Crash, Burn, Recover, Live

Things crash, people crash, situations crash….it’s as inevitable as the setting of the sun, rising taxes and a phone call from my college alumni association right about time that I settle in for the opening faceoff of the Bruins game (Just how many more buildings in Boston do you need to own anyway?).

I was never more cognizant of this fact than last Wednesday when our free New Hampshire BizCast webinar got lost deep in cyberspace shortly before liftoff. Instead of watching Allen Voivod of Epiphanies, Inc. wax poetic about the business benefits of establishing a social media presence, viewers were treated to a pixilated image and then….nothing. For seven minutes, our webinar team worked at unsafe speeds to restore the feed, all the while keeping their calm and sending moment by moment updates to viewers assuring them that a solution would soon be at hand.

Some would call that grace under pressure – I call it the emerging reality in today’s fly faster and higher world. Time used to be a luxury, now it’s a commodity that is as rare as a mint copy of the Beatles’ “Revolver” album or an autographed copy of the Gutenberg Bible.

So, in the absence of time and the absolute drive to accomplish the near impossible on a daily basis, what is the tradeoff? The tradeoff is that we need to develop a hardened shell that is critic resistant when we inevitably crash and burn from time to time. Rather than taking each barb from those who sit on the sidelines and secretly achieve nothing as a mortal blow, we need to continue to try our best to balance the demands of the workplace while finding new opportunities to innovate.

To give you a few personal examples, I’ve held press conferences that have drawn less than a handful of reporters, created an ad campaign that caused my previous marketing team to wonder if I had spent time in the Arizona desert experimenting with peyote and drafted ideas that would land me a guaranteed slot on the next space shuttle but were met with deafening silence by my own internal audience. Failures? Hell, no.

You see, each one of those “failures” allowed me to refine my ideas and come back to the starting gate with a new approach that would meet with better results. This is a great lesson for everyone in business – if you think that most of today’s great inventions from the smart thermostat to the telescope for invisible stars were created on the first try, you were probably enjoying what nature had to offer during your own trip to the Arizona desert.

It’s very easy to sit back in judgment and criticism of another’s work – in fact, it’s one of the things that we do best as human beings. No one is quite as brilliant or forward thinking as any of us as we explain how we would have improved upon an idea that someone else came up with. When we fall into that trap, we become passive observers watching real life being filmed right in front of us instead of being a lead actor. How tragic.

That’s why my advice for today is to put aside all of your fears about crashing and burning. If you’re going to go up in flames, make it an Irwin Allen size “Towering Inferno” that engulfs entire city blocks rather than thinking small and not challenging yourself to be more than who you are today. The world is filled with people who avoid the light of day and occupy a prime position in the back of the room, perfectly content to move through the day unnoticed and unconnected.

Don’t be like them. Think big, dream big and don’t be afraid to go up in flames. You will learn…you will recover and you will live bigger and better than you ever have before. After all, this world isn’t for the meek of heart and innovation only happens when fear is replaced with the confidence that you can soar where eagles fear to tread.

Steve Boucher is the Communications & Legislative Director at the New Hampshire Division of Economic Development and always returns his shopping cart to its original location. You can visit me on the “No Bull Business Blog” at blog.nheconomy.com, sign up for our Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/Nobullblog, check out No Bull TV at http://www.youtube.com/user/nobulltv or become one of our Facebook fans at www.facebook.com/nobullbusiness.