Believe it or not, entrepreneurs can actually learn something from the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un.
You heard me right …
“Rocket Man” (as President Trump affectionately calls him) is doing something that entrepreneurs should take note of:
The North Korean nuclear weapons program has progressed much more quickly under Kim Jong-un than it did under his father, Kim Jong-il, who led the country from 1994 until his death in 2011.
In his new book Fear: Trump In The White House, Bob Woodward explains how father and son view failure differently.
With the father, whenever a missile test failed he ordered the scientists working on it to be shot. He probably thought this would motivate them to not make mistakes, but the threat of taking a bullet to the head tends to make people nervous and can negatively impact performance.
His son chose to do things differently, and let the scientists of failed launches live to try again, realizing that they had tremendous amounts of experience and would learn and improve from their failures.
So while the elder had to continually swap out experienced scientists for rookies who didn’t know what they were doing, his son grasped the value of learning from your mistakes.
I’m not suggesting that you follow everything that Kim Jong-un does, since things aren’t rosy in his country, but you can’t deny the success of his nuclear program in recent years (as scary as it is for the rest of the world).
There’s a temptation to try to erase failures from our memories, instead of stepping back and evaluating where we went wrong and how we can change it.
Not learning from your mistakes means you kill off valuable experience that could be turned into gold.
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