Find It Out – Research Secrets and More

I try and make sure that my blog posts stand on their own – and if read in a year’s time will still be relevant. Although I sometimes focus on news issues, I always try and look beyond to lessons that can be learned.

The news this week throughout the world has focused on the rescue of the Chilean miners. News stories have focused on how the 33 miners kept up their spirits, their faith in God, their humility and so on. The rescuers were praised for their commitment to free the miners – and that they never gave up.

There are numerous lessons to be drawn from this news story – for management of businesses and humanity in general. However I’m not the first to spot the connections. Jeff Kaplan’s ThinkIt blog post Corporate Lessons from the Chilean Miner Rescue is worth reading. Jeff highlights how the rescue showed commitment to save the miners, determination to rescue them, and for the miners to stay alive, cooperation to achieve the objectives, and several more aspects that made the rescue possible.

There was one area that Jeff didn’t cover, and that is that believing in yourself can turn something that seems impossible into something possible. Benjamin Zander, the  conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra co-wrote a great motivational book – “The Art of Possibility“. I think that this is the true miracle of the Chilean miners and the best lesson to be learned. Rather than give up the miners as lost, efforts were made to locate them. When they were found, even more efforts were made to get them all out alive. What seemed impossible was proved not to be – difficult, but achievable.

However bad things are, giving up is not the solution. Rather, try, try and try again. Failure should never be an option. Instead focus on succeeding – and if things don’t go right first time, try again, learning the lessons from the first time so that mistakes aren’t repeated.