A couple of weeks ago I took a spectacular fall while mountain biking. I was pushing the limits on one of my favorite trails, riding full speed through a forest of redwoods, when my front wheel lost traction and I hit the deck. I slid about 20 feet through roots and rocks before rolling over the side of the trail and down a steep hill. I wound up with deep gashes on both arms and one knee, a wide swath of trail rash from shoulder to ankle, and what would later turn out to be a couple of fractures to the bones that make up my left shoulder. It now ranks among the top 5 falls since I started mountain biking seriously more than a decade ago.
Falling is an unfortunate fact of life with any difficult pursuit. The scars you rack up are like merit badges marking your progress, hopefully, to some kind of mastery. I fell 87 times my first year of mountain biking (I kept score once I realized it was going to be chronic) while trying to learn how to navigate switchbacks, climb boulders and dodge trees on steep descents. My second year I fell only 10 times, but the fewer times I fell, the more dramatic the falls became since it took more to throw me off the bike.
Just as you get better at riding with practice, so it goes with falling. The cloud of shock and confusion clears up after a few good spills and in time you begin to feel present as a fall unfolds–the collapse of gravity, the awareness of arcing through space, the sampling of sensory inputs from each point of impact. The more tuned your awareness, the more you can process the mechanics of falling so you don’t repeat the same mistakes again. Was it a failure of technique? Of equipment? Of attention? If you’re competitive, you learn to see falling as the outer edge of the envelope you have to constantly push to get better and start winning. If you’re not good with falling, you’re stalling.
What I never ponder after a fall is what it means. There’s no hidden mystery with falling. Every fall is just a challenge where the mechanical convergence of bike, body and terrain is something you can navigate successfully or you can’t. Falling is part of the process of identifying and resolving those challenges. You get up, you brush yourself off, and either you hit it again until you get it right, or you find a way around it–a decision rooted in whether or not you understand the mechanics of what went wrong and how to fix it.
Learning to fall has been an invaluable lesson for me in business, because in business it’s called failing, and there are so many tortured interpretations about the meaning of failure that it obscures the simple mechanics. You hear a lot of received wisdom from pundits about what it means to fail. Studies are conducted by major universities. Books are written. Conclusions are made that shape corporate policy. Some gurus say failure is a natural part of business that should be embraced as an opportunity to learn. Others say no, accepting failure breeds failure, and that only success breeds success. When you inevitably encounter some significant failure in business, all of these pronouncements become voices in your head, and you spend hours staring at the ceiling pondering what it all means.
If you find yourself in that position, just think about falling on a bike. No one who knows how to ride a bike did it without ever falling. The greater the rider, the harder the falls they’ve survived, and the more scars they have to prove it. The key is to forget about meaning and focus on mechanics. Don’t just get up and ride on ahead to the next fall. Take the time to understand the factors that led to the fall in the first place. Was it a failure of technique? Of equipment? Of attention? Then get up, brush yourself off, and either hit it again until you get it right, or find a way around it. Let the pundits debate what it means.