Can you achieve breakthrough without breakdown?
A breakthrough can be a wonderful milestone in anyone’s personal life. Or it can be a turning point for a company.
When we were children, we made several breakthroughs at the age of five. While those were monumental times, they weren’t walks in the park. Before taking our first step, we fell countless times. When we first try to talk or feed ourselves, we also fail. However, we are never discouraged. We stood up and took another step until we made a breakthrough on each of them.
As adults, walking, talking and feeding is so common that we pay very little attention to it. Once we get the hang of them, we move on to other advancements, like tying our shoes, riding a bike, reading, writing, learning math, to name a few. However, before we could walk or do any of the other things, we had many, many breakdowns.
Before we achieve anything significant, we experience breakdowns or failures. As children, breakdowns do not discourage us. When we watch a baby learn to walk, failure doesn’t seem like a problem or a breakdown. Every healthy baby stands up to take another step, even if he cries from the fall.
As we age and pursue our careers, we aspire to advance the salary, title, and prestige of the company that employs us. To achieve those career benchmarks, we volunteer for new assignments, take on new and more complex tasks, and some focus on managing others. At first, we are stretched. In fact, our performance can be mediocre at best. During the learning curve, we make what are called mistakes. Except those errors or failures are no different than the failures we experienced when we took our first steps. Like mastering the march, we too can master our races.
In order to dominate our careers, organizations are committed to producing breakthroughs that differentiate them in the marketplace. Most advancements don’t have a plan. If so, it is most likely an improvement on what already exists. Advances, on the other hand, require people to navigate unfamiliar territory. In that unfamiliar territory, there are likely to be many breakdowns. Some are directly related to the service or product. In other cases, it is the result or lack of communication, exceeding budget and time, or simply not having the right answers on how to take the next step.
Whether personal or professional, it seems that the human experience is never without fault. Those who are brave enough to overcome the collapse are rewarded with breakthroughs at best. At worst, they will have learned lessons that can only be learned through experience: pursue advancement.
While it seems counterintuitive to pursue collapse, it seems almost impossible to avoid it if you are committed to breakthroughs. However, no one talks about the intentional collapse they will create.
Perhaps mastering advancement has nothing to do with talent and intelligence. It may have more to do with people standing up for an outcome, even if they don’t know how to produce it. Thomas Edison may have summed it up better: “I haven’t failed. I just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” Edison seemed to have mastery in handling himself and others in the face of multiple breakdowns. It was as if he knew that breakdowns are part of the process of making breakthroughs. If each of us has been dealing with breakdowns since childhood, technically speaking, we should be adept at traversing breakdowns to make great strides. What breakdown will you create today?