10MINMC.Ep.9.V1.Audio
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Trey Sheneman: [00:00:00] Many leaders fear failure, but the really good ones know that failure is the tax you pay for growth.
Welcome to 10 Minute Masterclass, your weekly mic drop for business breakthrough. I'm your host and lead MC Trey Sheneman in each week on 10 Minute Masterclass Our goal is to translate timeless business principles to help you solve today's business problems Now we do that inside of a of a framework that we teach called the core four drivers of growth because no matter When I was taking my own startups to market or running growth inside of some well known brands Growth and the bottlenecks around growth always came down to one of the core four [00:01:00] drivers whether that was marketing sales operations or leadership Now in today's episode we're going to drill drill down into the leadership bucket a little bit more And i'm going to start a leadership series kind of nested inside of this podcast Where i'm going to teach you the single greatest leadership lesson That I learned from some of the incredible people that i've worked for or with Over the last 15 20 years that i've been in the space And today's episode is about the single greatest leadership lesson that I ever learned from John Maxwell Now I worked for John for about almost a year short stint And I was working And a lot on the non profit growth side of John's organization.
Um, he has the John Maxwell Leadership Foundation and he has Equip. And it was in that season that I got to sit in on a talk that John did and he delivered a quote, um, that was from one of his many books. I really do think John's written, I think something like 105, 110 books at this point, which is just profound.
He writes for 30 minutes every day and has [00:02:00] for 50 something years and that's how all the books happen, which is. Just a whole nother lesson in and of itself But in this talk he referenced this quote from one of his books and man this This concept that he shared in that that day just really struck a chord with me and it's it's been a real like hallmark guiding kind of a clarion call principle in my life ever since and I want to get the quote, right
so i'm literally going to read it to you. I want to get it exactly right "the more you do the more you fail The more you fail The more you learn, the more you learn, the better you get." And it's in that quote itself that I realized that there is a lot to be said about running into failure as a teacher, viewing failure as the university everyone has to get a degree from, whether you like it or not, and really thinking about it more as a lesson.
Experience less as a losing experience because truthfully if you learn [00:03:00] do you ever really lose is anything ever really lost and that mindset that came out of that quote really drove a hyper period in my career running growth Inside of Maxwell's organization and several others after that inside my own company now So I really want to take this this quote from Maxwell and kind of teach you the The system around failure, the, the system, the, the approach to learning that I've sort of, um, replicated in my own life using this quote as a guide.
So the first part is the more you do, the more you fail. Here's the principle activity drives growth. Like sitting on the sidelines and postulating isn't really ever going to grow anything. You actually have to do. You have to get into the game. At Herald, one of our core values is tenacity, which we call champion's grit, which is we're going to be in the dirt, like in the sand, in the arena.
We're not going to be people in the, in the crowd, like jeering at the people down, actually giving a show. We want to be in the game. You should want, you're, you're an entrepreneur. [00:04:00] Clearly, you should want to be in the game, but more than just. Activity is understanding that if you actually haven't failed recently, you're probably not pushing yourself hard enough Like you should be pushing on the boundaries of who you are as a leader.
I've got a stat for you I mean whether you want to get into if LeBron is up there yet or not in my opinion Maybe it's a generational thing Michael Jordan is still the greatest basketball player of all time and it's probably still not close not necessarily because of all the scoring titles in the championships because of the way that guy played defense, but more than that, would you know that Michael Jordan missed 26 game winners
of course, everybody's seen the footage of all the game winners he hit, but he missed 26 game winners in his career. Thousands of free throws. You know, he had an incredible shooting percentage, but it was rarely over 50%, which means he missed more shots than he made. Like, we get stuck on the fact that failing is a part of taking action.
So stop over planning and start taking action. Imperfect action is the [00:05:00] key here. If you're waiting on the perfect time, you shouldn't be in business because it doesn't exist. Are you ready for predictable growth in your business? Then I encourage you to check out the Compass Method. It's the unique framework we use for businesses to help them grow to 10 million and beyond.
If you're interested in finding out more, shoot me an email at [email protected] And as leaders, we should be coaching our teams into trying to get high quality reps at the thing, not planning the perfect, um, rendition of the thing. So that's number one. The more you do, the more you fail. Number two, the more you fail, the more you learn.
Failure isn't the end of the road, okay? It's just a step on the path to mastery. You have to miss in order to recalibrate and be able to figure out where you're going to go from here Most people avoid failure because they think it's going to define them when truthfully it's going to refine them failure is like that brillo pad on our expertise that just Sharpens our acts a little bit more makes us a little bit more effective.
So it's it's [00:06:00] not worth avoiding, you know, Thomas Edison famously, you know Took 10, 000 attempts at doing the light bulb. And when asked about it, he said, well, I just figured out the 10, 000 ways that it would not work. And he kept going in and I got a light on me right now because of what Thomas Edison was willing to do.
So it's reflecting and refining around the failure that makes. It a unique teacher. So a good way for you to practice this aspect of learning from failure, especially if, uh, with your running teams is to run what's called a debrief or a retro meeting after you've completed a big initiative, a campaign, a product rollout, whatever it is, and the function of the debrief for the retro meeting is for the team to come together and answer four questions.
What was right. What was wrong, what was missing, what was confusing. Now you'll notice that three of those four are about what didn't go right. That was what was wrong, what was missing or what's confusing. And in this meeting, it is my experience that leaders should go first. You should come to [00:07:00] that meeting with your own answers to those questions and you should model vulnerability and your own willingness to admit failure and to learn from it.
And that's how you show that you're actually willing to do the work. And then lastly, the more you learn, the better you get. Growth is a cycle. It's not a destination. Growth has never been a one time event. It's a continuous loop of doing, failing, learning, improving. Sometimes I teach it as you've got to ideate about what you want to do.
You got to implement on what you're going to need to do. You're going to iterate on what you did. And in doing those three things, you're eventually going to innovate on where you're trying to go. Um, you know, I think about Bezos at Amazon. Yeah. Alexa. I got like two  Alexa in my house, three Alexis in my house, but Alexa was the byproduct of the failed fire phone.
Like nobody even remembers he did. And Hey, newsflash. He lost 170 million on the fire phone before he came up with Alexa. And now Alexa is something we all know. So if you're not reviewing your failures, [00:08:00] then you're never going to have a chance to systematize your growth, that loop, that growth loop we just talked about.
It is in the failures that you find the bigger unlocks. So a question you can ask as a leader is what's the next most intelligent risk we should take, even if we fail. That's a really profound leading question to always ask yourself. Just quickly, because I am a huge John Maxwell fan. Let me just give you three quick other honorable mention John Maxwell lessons.
Number one, everything falls, rises and falls on leadership. The translation is if you want to fix your business, fix your leadership first. Number two, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. People follow leaders, not resumes. So make sure you're somebody we're following. And third, you will never change your life until you change something you do every day.
Growth is in the small. Iterative adjustments, not the big splashes as always. I hope you got something awesome out of this podcast. If you haven't had a chance to go and follow us, subscribe, smash the subscribe button. We'd love for you to do that. Uh, we're going to be dropping [00:09:00] this content like this every week.
And again, in this leadership buck and over the coming weeks, I'm going to teach you more incredible lessons from, from great leaders like John like Dave Ramsey like Brendon Burchard and others that I had the privilege of sitting under their tutelage. So I hope you'll come back if nothing else, just for the leadership. Content that the podcast is going to deliver.
I hope you've got something valuable out of this. Remember, get in the game. Failure is okay. It's just the tax that you pay to grow. Thank you for listening to 10 Minute Masterclass. We'll see you on the flip side.
