Fall seven times and stand up eight.
Japanese proverb
The meaning of the quote
In the late 1930s, a young mechanic named Soichiro Honda sent 50 piston rings to Toyota. Only 3 passed inspection.
Honda had skipped a lot of school as a boy, and now he could see the cost. At 30, he started night classes at a technical high school in Hamamatsu to learn what was wrong with his metal. About 2 years after the first rejection, Toyota placed a large order.
Then the war came. Bombing raids in 1944 and an earthquake in 1945 wrecked his factories. Honda sold what was left to Toyota, and in 1946 he opened a small workshop in Hamamatsu where he fitted little engines to bicycles.
That workshop grew into Honda Motor Company.
Years later, Honda summed up his career in 5 words.
“Success is 99 percent failure.”
The quote makes the same point with smaller numbers. You will fall, and probably more than once. What decides the outcome is whether you get back up one more time than you went down.
In Japan, the proverb has a mascot. The Daruma doll is a round papier-mâché figure with no arms or legs and a weighted base, so when you knock it over it rocks straight back up. Its shape comes from a legend about Bodhidharma, the monk who founded Zen Buddhism. He is said to have meditated facing a wall for so long that his arms and legs wasted away.
A new Daruma comes with 2 blank white eyes. You paint in one eye when you set a goal and the other when you reach it. At the end of the year, many people take their dolls to a temple to be burned, even if the goal never came true, and buy a new one to start over.
The quote gives you 1 more rise than falls. One way to read that extra rise is as the first one, the moment you got up to try before anything went wrong.
Getting back up works best when you change something first. Honda didn’t send Toyota another box of the same bad rings. He went to school, worked out what went wrong and tried again.
Action steps
You can borrow the Daruma ritual with nothing more than a notebook and a pen.
- Paint the first eye. Write down 1 goal you want to reach in the next 12 months and draw a single eye next to it. The SMART goals framework can help you make it clear enough to know the day you reach it.
- Write down every fall. Each time something goes wrong, write 1 line about what happened and 1 line about what you’ll change next time. For Honda, that second line was night school.
- Count your rises. Every time you try again after a setback, put a tick next to the goal.
Draw the second eye when you reach it. If the year ends first, start a new page and keep going.
Toyota rejected 47 of Honda’s first 50 piston rings. Today his name is on cars and motorcycles all over the world.
Resources
- Soichiro Honda (Wikipedia)
- Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa (Article)
- Daruma doll (Wikipedia)
- Grit by Angela Duckworth (Book)
- Grit: The power of passion and perseverance (YouTube)
- Failure + Reflection + Another try (Article)
- The SMART goals framework (Article)
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