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According to a study published in Annual Review of Psychology, the bigger the mistake you make, especially if you felt confident you were making the right decision, the more likely you are to learn from that mistake.
Great way to learn? Yes. Painful way to learn? Absolutely. That’s why it’s great to learn from other people, too.
Here’s some advice from four people who are definitely worth learning from.
Steve Jobs
Money matters. Money can make you happier. (One of the most important things money does is open up choices.) Yet while you can always make more money, you can never make more time.
As Jobs said:
My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.
Deadlines and time frames establish parameters, but usually not in a good way. If you have two weeks to complete a task, you’ll instinctively adjust your effort so the task actually does take two weeks, even if it shouldn’t.
Forget deadlines, at least as a way to manage your activity. Tasks should only take as long as they need to take. Do everything as quickly and effectively as you can.
Then, use your “free: time to get other things done just as quickly and effectively, so you can spend more time living the life you want to live.
While most people allow time to impose its will on them, the happiest (and most successful) people impose their will on time.
Oprah Winfrey
In the course of interviewing over 37,000 people, Oprah Winfrey learned to listen for one thing, and how to use it to guide her conversation with that person.
According to Oprah, at the end of a show every guest would (whisper) something like, “Was that okay? Was that okay?” No matter how important, no matter how successful, no matter how self-confident… almost everyone asked, “Was that okay?:
Why did so many people ask her the same question?
As Oprah said:
At the end of the day… whatever your profession, wherever you are in your life, in your relationships… every person you encounter, that person wants to know, ‘Was that OK?’
What I started to hear was that what people are really saying was: ‘Did you hear me, and did what I say mean anything to you?’
And so I started to listen with that in mind, with that intention of validating that your being here, your speaking to me… is important, because you matter.
Every (encounter that you have), the person just wants to know, ‘Did you hear me … did you see me … and did I say anything that mattered?’
Which makes perfect sense. We all want to feel like what we say and do has meaning. We all want to feel like what we say and do makes a difference. Whether in business, in our personal lives, even in the briefest of encounters, we all want to feel like we matter.
Which means we should try our best to make the other person feel like they matter.
Mark Cuban
Demanding, hard-charging, results-at-all-costs leaders get results… for a while. Eventually, though, the pressure gets old. The message grows stale. Leaders who manage through heavy-handed authority quickly “lose” their teams.
I’ll do what you tell me to do, but that’s about it, they start to think. And as soon as I can, I’ll do it for someone else.
That’s a lesson Mark Cuban learned. As Cuban said:
One of the most underrated skills in business right now is being nice. Nice sells.
Think about the best bosses you’ve worked for. They may have been demanding. They may have had high expectations. They may have provided occasional doses of tough love.
But you didn’t mind, because you knew they cared about you. They believed in you. They had high standards because they knew you were capable of reaching that level of performance, and while they may have been direct about the expectations they had, they delivered that message in an encouraging and respectful way.
In short, they were nice. Not soft, not lenient, but nice.
As Cuban also said:
I went through my own metamorphosis. Early on in my career, I was like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam — I might curse. I might get mad. I got to the point… I wouldn’t have wanted to do business with me when I was in my twenties.
I had to change. And I did. And it really paid off.
Don’t assume pay or benefits or opportunities make employees feel respected and valued. Tangible rewards have an impact, but treat employees poorly, with disrespect, disdain, or disapproval, and no tangible reward will overcome the damage to their feelings of self-worth.
My grandfather
One day when I was 12 or so I helped my grandfather muck out a few long-neglected horse stalls. Multiple layers of horse poo. The ammonia-like smell that results from time and biological decay. (Yee-ha.)
I tried to tough it out and stay quiet. (My grandfather wasn’t big on complaining.) Eventually, though, I caved. “Ugh,” I groaned, wincing and closing my eyes.
He stopped and leaned on his shovel. “That smell?” he said. “That’s the smell of job security, son.”
Years later, I understood the lesson. Other people may be smarter. More experienced. More connected. More something. (If you’re me, all of those things are true.)
But what you can do is what other people won’t:
- Walmart founder Sam Walton was willing to open department stores in small towns established retailers never considered.
- Michael Ovitz was willing to stay at his desk until 10 at night so he would be the only person the president of the company could turn to for help.
- Kobe Bryant was willing to make 100,000 shots one summer to correct a flaw in his shooting technique, even though he was already an NBA All-Star.)
Want to build a business? Be willing to do a few things your competition will not. Want to build a career? Be willing to do a few things the people you work with will not.
Scratch the surface of any extremely successful person, and you’ll likely find someone who was, and most likely still is, willing to do what others will not.
Because that’s a competitive advantage we can all leverage.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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