Business Inertia

Yesterday morning I read the following paragraph from a John Maxwell book and it’s been on my mind:

Every successful person is someone who failed, yet never regarded himself as a failure.  For example, Wolfgang Mozart, one of the geniuses of musical composition, was told by Emperor Ferdinand that his opera The Marriage of Figaro was “far too noisy” and “contained far too many notes.”  Artist Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings now set records for the sums they bring at auction, sold only one painting in his lifetime.  Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor in history, was considered unteachable as a youngster.  And Albert Einstein, the greatest thinker of our time, was told by a Munich schoolmaster that he would “never amount to much.

As we have received more recognition and exposure for our work, I’m frequently asked about our rapid growth.  More specifically, “What is it about Rockfish that has allowed you to grow so quickly?”

There are actually a few fairly common sense components to my answer, but one that never occurred to me until yesterday morning is that we are not afraid to fail.  Because of our quick growth, we don’t have time to sit around dwelling on what we should do or how we should do it.  We just make the best decision we can with the information we have and move forward.  Do we mess up?  Sure we do.  But because we have a continual forward momentum we are able to quickly recover and move on – better because of it and never sorry we didn’t at least try.  I guess you could refer to it as business inertia.

If you’ve spent much time in biographies or learning company histories, one thing you will find is that significant people and great companies are filled with numerous stories of mistakes and failures.  If that’s true, then I like our odds!