Choose Falling over Failure

First of all, I don't like the term failure. I like the term falling. I think you need. We fail fast. Well, the problem with the word fail is it's like the word cancer, right? If you have stage four lung cancer or stage four liver cancer and you have a mild melanoma with a 99.999% chance of, you'll be fine, both of those things are called cancer. And the problem is they're not the same thing. And failure is the same, which is, failure could be absolutely catastrophic or it could be a minor hiccup. But the problem is we call it failure. So I think we need to use different terms, right? Failure, I believe, is something we want to avoid, but falling is something that happens naturally, and we want to fall and get. Get up more often. That's what I think is fall. Fall fast and get yourself back up as opposed to lying on the ground and complaining, right? So I. I want to embrace falling because that's. That's taking risks. That's trying. You only fall when you push the boundaries, right? But the language matters because it changes our mindset, especially because it's too broad a definition for failure. So one of the ways we embrace falling is by when somebody does fall, we don't say, what have you done? We go, okay, try again as leaders, right? Or, how can I help you fix it? And we're just a little more relaxed about it, and we don't swoop in and do it for them, right? But rather we go, so in other words, we're encouraging risk taking. We're encouraging people to try recognizing that they won't lose their jobs. That, especially if you're more junior, you really couldn't do anything that brings down the firm anyway. And we have to give people the opportunity to fall and let them either learn to fix their own problems or guide them so that they can. Every single one of us has screwed up a bazillion times, and the only reason we are where we are today is. Is because somebody said, all right, all right, you're an idiot, but try again. You know, like, that's where I know who did it for me. Peter Intimaggio, my old boss. Years and years and years ago, the guy would never answer any of my questions. Peter, what should I do? What do you think we should do? I'm like, ugh, if I knew, I wouldn't be asking, well, what do you think? I think we should do this, then do that. The guy never answered the question. And if I screwed up, he goes, whew. Whew. What are you going to do? You know? But I never felt fear that I would get fired, ever. I never felt afraid that my job was on the line when I screwed up. We have to do that for people.