor of business, education, political science, sociology, and psychology, and author of six books of poetry. Nearly a decade after he last taught his course Organizational Leadership at Stanford, March distilled lifelong lessons into a film, Passion and Discipline: Don Quixote’s Lessons for Leadership.

What can be learned from the fictional 16th-century Man of La Mancha, who haunted Spain, lashing out at windmills and challenging farm animals to battle?

“We live in a world that emphasizes realistic expectations and clear successes,” March said in the film. “Quixote had neither. But through failure after failure, he persists in his vision and his commitment. He persists because he knows who he is.” Quixote took the role of a noble knight who fought for honor and did things out of the “obligation of his identity, rather than relying on outcomes or consequences for a sense of self-worth.”

That’s the kind of stuff that Builders are made of—they put a way of life far above the importance of any one success or failure.

Risk-takers and innovators are heralded as a good and rare breed. By definition, innovation requires a frequent iterative process of failure. Ironically, there is nothing socially acceptable or politically correct about failure. Almost nobody has patience for it. We idolize winners and demonize losers after a single game.

When Patricia Russo was installed in early 2002 as CEO of Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the bubble was just about ready to burst. Russo was among the group of career telecom executives who founded the technology networking company, backed by Bell Labs, in 1996. She had spent close to 20 years managing some of Lucent’s and AT&T’s largest divisions.

“In late 2000, things started to become challenging. And by 2002, the industry went into a totally unpredicted, unprecedented decline, whose depth and duration nobody was calling for. It felt like we were tap-dancing on quicksand; nobody could call correctly what was happening. If we knew then what we all learned a year later, we would have taken even more dramatic action sooner,” she said.

Russo and her team have clawed their way back from losses, turning in Lucent’s second consecutive profitable year when we spoke with her in 2005. Net income was over $1 billion on revenues of well over $9 billion.

During the crisis, she “was interviewed by a particular reporter I won’t name, and it was very testy because the reporter was chastising our team rather aggressively about how difficult it had been for us to forecast our financial results.”

“After a while, I stopped the interview and said, ‘Do you think we’re idiots?’ He just looked at me. I said, ‘This company has a lot of very capable people. We’ve got a lot of good history here. Do you think we’re just stupid?’”

“He said, ‘Well, no.’ I said, ‘Then there must be something else at play here that has created a phenomenon in the industry that makes it impossible to predict.’ So I explained to him what had happened. And he said, ‘You know what? I didn’t appreciate how the paradigm has shifted and what’s different.’ It was a very difficult time because the impression had been created that we just couldn’t get it right, when the fact was that no one could. The industry simply had never experienced such a severe downturn,” Russo said.

“Nobody anticipated what was happening, and we were all reacting to a target that was moving at a rate that we just couldn’t imagine. All you can do in an environment like that is be open and honest about what’s happening, what you know, what you don’t know, what the risks are, and what the opportunities are. That’s what we tried to do as we focused on the things we could control,” she said.

The bad news is that even when you’re doing your best, if you fail at any point, you’ll get harsh reviews. Think of the last time you got good press for bad news. Nope. It’s tough to find examples where public dialog ever refers to anyone’s efforts as a noble failure.

This is not a complaint. We’re not whining about the media. This is a reality check. You should not wonder why innovation doesn’t happen in most organizations. For much of the journey, innovation is hard work rewarded by bad headlines.

This is just one more reason why people hide out from pursuing their full potential to follow their dreams and serve the world. Enduringly successful people aren’t immune. They just tolerate the risks, feel the fear, take the brickbats, learn from failure, and do what matters to them anyway.

Tripping points are inevitable stumbles that Builders harvest. But even when complete recovery is not possible, as is the case for the people you’re about to meet in the next chapter, there are powerful ways to prosper despite—and sometimes because of—the worst of circumstances.

The good news is that if you’re willing to put up with the grief that comes from pursuing your dream, then congratulations. For better or worse, you’ve found what you should be doing with your life.