Rethinking Failure – Finding Motivation For Innovation
Humans seem to begin life with a healthy attitude toward failure. We are eager to fail quite frequently when learning how to walk. As a ‘slipping glimpser’ we learn from our falls and adjust our methods to find balance in movement until we succeed. During this learning experience failure is totally integrated into the process of our eventual success.
When it comes to academics, possibly the best time to rethink failure is when you have just had a meaningful academic success. Receiving an excellent grade on a difficult term paper, receiving applause for a presentation, passing a difficult class or raising ACT scores after several failed attempts. Did success come without setbacks, stumbles or falls? This debriefing may shed a more positive light on the total learning process.
In this TEDx presentation, Barbara Corcoran shares first hand experience of embracing failure and re-imagining what it has meant for her own path to success. Barbara Corcoran’s credentials include straight D’s in high school and college and twenty jobs by the time she turned twenty-three. It was her next job that would make her one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country when she took a $1000 loan to start The Corcoran Group. As one of the “Sharks” on ABC’s hit TV show, SHARK TANK, Barbara has ponied up her own money and invested in more than a dozen businesses, competing to make those deals for all to see, then shepherding them to success.
Barbara has learned how to build a culture of innovation. She built a business where she rewarded efforts versus rewarding results. She consistently dedicated five percent of the budget in every office she opened to encourage her teams try new things.
Real estate sales is a job that delivers frequent failures and rejection. Barbara spent many years studying sales people to understand why some reps were so much more successful than others. Ultimately, she found that the most successful sales reps spent less time feeling sorry for themselves when they failed. They were always too busy innovating solutions to their failures.