Learning to Fail Forward

This message was delivered by John Maxwell from the pulpit of the Crystal Cathedral.

There are three facts I want to share with you this morning about failure. Are you ready? Are you ready to learn something? Are you ready to take notes? Look at your neighbor and say, "You're going to learn something." Go ahead and tell them that. In fact, look right back at them and say, "It's about time." I've been waiting a long time for this.


Three facts about failure:

Number one, EVERYONE FAILS. No matter how successful a person may look on the outside, every one of us fails. In fact, since you're already talking to your neighbor, I want you to look at your neighbor and say to them, "You're going to mess up." Would you tell them that right now? Now hold on, hold on. Some of you seem to be enjoying saying that a little too much. That person who just said you are going to mess up, look back at them and say, "I already have. I'm sitting beside you." You see we all fail.

Every one of us fails. I love the statement that says that if you don't succeed, you're running about average. I can tell you right now that all of us have experienced failures within our life. In the Bible, one of the things I love about God's word is that it never tries to hide the failures, the shortcomings, the mistakes of the people that we look to as heroes.

Abraham, who was called a friend of God, he lied. Jacob, who was a prince of God, was deceitful. Moses, who literally spoke to God face to face, committed murder. David, who was a man after God's own heart, committed adultery and murder. Peter, who was literally given the keys to heaven, denied Christ. Paul, who basically was the catalyst for the early church, murdered. You see, the men and the women that we look up to in the word of God, all of them had blatant failures in their life. Why? Because all of us fail. All have sinned and all have come short of God's glory. We all fail.

The second thing I want you to know about failure is this, NO ONE ENJOYS FAILURE. I've never met one person who has come into my life and said, "John, the thing that really motivates me in life, the thing that I thrive on more than anything else, is failure. I get so excited when I mess up. I get absolutely pumped up when I do. The other day, probably the highlight of my week, I lost my job. Awesome! Awesome! It's just humongous what's happened to me; I just broke up a relationship. Oh life is good." I've never known anyone to get excited about failure. I've not known anybody who likes failure.

What do we do when we fail? We hide it. We deny it. We fear it. We ignore it. We hate it, run from it, do a lot of things in response to failure, but no one really likes it. In fact, it's been said that if at first you don't succeed, destroy all the evidence. How many of us have tried? Come on, talk to me now, raise your hand. How many of you have tried to destroy the evidence? Huh? I didn't do that, surely that could not be me.

When I was a young leader, one of the first leadership conventions where I was privileged to speak was a two-and-a-half day convention at which I was to be the last speaker in the last slot of the last day. For the first two days, all of the speakers spoke about success, about doing well, and about their achievements. To be honest with you, by the end of the second day, as a young leader who was messing up more than anything else, I was becoming quite discouraged. As they would talk about how good they were, what they had achieved, the mountains they had climbed, I kept thinking that I'm not that good yet. I haven't succeeded that well. I sensed that was not only in my spirit, I sensed that was within the spirit of the entire crowd attending the conference.

So, when it came time for me to speak, I decided I didn't want to teach the lesson I had planned to teach. In fact, during the lunch break before I was to speak that afternoon, I hid myself away and I asked myself what am I going to speak about? Certainly, they don't need to hear one more lesson on success. All of the sudden I had one of these "Eureka!" moments. As I realized what I was going teach, I got out my legal pad and at the very top I wrote the words, "Flops, Failures, and Fumbles."

When I got up to speak that day, I looked at the audience and I said, "For two days we've heard about success and how to be good and how to achieve. We've got that down. Now, I want to talk to you about failures. I want to talk to you about when we don't succeed and what happens when we don't reach that goal that we wanted to. I said I want to talk out of my life experiences." I took that "Flops, Failures, and Fumbles" message and talked to them about all the dumb things that I had done in my life. I can tell you the list was long; it was five pages of a legal pad. When I finished you should have felt the encouragement in that room. Everyone was thinking, look what he's done and look how many times he's failed. All of a sudden, there was a spirit of encouragement that came out of the failure. They were thinking that, if God can bless him with all the dumb things he's done, certainly God can bless me, too.

After that lesson, they stood in lines for two hours waiting for the duplicators to produce those cassette tapes before they went home. One guy wrote me a letter that said, "I went from Ohio to Kansas and I listened to that tape seven times and I just laughed at all the dumb things that you had done in your ministry." I wonder why he listened to it seven times? Did he assume that if he kept listening, I would get better? I have no clue.

But here's what I know: Everyone fails. Nobody likes failure, but the part I want to dwell on in today's lesson is this third point, NO ONE RESPONDS TO FAILURE THE SAME WAY.

Biblically, Job responded much differently to his problems than his friends did. Joshua and Caleb, when the spies were sent out in the Promised Land, they came back with a total different report than the other ten. David and Saul, first two kings of Israel, both of them failed and yet David, a man after God's heart, kept getting back up though Saul just stayed down after he failed. Even in the last days of Jesus' life, Peter and Judas, two of his disciples, both did terrible things to him and yet one commits suicide and the other comes back and to become the spokesperson for the early church.

Not everyone responds to failure the same way. And it's that response to failure - your response, my response - it's that response to failure that determines how successful we become. It's not the failure.

Several years ago, I wrote a book called "Failing Forward. It was a book to teach you how to fail successfully. In that book, the thesis is that there's a difference between people that are average and people who achieve. Here's the difference - it's in their individual perceptions of failure and their responses to failure.

Average people see failure differently then achieving people do. When they fail, they fail backward. Achieving people, when they fail, fail forward. When they fail, they advance, they fail forward. They're like my friend who said one time in college, "John, I'm never down. I'm either up or getting up." My friend, and achieving person, knew how to fail forward.

Now what's the difference? What's the difference between a person that fails backwards and a person that fails forward? How does that happen? People who fail backward take failures and turn them into major losses in their lives. Let me give you three quick thoughts on those who fail backward.

Number one, failure keeps some people from trying again. In other words when they fail they really fail, not because they fail, but they really fail because they allow that failure to cause them to back up and say, a phrase that all of us have said, I'll never do that again. Or as Mark Twain said, "If a cat sits on a hot stove once, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again." He said that cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves. We've all had experiences were we fail and we backed up from it and we said, "My goodness, I'm never going to do that again. I learned my lesson and I'm not going to touch that again! Wow, see you later!"

Twenty-five years ago the 1984 Olympics was held very close to the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles. Mary Lou Retton became the darling of gymnastics during that Olympics and, in an interview asking her about her achievements and about her medals, she said something very significant. She said that people liked to talk about the medals and the success, but she trusted that her success came from the fact that she'd learned to get through her problems and to bounce back after setbacks. Mary Lou Retton was just telling us that if you're going to fail forward you have to get back up. That people who fail backward, they back up, and they allow their failure to overwhelm and overcome them.

Number two, we fall backward when we become negative about life. Failure has a way of tainting our attitudes and coloring our perspectives. After a while, we begin to be negative about life and assume that everything is wrong and everybody is trying to hurt us. We go through this dark type of living, not because that's the way life is, but because that's the way we chose to live because we failed.

We're kind of like the grandpa who visited the grandchildren in the afternoon. After lunch, he was tired and he fell asleep, took a nap. One of the grandchildren came into the room, saw grandpa asleep. He had a handlebar mustache, so the grandson thought he'd have some fun. He went into the kitchen, got some Limburger cheese, and snuck back in the room, rubbed the cheese on grandpa's mustache, and slipped out of the room. Grandpa woke up a little bit later and he said, "This bedroom stinks!" So he left the bedroom, went into the kitchen, and sat down to have some cookies with grandma and the kids. He smelled around the kitchen and he said, "The kitchen stinks, too! I'm going to go outside and get me a breath of fresh air." He went outside, took a deep breath, and said, "The whole world stinks!" Now the whole world didn't stink. Grandpa had some Limburger cheese in his mustache.

I know people who have negative attitudes in their life and no matter where they go, no matter where they are, they can't be happy. No matter what job they have, no matter where they are in the world, no matter who they marry, none of it really matters. I love the statement that says no matter where you are, there you are. So many times we fail backward when those failures begin to get the best of us and we become negative about life itself.

One of the great things about the Crystal Cathedral over the years is that it's lifted up possibility thinking faith, hope, the things that allow the spirit to soar.

Number three, we fall backwards when we make excuses and blame others. When we begin to look at our failures and put the blame on someone else or something else, we begin to fail in a negative way. We begin to fail backward. Ben Franklin said one time, "He who is good at making excuses is seldom good at anything else." Boy that's true.

Many of you in this congregation and the TV audience are old enough to remember when Monday Night Football was really great, when it was the thing you did on Monday night because it was the only football in town. That's way back when Howard Cosell and Don Meredith were in the booth together. Howard Cosell would wax eloquent and Don Meredith, kind of the cowboy, would just kind of sit there listen to him for a while. When it became obvious that the game was going in one team's favor, Don Meredith would lay back and sing, "Turn out the lights, the party's over!" One day, Howard was making all kinds of excuses for a player who was dropping passes and messing up on the field. Finally, Don Meredith looked at him and said, "Howard, if ‘ifs' and ‘buts' were candies and nuts we'd all have a Merry Christmas!"

When we begin to look around and blame others for our issues and our problems, we're failing backward. But here's the good news. There are those fail backward and allow their failures to overcome them. And there are those who fail forward and they rise above their failures; they advance even as they are falling. And this is the difference: When we fail forward, number one, we learn from our failure. When you and I fail, we have to choose between two responses; we either learn from that failure and get better because of it or we panic and we leave that failure never learning, continuing to commit the same failure over and over and over and over and over again. I think for some of us, the reason we love New Years Day so much is because it gives us a fresh start. We can say, okay, that was last year and those were those failures, but this year I'm going to try to do better.

If we fail forward, we live by these five rules of life:

Rule number one - you will learn lessons.

Rule number two - there are no mistakes, just lessons.

Rule number three - a lesson is repeated until it is learned.

Rule number four - if you don't learn the easy lessons, they get harder.

And rule number five - you'll know you've learned a lesson when your actions change.

That's so true about failure. The question is not "Have we failed?" The question is not "Are we going to fail?" Of course we will. That isn't even the issue. That should not even be brought up in a discussion about failure.

There is only one question and that question is "How have we responded to that failure?" Since we have failed, what have we done since? If we fail forward, I promise you that one of the things that will happen to us is that we will learn from that failure until we can say, "Sometimes I win and sometimes I learn." We fail forward when we learn from our failure.

Secondly, we fail forward when we discover our true selves. Sometimes the only way we can ever really discover who we really are or who we could be or what our gifts are is through failure itself.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne lost his job, he went home to his wife and began bemoaning the fact that he lost his job. She smiled and she said, "Now you have time to write that book you always wanted to." And so he wrote "Scarlet Letter." James McNeill Whistler flunked out at West Point, failed as an engineer, but he found out that he was a pretty good painter.

You see, through our failures, many times we discover ourselves. We go down to dead ends and we say, "Oops, this is not who I am, this is not my giftedness, this is not my calling."

When I graduated from college, I had a counseling degree and I began counseling. I was a terrible counselor. Now you think I'm being modest, a little self-effacing, but trust me on this, I was a terrible counselor. Let me put it this way, if I had problems, I would not go to myself. Just terrible. People would come to see me because I was a counselor. They'd come and they'd sit down and they'd begin to pour out their problems. There are many reasons I was a terrible counselor. One, I didn't want to listen to all the problems. Two, I wanted to help them quickly; I wanted quick fixes for these people.

They'd start telling me their problems and within five minutes, I'd figured it out. On my legal pad, I'm already writing them an assignment, point one, point two, point three, etc. I let them go on and on and on until they felt a little bit better, and then I'd say, "Okay, I have some suggestions for you." I'd tear off that sheet with all my suggestions and I'd say, "Be healed." Well, they weren't healed and they weren't helped. They walked out of there kind of wondering what happened.

It was terrible for three years. I just it was terrible. I was counseling and I wasn't helping anybody. I wasn't helping myself. I'd go home and I'd be worn out. I Didn't like my job. Kind of thought I'd leave the ministry. Somebody would come and say they had a real problem, you know, like "I'm going to jump off the bridge." I'd feel like saying, "I've got a car let me help you." There'd be times when I'd be feeling so low after hearing their problems that I felt like saying, "Can I jump with you? We'll hold hands." It was three years of miserable counseling, making myself miserable, making everybody else miserable.

One day I stood up in front of my congregation and I said, "I have come to the conclusion that counseling is not my gift and I just want you to know I'm counseling nobody in the church again." They stood up and gave me a standing ovation. They looked at each other and said, "God has answered our prayer!"

You see, we fail forward when we discover our true selves.

And, finally, we fail forward when we come to a deep faith in God. Almost all of us in this auditorium, almost all of you watching television, you have come to God through pain, regret, failure, disappointments. That's what gives us the wake up call. That's what happened to the prodigal son when he came back to the father. That's what happened to the woman who had that incurable disease, who said I have to press through the crowd and see Jesus. What brought them to the Father? What brought them to God? Their hurts, their questions, their failures, their disappointments, until one day they realized the only person they could truly turn to was God.

And so I close with some encouraging words to you. By the way, they're not my words, they're the words of God. I just want you to know that there are some things that do not fail. We fail, we disappoint others, we're disappointed in others, people fail us, but there are some things that never fail.

First of all, God's word. God's word never fails us. Not one of all the good promises of the Lord your God that he has given to you has failed. God's love and compassion, they never fail us. It is because of the Lord's mercy that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. I love this phrase, His compassions are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness." So when I fail, God's not tired of me because his compassions are new every morning. So when I wake up and I'm tired of the old life and I think God's probably tired of the old life, God's says, "I'm not tired for you, John. I woke up with a whole set of new compassion for you."

I'll tell you what else doesn't fail. What we do for God doesn't fail. The scripture tells us to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. In other words, to give gifts to God because they will neither rust nor will moths corrupt those gifts.

When we do ministry for God, when we do ministry for others, when we give financially for the kingdom, that's all safe. That will never fail us. Hey, in an economic downturn I can promise you, the best investment is what you give to God. It will never fail you. The promises of eternal life never fail.

"I give them eternal life," Jesus said, "and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of hand." You are safe in God. God's love never fails.

Paul said, "Prophecies, tongues, and knowledge, that will all pass away, but there are three that remain, hope faith and love, but the greatest of these is love."

And, my friends, I've got good news for you today: God never fails. "Be strong and of good courage. Fear not for the Lord, thy God, he will not fail thee, nor will he forsake thee."

Right before World War II, Japan attacked China in an area where Gladys Aylward had worked many years as a missionary. She had a little orphanage of a hundred children. Immediately she had to gather up the hundred children and flee for safety. And, after a few days of them trying to avoid the Japanese, they finally found a little bit of a mountain retreat where they could spend the night. It was beginning to wear on Gladys, the missionary. She was quite discouraged. The next morning she looked at the orphans and she let her doubts arise and said, "I'm not sure we can get to safety and I'm not sure we can get through this mountain pass. I'm going to do my best, but I'm not sure."

A little girl that was thirteen says, "Mrs. Aylward, Moses led the children of Israel through the Red Sea. So, you can lead us through the mountains."

Gladys smiled and she said, "Honey, thank you for that word of encouragement, but you have to understand, I'm not Moses."

The little girl said, "I know that, but God is still God."

© Copyright Hour of Power 2009. This message was delivered by John Maxwell from the pulpit of the Crystal Cathedral and aired on the Hour of Power, January 3, 2009.