Episode Details

We talk a lot about learning from failure. But what about success? It might be quietly doing more damage than you think.

In this episode of the Church Staff Book Club, Jonathan Malm and Jason Young dig into Chapter 2 of How to Get a Return on Failure by John Maxwell. The big idea: success and failure don't belong in isolation, and when we treat them that way, both become dangerous.

🎧 What We Cover in This Episode:

• Why success can deceive you just as much as failure can discourage you
• The danger of "I am a success" vs. "I am a failure" and why both are wrong
• Why the most successful people are sometimes the worst ones to write the book
• How repeated success quietly causes you to misalign your values and your why
• Why churches struggle to define success and how failure helps realign it
• The importance of doing an autopsy on your wins, not just your losses
• Jonathan's story: the tuxedo skit that nobody learned anything from
• Jason's honest confession: falling into the identity trap with book reviews
• Two practical tools to evaluate success and failure: Five Whys and Kaizen
• The quarterly journal idea for tracking your team's progress like a scoreboard

📖 We're Reading: How to Get a Return on Failure by John Maxwell Follow along chapter by chapter with us!

💬 Key Quotes from This Episode:
"I am a success is just as dangerous as I am a failure."
"Success can inflate your ego. Failure attacks it. How do you live inside both?"
A bad day doesn't make you a bad leader."

🛠 Free Tools Coming: Jonathan and Jason are building individual and team debriefing tools based on this conversation. Download them at churchstaffbookclub.com

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