It was 1993. The Motorola DPC-550 flip phone was the hot seller. The “King of Smartphones", Steve Jobs, wasn't even working for Apple because he was forced out of the company in 1985. I was just starting my career in wireless and was working for Alltel as a Sales & Customer Service Representative in Burlington, NC.
In those days, cellphones were used for talking...period. If you wanted to electronically store your contacts in a functional way, you would purchase a electronic organizer. That's exactly what my boss did. One day, I needed the address of one of our customers. I couldn't find it anywhere, but I knew my boss had it in his organizer that he had conveniently left on his desk. I'd never used one before, but how hard could it be? I typed the customer's name, but entered it incorrectly. So, I had to delete it and type it again. "Are you sure you want to delete?", it asked. Answering "yes" turned into one of the biggest mistakes of my early career.
Immediately, it started quickly counting backward from six hundred and something...and I couldn't stop it. I had erased every contact stored on the device. Looking around, I noticed I was the only one in the back office. I could just walk away and no one would ever know. But, in that moment, I made a brave decision. I found my boss and humbly told him exactly what I had done.
Mistakes are going to happen. No matter how hard you try, they are going to be a part of your story. The only thing you may be able to control is the magnitude and the fallout. These are three things I've learned in my life about choosing to let my mistakes refine me rather than define me:
Big successes require big risks. The most successful people on the planet have large failures on their resume. The beach in Kitty Hawk was literally littered with the failures of Orville and Wilbur Wright. If you want to succeed, you can't be afraid to make a mistake. You have to be willing to fail and perhaps fail BIG. There was only one person who lived a perfect life and we have no chance of tying his record of success on this side of eternity.
If you're going to fail, fail fast. This is a mantra I'm borrowing from one of my mentors. The key idea is you need to be "all in" on your bold ideas. If you procrastinate or make overly calculated steps forward, you'll end up in the same place, but will have wasted a lot more time and resources getting there. If your idea is going to fail, get on with it! You won't know until you put it out there. Chase it with passion and purpose. If it flops, you'll have more time to adjust and move forward.
How you handle failure reveals your character. Sometimes, our mistakes are going to be the result of poor judgement, bad execution, or foolhardiness. This certainly was the case for me that day in 1993. These are the mistakes that are the most embarrassing and can show the world a side of us that we're not very proud of. However, owning these mistakes and having the guts to admit them also shows the world the depth of our character. I want my kids to know when they read this that I was always more interested in how they responded to their mistakes than I was in their quantity or severity.
In that small sales office so many years ago, I learned a lesson that has served me very well all these years. It's important to note that I might not have cleaved so strongly to it if it had not been for the way my manager responded to my courage and honesty. Sensing my sincerity and remorse, he was incredibly forgiving and never brought the incident up again to guilt or shame me. If you're a parent or leader, always be aware of the power and impact your response to failure will have. Either way, it could be a defining moment in that person's life and solidify how they respond to failure moving forward.