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Lessons from Improv Comedy: Failure and Success

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Failure and success. Two words that everyone knows. Two words that dictate what people want. Everyone wants to succeed and wants to avoid failing. This doesn't mean that everyone has super high ambitions and wants to be world famous and infinitely rich, but people in general want their endeavors to be successful – be it a successful business, career, sports team, friendship, or family relationship. People do now want to fail in these things.

This is all fine and good, and people should strive to succeed. The key however, is in how we define failure and success. Just because we don't get our desired outcome doesn't mean we have to feel like failures.

Human perception is subjective. Two people can look at the same circumstance and define it in two different ways. The most famous and oft used example of this is Thomas Edison. Depending on the teller, Edison had between 1,000 and 10,000 failed attempts at the light bulb before he got it to work. To someone else, each of those attempts would have been a failure. To Edison, each attempt was a success, because each one allowed him to eliminate a possibility and move one step closer to a working bulb. Had Edison considered his attempts failures, he may have stopped long before discovering the working answer, and we would be reading by oil light…

Edison's example is not just about having a positive attitude. It is also about learning from mistakes. If you consider failure to be a learning experience, it will not have power over you, and it can bring you closer to success if you learn from the failures. Edison did not keep trying the same design over and over hoping it would eventually work. He learned from each experience, made adjustments, and tried again.

This seems pretty obvious, but how many times do we as people not do this? I know people who when they get together always end up arguing, having the same argument, with each side saying the same thing and with each side hoping that maybe this time the other person will get their point. It never happens, so round and round they go. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome.

The concept of failure and success became pretty clear to me while performing and directing improv comedy performances. Some performers, once they had bypassed the novice stage and started to taste some success on stage, would fall into patterns of doing the same characters and jokes on stage. This allowed them to stay safe and avoid the risks that could lead to failure. These performers also did not grow, because it is from our failures that we learn and grow.

A Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, said, ‘ if you want to double the rate of your success double the rate of your failure.' Give it a try…


Avish Parashar is a dynamic professional speaker who shows organizations and individuals how to get what they want using the Art and Science of improv comedy. He weaves together humorous stories, witty observations, and interactive exercises from improvisational comedy to get people laughing, learning, and motivated! Avish is most commonly called upon to deliver programs on Motivation, Sales, and Communication

For more free articles, downloads, and resources, visit http://www.AvishParashar.com

To learn how to apply the powerful principles of improv comedy to your own business or life visit http://www.ImprovforEveryone.com

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