It’s Good to Learn From Your Mistakes. It’s Better to Learn From Someone Else’s.
When people talk about Steve Jobs, they usually focus on his triumphant return to Apple. The company was on the brink of collapse. Jobs came back and lead one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in history. Under his leadership, Apple created iconic products and became the most valuable company in the world.
Yet we rarely hear much about his years in the wilderness, especially his failures at NeXT Computer. It was the missteps there, like poor product-market fit and lack of software development, that informed his later successes. You can’t fully understand Jobs’ success unless you follow the entire journey, stumbles and all.
I get the same feeling every time I see a protest march. People often look back at the 1963 March on Washington as a model for change. But there have been roughly 300 marches on Washington, and that’s the only notable success. If we want to drive real change—in business, activism, or anywhere else—we need to study not just the rare wins, but all the failures too.
The First March On Washington
The first March on Washington wasn’t Martin Luther King Jr.’s in 1963, but the Women’s Suffrage Procession of 1913. It was held the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s first inauguration and it quickly descended into chaos. Provocateurs disrupted the procession, blocking its path and hurling epithets at the suffragists. The police were negligently slow to respond, and a full-scale riot broke out, discrediting the movement and its leader, Alice Paul.
Later, when Wilson entered office, the suffragists went to see him and urged him to do something about women’s rights. He refused, saying that he had more important things to tend to, such as economic and foreign policy. Alice Paul and her suffragettes were furious, but they had learned their lesson. There would be no more marches.
Instead, small bands of Silent Sentinels picketed the White House with quotes lifted from President Wilson’s own book. How could he object without appearing to be a tremendous hypocrite to signs that read, “LIBERTY IS A FUNDAMENTAL DEMAND OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT” and “WE ARE INTERESTED IN THE UNITED STATES, POLITICALLY SPEAKING, IN NOTHING BUT LIBERTY,” when he was, in fact, the very author of those same words?
Later, when he declared war against Germany and its allies, the suffragists once again carried Wilson’s words. “WE SHALL FIGHT FOR THE THINGS WHICH WE HAVE ALWAYS HELD NEAREST OUR HEARTS — FOR DEMOCRACY, FOR THE RIGHT OF THOSE WHO SUBMIT TO AUTHORITY TO HAVE A VOICE IN THEIR OWN GOVERNMENTS.”
It was an inspiring message for entering World War I. But it was just as strong an argument for women demanding a voice at home.
Wilson had two choices: he could have voiced support for women’s right to vote, or he could have had the women arrested to stop their picketing. He chose the latter. The women were arrested and subjected to brutal treatment in prison. When news of the abuse broke, it generated public outrage and turned the tide in favor of the suffragettes. Wilson, politically damaged and out of options, finally relented.
The president ultimately had to surrender. On August 18th, 1920, just 7 years after the disastrous march, the 19th amendment was ratified, finally giving women the right to vote.
Gandhi’s Himalayan Miscalculation
In 1919, five years after his return to India from South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi called for a nationwide series of strikes and boycotts to protest unjust laws levied on his people by the British. At first, it seemed like an enormous success. In Mumbai, for example, 80% of shops closed their doors. The entire nation was brought to a standstill.
But just like the Women’s Suffrage Procession six years earlier, what began as peaceful protests soon turned violent. Riots broke out. The moral high ground that Gandhi so coveted—and relied on to accomplish his objectives—crumbled under his feet. Things ended with a horrible massacre at Amritsar, in which over 300 people were killed.
Gandhi would later call it his Himalayan miscalculation and, like the suffragettes, he learned from it. He would later write:
I realized that before a people could be fit for offering civil disobedience, they should thoroughly understand its deeper implications. That being so, before restarting civil disobedience on a mass scale, it would be necessary to create a band of well-tried, pure-hearted volunteers who thoroughly understood the strict conditions of Satyagraha. They could explain these to the people, and by sleepless vigilance keep them on the right path.
Over the next decade, Gandhi did just that. He turned away from mass mobilization and focused instead on cultivating a small group of highly disciplined followers. At the same time, dissatisfaction with the British Raj grew among the Indian people. Things came to a head when on December 31, 1929, the Indian National Congress adopted a resolution for Purna Swaraj, its declaration of full independence from Great Britain.
They asked Gandhi to design a campaign of civil disobedience. But rather than rashly calling for sweeping national action, he set out with a small number of his closest, most disciplined disciples to march against a single, strategically chosen target: the British salt laws. Their nonviolent discipline inspired not only the Indian nation, but also millions around the world.
Today, the Salt March is known as Gandhi’s greatest triumph. As one of his followers would later note, before the Salt March forced the British to sit down and negotiate with him as an equal, they “were all sahibs and we were obeying. No more after that.” There was no turning back. India would win independence in 1947.
The Path To Civil Rights
The civil rights movement didn’t begin with marches or speeches. It began with slow, methodical work. In 1909, early leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida Wells, and Henry Moskowitz founded the NAACP, focusing largely on legislative and legal efforts. Later, after Indian independence, activists like Jim Lawson and Martin Luther King Jr. studied Gandhi’s success and learned from it.
A key early strategy was leveraging the economic power of black Americans. When the arrest of Rosa Parks for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, they won their first major victory. Sit-ins, like the ones in Nashville, used a similar strategy to integrate lunch counters.
Another effective tactic was to focus efforts on recently won court cases, such as the 1957 Little Rock Nine protest that followed the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. After the Boynton v. Virginia ruling outlawed segregation on interstate buses, the Freedom Rides pushed to ensure that the law was enforced.
Eight years went by between the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington. Each and every action in that time had a clear strategic objective. That was true of the famous march as well. Major civil rights legislation had been proposed and, while President Johnson was sympathetic, the bill needed a public push.
The earlier wins had helped the six major civil rights organizations build impressive organizational capacity and political power. They used that power to expand their coalition, bringing in groups such as the United Automobile Workers, National Council of Churches, and the American Jewish Congress. The march was designed to help put the bill over the top.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, passed soon after.
Start At The Beginning
We remember our heroes in their most iconic moments. It’s hard to think of Martin Luther King Jr. without picturing him at the Lincoln Memorial, delivering his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In much the same way, Steve Jobs will always be remembered standing on stage, calmly saying, “Just one more thing…” before unveiling the next revolutionary product.
Yet those moments are deceiving. Long before Jobs became the creator of the iPhone and the CEO of the most valuable company in history, he was cast out of the company he founded. It was what he learned during his years in relative obscurity—discipline, focus, how to retain top talent—that set the stage for his later triumphs.
Martin Luther King Jr. did even better. He learned from others’ mistakes. He studied those who came before him, especially Gandhi. That’s how he knew to build his movement methodically, to train activists and to pick fights he knew he could win. Rather than simply calling people into the streets, he focused early on local campaigns and boycotts, each with a clear strategic objective.
All change leaders need to learn from their own mistakes—and that’s crucial. But the really smart ones learn from the mistakes of others. The truth is, it’s hard to learn much just by looking at successes. You have to look at the whole picture: examine the missteps, moments of weakness and strategic blunders and the lessons learned. That’s how you improve your odds.
That’s why, before you set out to make a significant impact in any field or endeavor, ask yourself: Who’s tried this before? What were their failures? What can we learn from them? And how can we apply those lessons to the challenges we face?
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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