I’ll never forget before I got married someone told me “I’ll give you some advice, learn to say two words, “I’m sorry”.
He was right, sort of. I don’t know if they are the two most important words I needed to learn, I can think of four others, “I love you” and “compromise”. But “I’m sorry” is right up there, if you mean it. If you say it, you have to mean it, or it makes matters worse.
So today I happened to see a TV commercial, one for JCPenny. Never saw anything like it before. A mea culpa from a corporation? It sort of caught me off guard, in fact I had to go to YouTube to watch it again. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qKQAivS0xsE
(Or mobile device below)
http://youtu.be/qKQAivS0xsE
I, for one, was impressed. Give that commercial writer credit, that was a tightly crafted, well-written piece of work. It resonates as an apology, but with the added bonus of a solution: “what matters from mistakes is what we learn. We learned a very simple thing, to listen to you. To hear what you need, to make your life more beautiful.” Let’s hope they are being honest, but we can all learn a lesson from those words… to hear, to listen, to learn from mistakes and to focus on making life more beautiful.
It’s the focus of this blog too…look for good, search for positive, find the why, and then build on it to live the dream, YOUR dream. One way to do that is to realize none of us is perfect, we all make mistakes, we all lose our way and we all fail. And it’s OK to say, you know what, I was wrong and I’m sorry. And to get better, to truly get better it’s important to listen. The way to greater success is to be a good listener, pick up good ideas and then take action. Remember what philosopher and motivational speaker Jim Rohn says, “if you want things to change, you have to change. To have more than you’ve got, you must become more than you are”.
Who would have thought a major retailer would own up, say they’re sorry, tell you they’re going to learn from their mistakes and change for the better? The commercial ends with this line: “Come back to JCPenny, we heard you. Now, we’d love to see you”.
Whether the commercial leads to more sales remains to be seen. But I feel the same way and I’ll borrow a line for this blog.
Come back next time, I’d love to see you.
Until next time, thanks for taking the time.
Mark