By Allen Haynes • December 16, 2024 Listen to the podcast. Andy Stanley (00:05): Hey everybody. Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go further faster. I’m Andy Stanley and I have been looking forward to this month’s podcast for a long time because today for the first time, John Maxwell is joining us to talk about a topic we have never discussed before. In fact, I think John’s probably the only person I would ever invite to even talk about this topic. John is here to talk about how to get a return on failure. And the reason John is talking about this, I was with John and Odessa earlier this year, and I heard him give a talk on this topic, and you know how it is you’re listening to, you’re listening at, you’re taking notes, and I thought, you know what? I just need to have John come redo all of this on our podcast. So I invited him to do that and he graciously agreed. So John, welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership podcast. John Maxwell (00:54): Thanks, Stanley. Good to be with you and all of your listeners. And I am one of your listeners. Also, Andy, I can tell you, you have taught me so much over the years and I learned so much from you. And so thanks for what you do for so many of us. And I’m one of your listeners today. I get to be on the show. Andy Stanley (01:11): Well, that is intimidating. Fact, just so our listeners know, years ago, John and Margaret lived in Atlanta and they attended our church. For those of you who are communicators or pastors, I was usually five, seven minutes into my message and there’s John, and I’m preaching and thinking at the same time, oh, am I quoting him? Am I stealing something? And suddenly it was just hard not to see John Maxwell as the filter for the entire message, but he was always so gracious and he and Margaret always so complimentary. Now, you don’t need to know this, but I just feel like I need to say it in case you didn’t know. John Maxwell is a number one New York Times bestselling author, has been for years. He’s a leadership coach. Speakers traveled all over the world. He sold more than 30 million books. He’s been called the number one leader in business by the A MA and the world’s most influential leadership expert by Inc. (02:07): Which is absolutely true through the John Maxwell Company, the John Maxwell team equip his nonprofit and the John Maxwell Leadership Foundation. He has trained literally millions of leaders in every nation in the world, and he has in fact, for sure, trained me. So again, John is a dear friend, and I’m just so grateful that he took the time to be in the studio with us today. So John, let’s just jump in and I’ll set up the topic this way. Maybe this is more personal revelation than it should be, but nobody wants to fail. I certainly don’t, honestly, I don’t even like to talk about failing, but you actually suggest that in the talk I heard you give that anticipating failure and reaping a positive return from failure is actually a leadership skill. In fact, you call this a critical leadership skill, leveraging from failure and learning to just leverage it at all. I’d never thought about this. I’d never heard anybody talk about this, but five minutes in you had me. I thought this is absolutely true and this is something I need to think about. So just jump in. What does it mean to reap a positive return from failure? John Maxwell (03:17): Well, first of all, to be able to talk about this subject, you have to have some failure under your belt. Let’s just begin right there. Okay. When I was a young leader, I feared failure. In fact, when I was a young leader, Andy, what I thought was that if I failed, people would look at me and say, well, he’s a lousy leader. I mean, after all, he’s trying to take us somewhere and he can’t even do it. So I looked at failure in a very negative way. And so what I caught myself doing as a young leader is I caught myself not attempting things I should attempt to do (03:54): Because I feared failure. And so I sat down. You knew Robert Schuller. He befriended me when I was about 30 years old. And so we spent some time together and one time at dinner he said, John, what would you attempt to do if failure was not possible? And when he asked me that question, I said, oh my gosh, there’s a lot of things I’d attempt to do if failure is not possible. And that question really helped me get I take more risk and attempts, but it really wasn’t a great question because failure is always possible. It’s a question, what would you do if failure wasn’t possible? Here we go. Oops. Oops. I found it again. I found it again. So it was kind of a setup question. And so I changed it after about a year because it just didn’t quite work for me. It encouraged me to start something, but it didn’t encourage me when failure happened. And so I turned it around and said, what would you attempt to do if you knew you would fail, but in failing, there would be a positive return from it. Andy Stanley (04:59): So let me say that again. So the question was what would you attempt if you knew that failure could give you a positive, what would say the question again? What would you do? John Maxwell (05:09): Yeah, what would you attempt to do if you knew failure was possible? In fact, I’m going to say failure is always possible, and usually it’s probable. But what would you attempt to do if you knew failure was possible? Probable, but you knew that failure could give you a positive return. So now all of a sudden, you’re not trying to avoid failure, but you are realizing that there’s a positive return from failure if you have the right attitude perspective, and the right type of thinking. Does that make sense? Andy Stanley (05:36): Yep. And so when you were talking about this to me, this was where the light started coming on, light bulbs started coming on. You talked about keeping failure and success together. And this is not intuitive because my failures, I might use them as illustration someday, but not soon because I need some distance. I need to put a little more success in the bag before I can talk about failure. But you talked about keeping these things close together and leveraging them. Talk a little bit about why that’s important. I thought that was so helpful. John Maxwell (06:07): Well, I’m so glad you asked the question because I think what we have done is we have separated them. We say, succeed, don’t fail. And we put failure and success as far apart as we possibly can. And one day it hit me, it just intuitively hit me that success and failure should be together. And when they are understood correctly, they bring value to each other. Now, how I came to the conclusion the success and failure are travel together is because I do learning lunches with people and I ask them seven questions. One of the questions I ask is the question, what’s the greatest lesson you ever learned? And I’ve asked that question to hundreds of times to hundreds of different people. And Andy, every time when I ask, what’s the greatest lesson you ever learned? Every time they talk about a very difficult time in their life, every time, it’s not like sometimes it’s in there, but they’ll talk about if it’s a business person, they’ll say, I went bankrupt and I realized that I had to develop different business principles. I’ve talked to people, I lost a loved one, or my marriage started falling apart. And what I realized was that these failures were catalytic for bringing people to an awareness and to an action that really began to make ’em a better person until all of a sudden it was the most important lesson they ever learned in their life. So when I listened to successful people, they never separated failure and success. (07:33): They never talked to me, said really most important lesson I ever learned, the life is if you do these seven principles, you never fail. I never heard that. I always heard the fact that they had success and failure, and they talked about it very evenly, very evenly like, failure is not the worst thing that ever happened to me. And success isn’t the greatest thing that ever happened to me. And so now let me talk to you about the balance that comes when you bring success and failure together, because this I think is huge. We all have our momentum moments. When we get on a success role, we make three or four decisions and things are turning to gold. So what happens is when that occurs in my life, there’s a tendency for me to think, oh my gosh, I’m getting pretty good here. I’m getting amazing. (08:15): So I’m over here kind of on this success road, kind of like, wow, if you could see me now, you need to keep failure besides success. And the reason why you do is because failure, if it’s by success, keeps success humble. There’s an awareness and a humility even in great success if you keep failure close to you, to remind you and to keep you and me aware that it’s not always going to be this way and that it’s going to reign. It’s just a matter of time. So if I keep failure with my success when I’m on a success role, it teaches me humility. And humility is what makes me teachable. And as well as I do, Andy, you show me a person that doesn’t have humility. I tell you to show you a person that’s not teachable and they have arrogance and they’re going to do their own thing and they’re going to have their own faults. So when I’m succeeding, I need to keep failure close because it gives me that teachability and that humble spirit. Andy Stanley (09:09): So when you say that a minute ago, when you ask people what their greatest lessons and they immediately went to something hard or a failure, everybody listening, including me, we immediately went there. And I just want to make sure we don’t go by this too quickly. I learned virtually nothing from my successes, John Maxwell (09:29): Absolutely, Andy Stanley (09:30): Virtually nothing. I mean, we should do an autopsy on our success because we typically do autopsies on our failures. I don’t want to do that again. We typically don’t do autopsies on our success. And so we naturally don’t learn much from success. And so the power of keeping the failures close to the successes is so important because apparently that’s the only place we learn anything. So anyway, I keep going, but that’s such a big deal. John Maxwell (09:55): It’s huge, and you’re so right on. And I remember one time talking to a very successful college coach, and he said something that was interesting to me. He said, I study our winning films as much as I study our losing films, because he said, in every win there’s a weakness and we’ve got to find out what it’s, and I thought, because our tendency is the study, the losses, oh my gosh, I got that changes. But we need to keep success with our failure so that when we are in the ditch and we are on a roll, we’re getting rolled over instead of being on a roll, we need to keep our successes close to our failures because it gives us resiliency and tenacity. It keeps me in the game when I don’t want to be in the game anymore. So if I separate ’em, neither one brings value to the other, (10:41): But if I put it together, now I have a balance. And Andy, I was doing a q and A recently, and somebody asked me, said, well, have you failed lately? And I started laughing. I said, well, I failed in the last month. And they looked at me and they said, well, tell me about your failure. And I got a little embarrassed because I couldn’t pull it out. And I really, very seldom, I felt very, I just told ’em, I am sure I’ve failed in the last month because I have mean failure’s quite common in my life, but I couldn’t pull it out. And then it hit me if they would ask me about success, I could have told ’em that I succeeded in the last month too, but I couldn’t pull it out either. (11:21): This is what I don’t want our listeners to miss. When you put ’em together, your successes aren’t so great, and your failures aren’t so bad, they balance one another out. You separate. Oh, then you remember your success. Oh my. Or that failure, oh my gosh, I got to get away from that, I suppose. So when I separate ’em, I exaggerate and maximize the effect that they have on them. And neither of the effect of success or failure should have a big place in our life because success makes you arrogant and failure makes you, and they overexaggerate their value, both positive and negative, but you put ’em together and you get a balance, and all of a sudden there’s a meaning and purpose for both, and you appreciate both of them, and you don’t have to explain either one of them away because they fit together, if that makes sense. Andy Stanley (12:13): When during this same talk I heard you give, you talked about the difference between a good miss and a bad miss. Do you remember that the good misses and the bad misses, and this flows from this conversation? Talk a little bit about that, because again, I think this helped clarify some of this as well. John Maxwell (12:29): I think, well, first of all, failure is a miss. Okay, so let’s start there. But there’s a difference between a good miss and a bad miss. And so when I fail, the first thing I have to ask myself is, okay, was that a good miss? Because good misses are good, good misses. A lot of times they get us closer to where we need to go. So for example, a good miss moves me forward, and a bad miss moves me backward. I embrace good misses. And what I try to do in my failures, let me just say it this way, in my failures, 80% of my failures are good misses anymore in my life because I’m very intentional and I understand good misses and bad misses, where I think if you don’t understand a good miss and bad misses, you’re going to have a lot higher percentage of bad misses. So a good miss moves me forward. I didn’t get that. I didn’t get it, but I learned from it (13:20): And I got closer to it. A good Miss Andy is where I make adjustments. And what we really do is we adjust our way to success anyway. We all do. It is not like we laid out a perfect plan and it was perfect, and we got a perfect ending out of it. That never happened to anybody. We lay out a plan that’s not perfect, and we find that out in a few days when things don’t go like we think. And so what do we do? We adjust our way to victory. So a good miss is where I make adjustments and a bad Miss Andy is where I make excuses. See, because if I start making excuses, now all of a sudden I’m not getting closer to where I need to go. I’m allowing acceptance of going farther away from it by excuse. You can go from failure to success, but you can’t go from excuses to success. Nobody has ever gone from excuses to success. It’s a bad Miss Andy. Andy Stanley (14:14): So we can fail our way to success, but we can’t excuse our way to success. Yeah. (14:22): So a good miss is a miss. That’s was a potentially a necessary step to figure out how to move forward. Years ago, this is what comes to mind. Years ago, our very first capital campaign, I came up with it all by myself, even though I should have called you, you had done a company that did this, but I thought, oh, I don’t need a company. I can do this. So I came up with this capital campaign. This is a good miss story, but it was a swing and a miss and a swing and a miss. Anyway, so we launched this capital campaign. It is not going anywhere. And this woman who I love so much, and I have so much respect for her, she came up to me after a service. She was on our stewardship team, and she knew it ain’t working. And she said to me, she got a little all spiritual up, and she said, well, Andy, what do you think God’s trying to tell you? (15:07): And her name was Marcia. I said, Marcia, God’s trying to tell me that I had a really bad idea, but we’re still going to figure out how to raise this money. Because she was about to say, since the plan didn’t work, maybe we shouldn’t be trying to raise this money. I’m like, oh, no, no, no. It’s just a bad plan. It’s a good miss. And then we went from there and figured out what to do. But again, I could have said, oh, since that didn’t work, maybe we shouldn’t try to do this at all. So it was painful and it was embarrassing, but it was a good miss. John Maxwell (15:40): It’s a great illustration in that. And it was a good miss exactly, because you made adjustments. But if you would’ve made excuses and said, you’re right, Marshall, oh my gosh, we need to ditch this thing. That’s a bad miss. You never go down to where you were trying to get to. Andy Stanley (15:54): Yep. I heard you talk about this in several contexts. You talk about everything worthwhile is uphill. John Maxwell (16:01): Yes. Andy Stanley (16:02): And again, anytime we’re moving uphill, there’s going to be challenges and potential for failure. John Maxwell (16:09): Scott Peck wrote The Road Less Travel, which is a classic book, and his opening paragraph is very simple. He says, life is difficult. (16:18): And then he said, what’s interesting is if you embrace the statement and the truth that life is difficult, it no longer becomes difficult, but if you don’t embrace it, it always is difficult. In other words, if I go into every day realizing that it’s uphill, it’s uphill. And I mean, think about it. You’ve built a great work, you’ve built a great church, but it was uphill all the way. You didn’t accidentally get there. You hit some, you missed some. You and Sandra, mark and I have been married for 53 years. Good Lord, you’ve been married a long time. It’s uphill. It’s uphill that if that relationship’s going to work, you got to work at it. You don’t coach your way to success. That’s why when I say anticipate failure, people, I had a person at least say, well, that’s kind of negative. And I said, no, it’s kind of realistic. Hey, can I tell you something? If you’re positive, anticipate failure. If you’re negative, anticipate failure. Because guess what? You’re going to have failure. I mean, failure is not like an option where I push a button and it doesn’t come into my life. Failure is life. And so therefore, the moment that I understand it now by anticipating it when it comes, I’m not blindsided. I watch people all the time to get blindsided by failure, and they just, what do you do? You freeze. You automatically just stop everything. (17:44): So I anticipate failure, and here’s the way it works. The more challenging the project, the more failures you’re going to have and the bigger failures you’re going to have. It’s just the way it works. So because I anticipate it when it comes, it’s not like I sideline myself and said, well, that didn’t work. I have to maybe do something else. No, I adjust my way. So I’ve always said to myself, there’s always an answer. So when people come around me and tell me there’s not an answer, I smile. And for them there’s no answer, but there’s always an answer. There’s always a better answer. Whatever answer I have, there’s a better answer. So if I’m doing well, I’m not satisfied with just doing well because I think there’s probably a better way for me to do it. And then I will always believe in my mission and my cost that keeps me going uphill. If I don’t believe that there’s a time when I just say, I’m tired. I’m tired of the hill, and I stop. And that’s never good. Andy Stanley (18:43): So practically speaking, you gave us some specific steps. I think the phrase you used was that progress always requires a process, and I think that was you. And so what, for the person who’s listening, and again, they’ve distanced themselves from some failures, they’ve had some good misses, some bad misses. They didn’t have that language at the time, but looking back, they realized, oh yeah, that was a necessary good miss, what practically can we do? Or what’s kind of the framework that we should embrace mentally going forward to keep this in mind because it’s so emotional and it’s so difficult. John Maxwell (19:17): Well, again, when you intentionally develop a process, it becomes less emotional because you embrace what has to be in that cycle. I call it the cycle of success, and I just find it really works for me. And if I’m trying to build something, develop something, and the cycle has four places that you stop and work the cycle. The first stage of the cycles of success is testing. Just trying something you’ve never tried before. And obviously by the way, people that are highly successful, they don’t want to test very much because they want to hold on to what they have. It’s kind, I found this formula, I found this way. I don’t want to lose it. So we do a lot of testing. If you do a lot of testing, it brings you to the second stage, which is failure testing is accompanied with failure because you have not been there. I have a teaching that’s entitled, you’re Never Good the first time. And it’s so true. I love people. They say, well, I’ve never done this before. So I really want to work at it and be good at it. And I just smile. I say, relax, you’re not going to be that good, so go ahead and try it. (20:27): You’re not good the first time because it’s the first time. So we test, since we have a lot of first times, we have a lot of failures. Well, the third step in that cycle is learning because the fruit of failure is not what happened to you emotionally. Fruit of failure. When people talk to me about a failure when they’re done, I only have one question as, what did you learn? What did you learn? If you learn something, you’re going to get a return on your failure. Most people want to leave the scene, but get away. Oh my gosh, I didn’t do that, or whatever. (21:02): And if you leave the scene, you don’t grow from it. So we test, we fail, we learn just like the fruit of failure is learning, the fruit of learning is improvement. What did I change? How did I become better because of this? Now that I learned something, turn that learning into improvement and action and positive change. The last stage is reenter. Then you reenter. But when we reenter, we reenter to do the cycle all over again. We’re going to test more. We’re going to fail more. We’re going to learn more. We’re going to improve more, and we’re going to reenter. But the time to reenter is when you’ve improved because now you’re in a different level and being at that different level allows you to do things you couldn’t do at the previous level. It’s almost like an upward cycle that I just keep going higher through a process, through a process. And when I reenter, I don’t reenter now to, well, now that I’ve got it, I’m not going to do any more testing. No, because again, it’s the testing that brings the failure, that brings the learning, that brings the improvement. Andy Stanley (22:04): So it’s almost this. In fact, it is the scientific method. John Maxwell (22:08): Yeah. Andy Stanley (22:08): Yeah. So test, fail, learn, improve, reenter, test, fail, learn, improve, reenter. So having said that, John, here’s what I would love for you to do, is we kind of get toward the end. Younger leaders, we read biographies or we read the articles about super successful people. We are rarely aware of their failure. So the assumption is everything they touch turned to gold. This process that you just described, the test, fail, learn, improve, reenter. We never see that (22:37): In the early years of famous people because they’re not famous yet. And by the time whatever they’ve done that made them famous is well-known. We just get that highlight reel. So just talk about that a little bit because again, we live in a day and age. If you’re 25 and you haven’t made it, hey, you probably not. I mean, there’s so much pressure to do so much early that the whole idea of testing and failing, that just seems like that’s for other people. I don’t have time for that. And I think it’s why I’m oftentimes so encouraged by hearing other people’s failure stories. I don’t know if that just says something about my insecurity. It just makes me feel better because generally we don’t hear those stories because that part gets left out. So I guess the question is how do we encourage others or how could you encourage us with your failures? How do we encourage others with our failures? Because I think they need to hear that. I think younger leaders need to hear those stories. John Maxwell (23:33): And the biggest disservice a leader, I think gives the team is not talking about failure. If you could pull out the genie and get one wish, I wish people could see me not at 75. I wish they could see me at 25, because if they could have seen me at 25, Andy Stanley (23:49): They’d be so encouraged, wouldn’t they? That’s right. They would be so encouraged. John Maxwell (23:57): I’m reachable at 25. I’m not at 75 because the success gap has gotten too big. (24:07): So how do I serve people that are 25? I serve them by talking very openly about my losses, my misses, my failures. And again, I’ve always said, if you want to impact people, you really got to talk to them about your losses. And so here’s what I don’t want your listeners to miss. And again, Andy, you do such a good job with your podcast, and I’m a faithful listener, and I hope that all of your listeners just go tell their friends about it because you always bring such good wisdom and thoughts. Here’s what I don’t want us to miss, though. Today, this didn’t come from me. This came from a conversation I had with a very successful CEO who was so open in talking about he built this multi, multi, multi-billion dollar company. But he was so open about how the things he did wrong and how it wasn’t quick and it wasn’t easy. (24:58): And I loved his vulnerability in this. It was just open. So when it was over, I asked him a question. I said, okay. I said, all the things that you told me that you kind of messed up. Which one would you like to go back and do over? Just go talk about if you could go back and do have a do over which one would it be? And his answer was just one of the best things I’ve ever received from anybody. He surprised me. He said, well, he said, if I could go back and do any of them over in my failures mistakes, he said, I’ve decided I wouldn’t do any of them over. (25:32): And I remember saying to him, you’re kidding me? He said, no, I’m not kidding at all. And he said, John, he said, when I look at my losses, my failures, the decisions I made that were not the best decisions, he said, I learned from every one of them. He said, if I went back and did a do-over, I would lose what I learned. And then he said, it not only taught me much, but it also developed character inside of me to get back up to not quit, to be resilient. And he said, if I could go do them over, I would lose my learning and I’d lose my character, and I’m not willing to lose any while. Because both of those were more valuable than having done everything perfectly and having done everything. And when I finished my conversation with him, God just helped me. I said, I want to always be this way. I want to learn from every loss, and I want to become better in every ditch that I land in. And I want to have character. (26:36): So I think when you do shortcuts, shortcuts, by the way, don’t pay off the long run. But when you shortcuts shortcuts, you are going to miss the learning and you’re going to miss the character. And you’re 25, you don’t want to miss that. I know you want to get to success quickly, but you don’t want to miss that because if you miss it and you become successful, Andy, it’s only a matter of time until you’ll fall. And then when you fall, sometimes you have to start it all over again. And when you have that inner core of values and that inner core of character and that storing up of all that learning that matures you, you’re still going to fall, but you’re going to catch yourself and it’s not going to be. So it’s not be such a big fall because of the stuff that’s stored within you. And does that make sense? Andy Stanley (27:24): Yep, absolutely. It’s just very difficult to see that and keep that front and center at 25 and 35 years old because we feel like we’re falling behind. And again, we’re always comparing ourselves to other people. But again, it goes back to what you said at the beginning. The greatest lessons are generally not learned on the mountaintop. The greatest lessons, the lessons that really prepare us for future success are the ones that are learned in the valley. And that’s where we get character, and that’s where we develop humility. And that’s what, as we’ve talked about before, sets us up for sustained success later in the areas that really matter most. And many times, those are areas no one can see. But the people who are closest to us John Maxwell (28:05): Learn your lessons in the valley and make your decisions on the mountaintop. If you’ll do both of those things, I promise you you’re going to get there. But so many times we make our decisions in the valley, you can’t see clearly there. You don’t have the view that you need, you don’t have the perspective you need, so you hold those decisions till you get back up till we have a better perspective and make ’em there. Wow, Andy Stanley (28:30): That’s just fantastic. And to all of our podcast listeners, I wish we could all give John a standing ovation at this moment, not just for what he’s just shared with us, but for the impact he has had on all of us directly and indirectly, because most of the good leadership stuff you’ve ever heard, somebody stole it from John. In fact, John, I was with you the first time. The only time I’ve ever given this talk, it’s called a Leader’s Second Best Friend, because I said, I can’t say it’s a leader’s best friend because the leader’s best friend is momentum. There’s no way around that. In fact, I told our staff today, I was talking about that, and I said, the first time I heard John say A leader’s best friend is Momentum. I thought that’s not true. Three or four years later. That’s true. Absolutely true. (29:10): So we have all learned so much from you. We all continue to learn so much from you, and I’m so grateful that you took the time to join us today. So to all of our listeners, we want to thank you for joining us and invite you to check out the Maxwell Leadership App. This is a brand new app that John’s team has just released. It’s free. It’s designed to help you pace your leadership journey, and it’s designed to help you create your own plan for personal growth as a leader. Just search any of the app stores for the Maxwell Leadership app, make sure you download that. And as always, visit the Andy stanley.com website where you can download the leadership podcast application guide that includes a summary of our discussion and questions for reflection or group discussion. And of course, be sure to join us next month on the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. I’ll see you then. Comments are closed.