I’m no blackbelt… 

You know me, I’m a footie fan through and through. You’re much more likely to find me at a premier league football ground anywhere in the UK on a Saturday afternoon, watching the Villa, than in the ring. But my good friend, let’s call her Louise, her 14-year-old son is big into Taekwondo. A couple of weeks ago, he took part in his first national competition. Over 400 kids from all over the country showed up to fight for a medal. 

Now, like most martial arts, Taekwondo competitions are segmented into different weight categories and by belt. So the taller, higher belts fight each other to make it a fair fight. The problem was, this was quite a small competition. You might think 400 people sounds like a lot, but by the time you’ve separated them out into boys and girls, height categories and belts… you end up with just a few per category. So they combined some classes. Instead of blue belts against blue belts, and black belts against black belts, they had mixed belt categories. 

Louise’s son, Jack, is a good fighter, but he’s only a blue belt and it’s his first competition. First-round sparring, he’s up against a black stripe. I’d love to tell you this is a tale of the underdog winning, but it’s not. Jack fought well and did his best, but the black stripe had 4 years and 3 belts more experience behind him. Jack lost, and the black stripe went on to obliterate everyone in the competition and win the gold medal. 

Now, Jack’s only 14. He’s just a lad. He could have got angry about it and whinged and whined about how unfair it was that he was up against a black belt in his first match. But he didn’t. Instead, he stayed and watched the other matches. He evaluated what he did in that match, how the black belt fought, how he could have done it better, what he learned from his opponent and made a plan for what he would do next time he’s up against a similar fighter. 

I think Jack is wise beyond his years. You see, how many of us, even as adults, take a loss on the chin like that, keep clear-headed and just evaluate what we learned? When you lose out on a proposal, when a potential client chooses someone else, or when a customer leaves you, can you honestly say you objectively, thoroughly and open-mindedly evaluate your actions and performance looking for ways you can improve? Or do you make up excuses? Whinge a little bit and feel sorry for yourself? I think we’re probably all guilty of this sometimes. 

But our boy Jack’s got this sorted. I have no doubt that within a short space of time he will be bringing home that medal. Why? Because when you approach a loss like he did, you’re always going to win eventually, it just becomes a matter of time. And it’s no different in business. If you constantly evaluate and adjust at every failure, you’ll soon have no choice but to succeed.  

So how about you? Do you have any inspiring stories of failure? I’d love to hear them…