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3 • Emotional Blocks - Part 3

Of the more permanent types of emotional blocks, the kind we acquire early in life and carry with us ever after, probably the two most important are the fear of failure and the fear of ridicule. We manage to learn early in life that "nothing succeeds like success" and, its companion adage, "nothing fails like failure." And so we go through life doing everything we can to avoid making mistakes—"it's better to be safe than sorry."

One of the dangers of this attitude is that we can rationalize it to ourselves so that we don't even realize this is our governing attitude. For instance, on our jobs, we tell ourselves that the reason we don't openly disagree with some idea of management, or try to promote an idea of our own that would be contrary to current management thinking, is that this would be "disloyal"—and we are very loyal to our boss and our company! So we avoid the disagreement. Not to belittle loyalty in any way, but a very sharp manager once remarked that "When two men in an organization think exactly alike, you can usually fire one of them—and maybe both of them!"

One of the things we forget in "playing it safe" is that one can usually learn more from a mistake than from a success. Failure teaches us what we don't know and what we need to know about ourselves. And this is the key to your own progress and develop­ment.

Sometimes we hold off taking any action because we are afraid we don't know enough. But this can often be a help, rather than a hindrance. Consider Henry Ford. There are many men in business today who, had they been around at the time, would have advised Henry Ford against going into production on his Model T. They would have suggested that he hold off until marketing research could find out if there really was a market for such a thing as an "automobile." They would have wanted to test the "price structure" to see if people would pay $300 or $400 or $500 for such a thing. They would have wanted him to find out if people would consider this automobile better than a horse, streetcar, or bicycle. And they certainly would have insisted that he find out what colors people preferred, instead of just going ahead with black. But "poor" Henry Ford didn't have any of these people around to advise him, and he didn't know the answers himself, so all he could do was to take the risk of failure and go ahead and make a few million dollars for himself!

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