Optimism

Optimism and the Wallenda Factor

One of the most impressive and memorable qualities of successful leaders is the way they respond to failure. Like Karl Wallenda (1905–1978), the great tightrope aerialist who once remarked that “the only time I feel truly alive is when I walk the tight-rope,” these leaders put all their energies into their task. Not only do they not think about failure, they do not even use the word, relying on synonyms such as mistake or glitch or bungle or countless others, such as false start, mess, hash, bollix, or error. Never failure. One of them said during the course of an interview that “a mistake is just another way of doing things.” Another said that “I try to make as many mistakes as quickly as I can in order to learn.”

Shortly after Wallenda fell to his death in 1978 while traversing a 23-meter-high tightrope in Puerto Rico, his wife, also an aerialist, discussed that fateful walk—perhaps his most dangerous: “All Karl thought about for three straight months prior to it was falling. It was the first time he'd ever thought about that, and it seemed to me he put all his energy into not falling, not into walking the tight-rope.” Mrs. Wallenda went on to say that her husband even went so far as to personally supervise the installation of the tightrope, making certain that the guy-wires were secure—“something he'd never even thought of before.” When Karl Wallenda put all of his energies into not falling rather than walking the tightrope, his characteristic success ended.

We refer to the peculiar combination of vision, [Page 1112]persistence, and optimism necessary for successful tightrope walking—the combination found in so many leaders—as the “Wallenda factor.” An example of the Wallenda factor comes from Fletcher Byrom, who retired several years ago as president of the Koppers Company, a diversified engineering construction and chemicals company. When asked about the hardest decision he ever had to make, he said, “I don't know what a hard decision is. I may be a strange animal, but I don't worry. Whenever I make a decision to start recognizing there's a strong likelihood to I'm going to be wrong. All I can do is the best I can. To worry puts obstacles in the way of clear thinking.”

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