Rockefeller’s advice – 2

Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the worlds, and peace and blessings be upon him, the most merciful, the most merciful. Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and peace and blessings be upon him, and peace and blessings be upon him, and peace and blessings be upon him. My brothers and sisters, we are looking at the nine letters of advice that John D. Rockefeller wrote for his son. Absolutely brilliant pieces of advice, which I thought I should share with you and myself. And the first one was, hardship is your greatest teacher. The second one, he says, failure plus persistence. Failure, not failure by itself. Failure plus persistence equals breakthrough. Failure plus persistence equals breakthrough. Think about this. Edison, Thomas Edison, failed 10,000 times. He failed 10,000 times. The wonderful story of his, which I love the most, because he is the founder of GE, General Electric, with which I have been working for many years. Working as a consultant from 1994. The wonderful story, two wonderful stories. One is, of course, is, they say that the light bulb, he got it right at the 1100th time or some such thing, right? So they said to him, well, you failed, you know, 1100 times or 1100 minus one. So 10,999 times. So it's, you know, you failed so many times. So he said, no, it takes 1100 times to succeed. That's how long it takes. So in many other cases, you know, put together, they say that he failed 10,000 times. Now, the most wonderful story of Edison is that his lab caught fire. So he had this lab in a, you know, like an outhouse. So, you know, they have these, what they call granny cottages, which is just off the main house. There would be a cottage where your elderly parents or parents, for intending, they were supposed to stay there. So they're close to you and you take care of them. And they're still, they have their independent living. So this kind of granny cottage, so, you know, maybe it was a, it was a room or a shed or whatnot. So that's where he did all his experimentation. That's where he did all his discoveries or inventions. So all his work, all his work was there, you know, whatever his current experiments and current inventions. Inventions in progress. He had all his documentations and so on. So all of that stuff is there in this, in this building. And one night it caught fire. So it was a huge conflagration. The whole place was completely on fire. And there was no way that, you know, that fire could be put out or anything would be saved. So John D. Rockefeller's, no, no. Edison, Thomas Edison's son, he says that I, when I saw the fire, I went looking for my father. I thought he was going crazy with grief and with, you know, with this sense of loss. So, and I was afraid that he might do something, you know, to, which might harm himself, which might harm himself. So he said, I went searching for him. I see him standing there with his hands, gloves behind his back, looking at the fire. And he said, son says, when I got to him, he says, go call your mom. She'll never see a fire like this again. Go call your mom. She'll never see a fire like this again. So son says, well, you know, I was absolutely astonished at his equanimity and the fact that he was not, you know, screaming with grief or something. So he asked him, he said, Dad, this is all your work, right? This is everything that you have. All your inventions and all the, all the writing and all the documentation and everything else. Right? I mean, you just watching it burn. You, you know, you're not, you don't seem to be bothered. He says to his son, how many people have a chance to make a completely new beginning? Just think about that. How many people have a chance to make a completely new beginning? Slate is wiped clean. Right? Now you can think about this and say, well, if I was living a life, you know, as a drug addict. And I, if I spend my time, uh, in a bar and then I got kicked out in the, in the, in the night and I, you know, fell into a drain and I wake up my own vomit or something the next morning. Wait, this kind of miserable, horrible life, which a lot of people, a lot of people do lead that kind of a life. So I'm not exaggerating. So if that were the case and you made a statement like that and say, how many people have a chance of making a completely new beginning? You know, slate wiped clean. You can understand that because okay. Your slate needed to be wiped clean because your slate was really filthy. You had a lousy life. But in this case, we are talking about his lifetime inventions, his lifetime of work, something which he takes pride in. The whole thing burns down and he's not disappointed. He's not shocked. He's not heartbroken. Uh, you know, he's not in despair. Uh, you know, he's not in despair. Uh, he sees that as a blessing and he says, wow, this is fantastic. Now I can be in all over again. What kind of a mental attitude, what kind of mental power is that? Think about it. Dyson created, he's supposed to have created 5,126 prototypes. The Dyson is a James. Sir James Dyson is a British Singaporean. Uh, inventor, uh, who created, uh, they say that he had, he created, um, 5,126 prototypes. So over 5,000 prototypes for his bagless vacuum cleaner over 15 years before successfully launching it. He developed the technology to solve the problem of traditional vacuum. Bags clogging and losing suction and his perseverance, uh, led to the creation of the global company called Dyson. So it's very, very interesting. Uh, he developed a bagless vacuum that uses cyclonic separation, uh, to separate dust and debris from the air using centrifugal force, eliminating the need for a bag. He created over 5,000 prototypes. So he created over 5,000 prototypes in his garage over a 15 year period. Learning from each failure to refine his design and his dedication led to the creation of the first bagless vacuum cleaner. And he formed this company called Dyson. Uh, it also went into farming and went into, uh, into, uh, all sorts of philanthropic work and so on and so forth. Now, Rockefeller's formula is, is not just talking about failing. He's talking about failing for the sake of failing. He's talking about failing plus challenge. So every failure, you don't just sit with that. You, you take this failure and you turn it into a challenge. You say, well, what can I learn or what did I learn from this failure? What can I learn or what was. So very important in, in terms of failing is to know why you failed. Uh, in GE we had a system where if somebody, uh, failed, then they weren't fired. They weren't, uh, you know, uh, uh, uh. or they didn't get some black mark in some secret record, they were encouraged to come and talk about their failure to their team. And if it was a big enough failure, then they talked about it to a larger group. But very important, what was done was you didn't just come and say, well, this is what I did and I messed up. No, you had to present this thing in terms of what were you trying to do? What did you actually do? That's two. Number three is what led to the failure? So what are the causes that caused that this failure happened? So it would be omission or commission, something you should have done, you didn't do, something you did and it didn't work. And therefore, what are the lessons you learned? So that's number four, what lessons you learned. And number five is, therefore, what are the fixes? So how do you ensure that the failure does not happen a second time? Now the principle behind this is you're not encouraging people to fail. You're encouraging people to take risk. This is something which many, many, many people in authority, whether they're companies, whether they're parents, whether they're teachers, especially teachers, they literally create this very false image for a child to say that you must always succeed. So how do you ensure that the failure doesn't happen a second time? Now, the principle behind this is you're not encouraging people to fail. You're encouraging people to take risk. You're encouraging people to take risk. And if you don't succeed, then you are punished. The result of that is not greater learning. It's actually lesser learning and greater deception and greater chances of people just hiding mistakes, which is a terrible thing because first of all, you make a mistake and that mistake is a loss. And when you hide the mistake, you are telling lies, you're trying to cover it up. And in this cover up. You are trying to cover it up. You are losing the only advantage of the mistake, which was the learning. So if you, instead of that, if you teach, if you treat the mistake as something which, this is the fee that I paid to learn, then you are hugely benefiting from that mistake. But obviously if you paid a fee to learn something, you should be able to say, what did you learn? This is something that you should be able to clearly state. This is what I learned. And that's why this rehashing of it, which you say that, what was I trying to do? What did I actually do? So commission or omission. And then what is by learning from that? What lessons did I learn from that? And then to say that, what is the fix for it? This is very, very important. Because this is what helps us to realize. So, I think that's the key. I think that's the key. I think that's the key. I think that's the key. I think that's the key. The key is to really extract benefit from that mistake. So I, this is what Rockefeller says, failure plus challenge equals success. So, treat the failure as a challenge to learn something and say, what did I learn from this? And he says that most quit, most people quit at failure number 10. Winners know that number 11 might change everything. And that's the, that is the key, that is the secret to say that it is something which, If I am going to just leave it,