How to profit from being wrong

  When my grandson was five years old he came to me one day and said, "I love being right." 

      I said, "Do you?"  

      "Yes, I love being right." 

      "I like being wrong," I said.  

     And he stopped and he looked at me ... stunned ... and he said, "You like being wrong?"
  
     "Yes."  

     "Why do you like being wrong?" 

     "Because when I am wrong, I can learn something.  When I'm right, I don't learn anything."

     And he thought for a minute and he started to smile, and he said, "I'm going to like being wrong now, too!"

      I said, "That would be great."
  
      So later it happened that I saw him (maybe a month or two later) and he had a little friend with him and he said, "That's my Lalu" (he called me Lalu---that was his funny grandfather name for me)  "That's my Lalu, that's my grandfather, and he likes being wrong."  

      The other kid looked at me in amazement that I liked being wrong.  And Kathy, my wife, was with me at the time. She looked at the boys and she said, "That's why he's happy so much of the time."

      And oh how funny that was.

      But this illustrates something that I think is really important in the area of wealth creation and learning how to prosper.  

      And that is being OK with failure and getting it wrong and staying in action and building on what I learn from mistakes.  With my coaching clients we call it "Game film."  

      We call it "game film" because I want them to see that anything we talk about in the immediate past can be neutral. If something didn't go their way, say they didn't come up with a sale, or they didn't come up with the agreement they wanted or they didn't have a negotiation go their way, I want to review the conversation they had as if we were watching game film. 

     I don't want to make them wrong or have them feel guilty about how they didn't close their deal. So it's just game film. Just like when a team, after playing a big game, will all gather together the next Monday and watch film of the game that they played.  By watching this game film they can learn so much about how to play next week's game.  They can see where they were out of position and the other team scored.  They can see wonderful things they can learn from.

  I remember years ago one of my clients was Dick Tomey,  head football coach of the University of Arizona Wildcats.  One of the things I noticed about Coach Tomey was that after a game in which his team lost, he always had this strangely energized expression on his face.  His eyes were sparkling and he didn't look exactly .... happy ...  but somehow he looked uplifted.  

     And after his team won a game there was a strange foreboding or brooding look on his face as he trotted off the field.  And I thought that was interesting because most coaches celebrate wins and when they lose they look angry and upset. But he was the opposite, in a very subtle way.  

    So I asked him about it one time and he said, "I see what you mean and I'll tell you why that is.  When we lose I'm really excited about all the alterations we can make and everything we can learn from our film of the game.  I'm ready to go.  I'm ready to really fix this team and shore it up and make it strong for next week based on what we see on the film---all the things we can do differently.  But when we win we get a kind of feeling of being invincible, there's nothing really left to correct, we only need to show up next week.  And I don't like that.  I get upset with that attitude, so I'm worried when we win about how to keep the intensity and how to keep people focused. So that's what you are seeing in my face after each game."

      Whenever clients of mine or I have had some breakthroughs in building wealth,  or when our own careers start to make more money, it often accompanies a new approach to failure and to things we did "wrong" and things that didn't work.  

     Most people try to forget what doesn't work because they have a bad emotional reaction to it. They think "That's too bad and it's sad and I wish I hadn't lost that deal or I wish I hadn't lost that customer," but if I can change that to "Boy, this is terrific, I've got a lot to learn here, there's game film to watch, I'm not afraid to watch it because this customer I lost last week who I wanted to enroll is going to show up again in another identity soon and if I haven't learned how I lost the customer this time, it's going to happen again and again."

     And it's really true that most people who are not doing well financially have patterns of things that keep happening again and again that cause them to not build their businesses.  Part of that is because of their willful lowering of consciousness when bad things occur---like, "I don't want to think about the bad news, I want to move on, I need to stay positive, I don't even want to look at it."

     It was interesting to me that one time Bill Gates of Microsoft said, "We built our company on customer complaints."  Because when the customers would complain about any part of his computer system (or software systems) they would really be fascinated by the complaint and they would stay with it and they would have teams studying the complaint so they could change things and that complaint wouldn't show up again.  

     Whereas most people in business operations try to sweep complaints under the rug or minimize them and try to get rid of them quickly.  Like "Here's somebody who is upset."  "OK, I'll talk to him".   "No, you talk to him!"  "Yeah, he's OK now, I talked to him and he's happy now." 

      They see complaints as an emotional issue.  Somebody's emotionally upset, I want to make him feel better and hopefully it will go away and I don't have to think about it.  

     But there is real gold there.  

     There's a tremendous learning inside of the complaint if I slow down and I can study it like game film.

     Part of creating prosperity is to lose the evaluation of events as negative and positive and see them instead as material ... the way a comic sees things in his life as new material-----something to build on, something to use for a more prosperous future.

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 We just started my inner circle---The Wealth Warrior Movement---so that people who are interested in these subjects can get a wide variety of reading and audio material to help them build wealth and prosperity... you can check it out here: http://www.stevechandler.com/wealth_warrior_movement.html 

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[Andi-Roo]

Being wrong sucks. But not learning from mistakes sucks even more. Tough lesson, but I'm finally starting to pick it up.