Learning Lessons & Lessons Learned

Back in May, I published a how-to article about running your first marathon. I thought it was a great fit for the site.

I was sure it would end up one of my pieces of “pillar content.” It was long and comprehensive, but broken up well so that it could be read easily.

Side note: If you’re a writer, that’s a really important tactic to use. Some people will want to read every word of your article, but most will just want to skim it. Make sure you cater to both audiences.

I thought the article had a good message that mixed my philosophy on why I run marathons with practical tips on how to do it. If you can’t tell, I was pretty happy with how the piece turned out.

Newsflash: What I think doesn’t really matter.

If I were writing for myself as a reflective exercise, that would be fine, but I’m not. I’m writing for you. And you took one look at that article and said, “no thanks.”

When I published it, there was dead silence. No comments, no emails, no tweets.

Well, I did eventually get one comment. It was from my grandma, though, so I’m not sure if it counts.

Either way, I was positive it was going to be a hit. Instead, it fell flat on it’s face.

I’m sure if you think hard enough, you can remember a similar situation of your own.

There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we learn more from our successes than our failures, so don’t be surprised if you have to really give it some thought to come up with an example. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think it’s pretty important not to gloss over it.

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Here’s another interesting phenomenon:

People tend to attribute success to their own hard work and aptitude and attribute failure to external sources they couldn’t control. This is where great danger lies.

In order to really learn valuable lessons, you have to take complete responsibility for both your successes and your failures.

Truth is, you really are responsible for both even when it feels like there was nothing you could do. Your actions and decisions leading up to success or failure directly contribute to the likelihood of good or bad things happening to you. When you take that perspective, it becomes a lot easier to learn valuable lessons about how to keep succeeding or, just as importantly, quit failing.

I could say that my marathon article flopped because my audience wasn’t very big yet, but that’s just an excuse. Obviously it was big enough to get multiple comments on other articles, so there was definitely something off about that particular one.

When I look at it like that, it opens up more opportunities to explore exactly what went wrong and, more importantly, fix it:

Maybe you guys just aren’t interested in learning about marathons.
Maybe it was too long.
Maybe the title scared people away before opening it to see what it was really all about.

I don’t know for sure and I’m not beating myself up, but now I have possibilities to explore and test rather than just guess and hope it works the next time.

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One more really important piece of the puzzle to learning lessons is that it shouldn’t just be reserved for the greatest successes or the biggest failures. Those are just too infrequent.

Far more useful are the completely average ones that you experience every day and forget about just minutes later. Those are the ones that hold the most power and potential to learn from.

What made you late to that important meeting?
Why did everyone laugh at that joke?
What caused that little argument?
How did I manage to strike that deal??

On the surface, they seem insignificant, but they’re not. They happen so often that improving and repeating them are what will really make the biggest difference. They also happen to be the easiest to dissect.

The only reason we don’t pay much attention to them is because we forget about them so quickly after they happen. They’re not big and sexy or spectacular and memorable. But they’re your bread and butter, so don’t forget that!

Focus on improving the average. When you do, the outliers will naturally come with it.

What about you? Have you learned any lessons recently?

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Reminder: My first better than free guide, Take This Job & Shove It launched to great fanfare on Tuesday (I think it got retweeted on Twitter almost 100 times already). If you haven’t checked it out yet, make sure you do today.

Image by: jrodmanjr