Sekisui House

Posts Tagged ‘Succeed’

The concept of failure is one that has many faces. When we are children, we have no concept of failure and it is taught to us. Despite the best intentions of our parents, we still explore, break things, find (and exceed) limits and get in trouble. We don’t really like getting in trouble so we learn that making mistakes is not so good and that failure is bad. We get report cards with “pass-fail” or grades from A which is great (or barely acceptable in some houses) to F, for failure.

As young adults we begin to develop a fear of failure. Because it is not totally developed, young adults will take more risks, on average, than older adults. We send young people to war, knowing that they feel invincible and they think, “It won’t happen to me. ” People start businesses, get married, assume mortgages and get more and more responsibility.

I have been a strength coach among other things and I distinctly remember working with a lovely woman who was a great athlete, but did not like the word “failure. ” Her experiences have stayed with me and in part are the basis of this article. The context of our discussions in the weight room centered around the need to work a muscle group to “failure” in order to have a good workout. Fail, Recover, Get Stronger.

This woman was great at working out but was marvelously stubborn in language. I could not push her to fail. She learned to work out hard enough to get much stronger but never would allow me to mention the word failure, even though that is exactly what her muscles were doing.

I grew up in Amarillo, Texas and Boone Pickens was a family friend. I always marveled at Boone’s tenacity. Some years he was up and some years he was down. He started over many times, succeeding or failing in his businesses, but never acknowledging failure as a person. When bad things happened, he got back up, brushed himself off and dug back in. Boone was my real world example of how one succeeds by failing, learning and trying again.

Fast forward to today. KGS Bikes has clients that typically are over 40, quite successful in life and experienced enough in failure to know better! No wonder cycling as a lifestyle is so difficult to achieve if it has not been done in a long time, to a significant degree, or ever. It is a small, yet large mindset shift to become more “child like” and embrace new ideas, processes and habits which have a profound effect on one’s lifestyle but come with a cost.

The reason I have a job is, I have developed a plan which helps people learn as adults an activity which is not easy to learn, but as a child was very easy. The first step is to accept the fact that for progress to occur, failure is inevitable but that is part of the process. Fortunately, there is “good” failure and there is “bad” failure, so we can eliminate the unnecessary failures (the bad ones) and only focus on the failures that produce positive change.

A fundamental concept here is the fact that this kind of failure is not really failing! When one exceeds a boundary, personal limit, whatever, they move out of their comfort zone. The marvelous fact of human nature is, when recovery is allowed to happen, the comfort zone is expanded upon revisiting the activity that pushed us out of the comfort zone.

Here are tangible examples. Weight training is very important for adults to maintain bone density and to minimize the loss of muscle mass as we age. The whole concept of strength training is to stress a muscle (work towards “failure”) and then recover. The recovery process allows the muscle to adapt by becoming stronger. The technical term is called hypercompensation. Over time, these muscle fibers get stronger and stronger as well as joints, ligaments and bone. We get stronger.

In cycling, we have many different things to learn. This is why I liken cycling as an adult on the road to snow skiing. We think that riding a bicycle is like what we did as kids, but it is not. For example, I had a Schwinn StingRay bike when in Junior High School. I can distinctly remember my first five mile ride, and my first fifteen mile ride. It was a long way for a kid on a kid’s bike. Now I don’t think twice about a Century ride. Much learning and conditioning had to happen to achieve this shift of perspective.

To compound things, I wrote recently about “Starting Over. ” Back in my full time bicycle racing days, I didn’t have a car and rode over 700 miles per week in Dallas. I could actually beat an automobile across town, due to the topography of Dallas and the timing of lights on roads like Northwest Highway. I learned to draft buses and took great pride in being able to stay with people in cars. As a side note, it was very disconcerting for those auto drivers to see me again and again at traffic lights after they did something rude to me.

After I quit racing I became exactly what many of my clients are escaping; a sedentary fat person. I distinctly remember the first time on the bike when I had ballooned to 275 lbs. I rode five miles and it seemed like an eternity! What goes around comes around.

Over time, I re-learned what it was like to do a real workout on the bike. I re-learned how to integrate with traffic, how to corner without fear, how to ride smoothly with others and all the while losing weight and getting stronger and faster.

Did I fail? Yes, of course. Did I have setbacks? Absolutely. Did I regain control of my life? Undoubtedly. I succeeded in regaining my youth and now at the tender age of 52 I feel like a kid again, who obviously needs “Just for Men”! Not.

I succeeded through many little failures, and as a result did not fail to succeed but followed the pathway of success that all our bodies and minds are able to do when placed on that pathway. The marvelous thing about us as humans is this concept of hypercompensation. We fail. We recover. We succeed.

My goal in life is to help you succeed. I really believe in the bicycle as a success tool, not an expensive toy. I know that you, like I, have in you the stuff of champions and am honored to be part of your journey. I will be there with you in the good times and bad.

This knowledge of the success through failures makes me much stronger when seeing the bad news that permeates the media. Yes, things are tough. The thing the news media doesn’t say, is that “Life is tough,” but the beauty of life is, we get tougher by challenging ourselves. I challenge you to audit your life and your situation. Consider whether you are playing it safe or getting out and improving yourself, one little failure at a time.

In closing, I have to quote a dear professor from Westminster College who said, “Life by the yard is hard, by the inch is a cinch. ”