“The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure, and your people know that and are pessimistic, therefore, about trying something again, is very high.”
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Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.
I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head.
The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.
Even in a gleefully negative comic, there is optimism, although it's slightly hidden: It comes out through a comic character's sheer tenacity. He keeps going and trying to find some sort of fulfillment regardless of his perpetual failure record. That's a form of hope, a form of optimism. Really hokey I know, but it's true.
