Repelling Photo

Failing Forward

Failing Forward

"Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street." Zig Ziglar 

 

It's 1 am on Saturday morning, and my brother Mike and I are screaming down a dirt road on our mountain bikes.  The only light comes from our helmet lamps, so we can see only a slim tunnel of road directly in front of us.  This downhill ride is our reward for an hour of all climbing as we move much closer to checkpoint 6 in our 48-hour adventure race.  As we get towards the bottom of the hill we see a T intersection that is not on our map.  We stop and look around and note that this intersection looks familiar.  "S**t!" is the only thing I could think of saying at that point.  I just realized that the past two hours had been spent going in one big circle. Maybe we were in over our heads. 

I started adventure racing earlier this year and find it a natural extension of the endurance running and biking I have enjoyed in the past. Adventure racing pushes me to my physical and mental breakpoints. This new 48-hour race endeavor consisted of mountain biking, trail running, kayaking, repelling and orienteering (finding hidden objects in the woods with just a map and compass).   The race is accomplished as a team of two, and you must be within 50 feet of your team partner at all times.

"I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying." Michael Jordan 

 

This event was definitely a stretch goal for Mike and me.  Our only other adventure race had been a 24-hour race earlier this Spring which took us 26 hours to complete and the use of GPS (which was illegal and disqualifying) to get ourselves out of the woods after we found all of the check points. So when we signed up for this one, we knew that we were taking on more than we could handle.  And at 1 am Saturday morning after our unintended third loop in the town of Confluence we realized that we were probably not going to finish this one.  

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger." Friedrich Nietzsche 

 

We hung in the race for another 14 hours and made a strong showing during the 30 hours we endured. We hit 10 of the 20 required checkpoints, and I had the opportunity to try repelling for the first time – successfully thank goodness - by jumping off a 100-foot bridge. 

"Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it." Mia Hamm 

 

At the end of day we didn't finish the race, but we failed forward by learning from our mistakes and deficiencies.  We practiced our navigational skills, learned to repel (and learned to wear gloves when repelling as the result of severely rope-burned hands), learned that it is much easier to swim across rivers than to walk across them, and many other things that I am still too tired to think of. 

One of the most important things that we learned is about the teamwork required to endure such an event.  My prior events relied on my ability to get to the finish line.  This event relies much more on the team members' abilities to use their combined strengths to get to the finish.  

"Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm." Winston Churchill 

 

In order to perform at your highest level you need to push yourself out of your comfort zone and into a point of almost certain failure, or "failing forward".  The success comes by learning from the failure and making yourself better from the experience.  I am glad I failed this weekend and know that I am stronger now because of it.  I will go back after a bit of rest and training to do another 48-hour race, and I will succeed!

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Thomas A. Edison 

 

At Signature Community we fail all the time and are proud of those failures.  Sometimes we try a new marketing idea that doesn't work or maybe we give a resident some extra time to pay the rent and they disappear in the night.  These are all learning experiences that make us better in the future.  We share these experiences in our daily huddles, and we are not afraid to share our experiences of failure so that we can allow everyone to learn from them.  From a macro-perspective we are a risk-adverse company, but we do take opportunities to get out of our comfort zones and move towards greater success while failing forward along the way.

Thanks for continuing to support Signature Community through our success and our failures.

--
Nickolas Jekogian
CEO
Signature Community
917-763-3500
www.ASignatureCommunity.com
Blog -http://www.nwjceommm.blogspot.com/

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