If at first you don’t succeed … – Greeley Tribune

For families, employers and new job seekers, as I wrote in my debut column for the Tribune two years ago, May signals the end of another school year, graduation celebrations and fresh beginnings.

Moms, dads and grandparents once again, thankfully, are experiencing Commencement alongside friends, teachers and assorted “elders” invested in our graduates’ success.  We’ve come to expect soaring exhortations to perseverance and grit.

Two speeches in particular resonate with me this spring.  The first is from Steve Jobs, Apple’s visionary cofounder, who addressed Stanford University’s graduating class in 2005, fresh from his first sobering brush with cancer.  The other, by Oscar winning actor Denzel Washington, took root at Fordham University in 2011, where this gifted artist had explored premed, law, and journalism before dropping out so as not to “waste” any more of his family’s savings.

Readers will recognize the similarities: Follow your heart. Dream Big. Fall forward. Carpe diem. Nunc coepi.  (Look up those last two Latin aphorisms, please).

Both speakers had born personal failure and regrouped.  They had accepted disappointment with grace and chosen to “begin again.”

In business, particularly for determined entrepreneurs confronted with a start up on life support, this often translates to “fail fast,” integrate tough lessons learned, expect to succeed in your next venture.

First Steve Jobs, the inspiration for my original reflection in this space, who reflected on being fired from Apple as a 30-year-old wunderkind who evidently had misread the corporate politics.    Yet he was “still in love,” the heaviness of success replaced by the lightness of a new beginning, free to follow his heart.

Soon came a fresh burst of creativity, startups NeXT and Pixar, a revitalized family life, a more humble executive.

Second, Denzel Washington, who boldly asks his graduates, given their “obvious talent to succeed,” whether they have the “guts to fail.”  Fortunately, his several speeches, from Fordham, which he quit at age 20 with a GPA of 1.81, to the University of Pennsylvania, have been distilled into a 10-minute, highly produced motivational speech, accessible over You Tube.

While “dream big” and “fall forward” appeal to our inner yearnings, in the view of a Scottish business professor who has looked at the data, Jobs and Washington may be exceptions to the rule.

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, most entrepreneurs do not learn from their mistakes,” reports Prof. Francis Greene, an entrepreneurship and innovation specialist at the University of Edinburgh.  “If they fail once, they most likely will fail again.”

Greene’s research is summarized in a December 2019 article in the Wall Street Journal, which helpfully observes that in the U.S., barely half of all startups make it beyond a year or two, even fewer to “adolescence or adulthood,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Mostly what passes for evidence are the cherry-picked stories of famous failed entrepreneurs who became successes later on,” he writes.  Conveniently forgotten are “the far larger number of entrepreneurs who failed and didn’t get to tell their tale.”

Still, in the dewy mist of spring commencements, it is tough to ignore steely eyed, battle tested, chastened pioneers who took time to “pause and reflect” on past mistakes, who realized that “to get something you never had, you have to do something you never did!”

To Messrs. Jobs, Washington, and other big dreamers, Prof. Greene appears to offer three cautions from his academic research:

Learning is difficult in startup contexts, in which the chessboard does not always have 64 squares and 32 pieces, and “10,000 hours of practice” is impractical.  Markets evolve, customers are fickle, rules of competition and opponents vary.  With customers’ needs changing over time, lessons learned from the first failure…