Hello, dear friend,
Here we are, enjoying 2024 with good vibes and inspiring stories!
I consider myself extremely lucky to be surrounded by outstanding professionals who lead by example, who are continuously dedicated to multidimensional growth, and who unconditionally support the growth of others.
I learn a lot from people’s actions that align with their values, rather than just what they claim to stand for. And here, I think it makes a huge difference to have role models that we can actually see in real-life action, not only role models who we appreciate for their ideas presented in podcasts or books.
One of the people who shaped the way I see leadership over the last few years is Magor CSIBI, Partner and Head of Leadership and Organizational Culture Practice at Trend Consult Group.
Magor has extensive international leadership experience, from NGOs and politics to entrepreneurship, as well as a strong passion for assisting leaders in balancing their performance with meaningful work. He served as the youngest member of the Romanian European Parliament, managed WWF in Romania and Korea, and is now a global voice on topics related to quality of work, culture, leadership, habits, and mindset.
Magor is determined, hardworking, competitive, and very disciplined. He never skips his morning workout routine, regardless of which city he wakes up in.
I invited Magor to share his views on success and failure, topics significantly relevant for any leader. He is very present and dedicated to his work with other leaders but also to his own growing process.
I invite you to discover Magor and his ideology in the following section, written in his own words.
“As we were approaching the end of 2023, I had the tendency to analyze many aspects of my life and my surroundings.
A few years ago, I founded “Think Outside the Box,” an online media platform to encourage people to think outside the conventional and to encourage people to forget about labels, tags, and shortcuts, which are supposed to make our lives easier but instead sometimes they only make them poorer.
In one of the key moments of last year, I was talking about failure on the stage of the National Opera. All the speakers came and spoke about their failures and all the learnings and growth from this. But not all failures make us grow. We should not seek failure, we should just not limit our actions because of our fear of not being successful. A few days later, a popular podcast came out where I was talking about the dark sides of success. But as we shouldn’t fear failure, we should not avoid success as well. By itself a successful outcome cannot harm us. What can be harmful is our attitude and behaviors toward our different outcomes.
In other words, I was labeling and tagging again. Overwhelmed by the complexity of the world and my surroundings, I was tempted to simplify the complicated reality around me, and I can safely say that I have failed again.
Once again, I realize that many times, simplification just doesn’t help for clarity and good decisions. What I tend to label as success is not about the outcome of my projects and actions, but about my reactions to that outcome. If I connect my self-worth to success and tend to feed my ego from there, then yes, success can be quite harmful. But if I treat success simply as an outcome of my actions, then immediately I have something to celebrate.
I realize that the same principle applies to failure. By itself, it is neither good nor bad to fail. We cannot say that failure is a sign of courage, for example, until we don’t know if the actions that led to failure were intentional or not. We cannot say if our failure is a learning opportunity or not until we don’t distance ourselves from the outcome and look at our behaviors. Too often, we say that we have learned our lesson, and then we continue to commit the same mistakes.
Somatic simplification can help. Yes, failure can be a sign of courage or an indicator that we ventured into territories we had never been to before. But it can also easily signal sloppiness or an unwillingness to learn. The label doesn’t help us. A complex and honest analysis of the situation will. Only then can we learn.
Yes, the world tends to be overwhelming. Yes, we can have too much complexity around us. But this doesn’t mean that the answer is always simplification or labeling. We are different, and our challenges tend to differ as well. Instead of simplifying, we could overcome the doubt and the hard truth that sometimes we don’t have solutions or answers. Only questions. But aren’t questions the best way to learn?”
Following these ideas, I wonder what success and failure are for you and what practices you have to learn from both.