Who Defines Failure?
If you’ve ever tried anything, odds are you’ve failed at something.
If you’ve ever tried anything, odds are you’ve failed at something.
But, hold on. Is that really failure?
I would argue that failure, as such, doesn’t really exist. Whatever it was just didn’t work. And it may not have worked for a myriad of reasons, some in your control, some not.
The only true failure is not trying.
A few years ago, I had the idea to start making soap. So I did. I started a soap company called Round Soap Records. As the name implies, the soap is round and the names and colors of soap were all based on music (Purple Rain, Whiter Shade of Pale . . . that sort of stuff). I built the web site, began making the soap, started a corporation, social media, sold the soap at flea markets and tried to get it into shops.
He’s what I learned:
Personal hygiene items are, in a word, personal.
Scaling a novelty item like this on a macro level, on a micro budget is challenging.
Marketing is harder than it seems.
People almost always are genuinely interested if you’re genuine.
I didn’t love making soap.
Clever doesn’t guarantee success.
Salesmanship is more of an art than I gave it credit for.
Yes, it’s true, everyone has an opinion.
Eventually, I ankled Round Soap Records. It was too much of a financial, emotional and time drain. Which I had anticipated, but after two years, I wasn’t seeing the kind of progress I had hoped, or projected, for.
I still think it’s a clever idea. Who knows . . .
Was Round Soap Records a failure? Absolutely not. A disappointment? Absolutely. Sure, it’s a bummer that I didn’t get to sell my soap at Target or Wal-Mart or make a million dollars. Isn’t that the vision of every entrepreneur? Maybe not, but it was my vision.
What no one tells you about having an entrepreneurial spirit is that the cards are almost always stacked against you.
Well, wait, that’s all they tell us and we just don’t listen?
While Round Soap Records was a bummer, it doesn’t mean I didn’t get little wins here and there. I did. I was lucky enough to have my soap in a number of stores along the East Coast, so that was cool.
But we only hear the stories about the really successful entrepreneurs. And then everyone thinks they can be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Who wants to hear about the people who didn’t succeed?
But the fact is, if that entrepreneurial spirit is in you, it’s in you. You’re always going to figure you’re the exception to the rule. And you may be. You certainly should try to be.
Thomas A. Edison: “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Whatever disappointment I may feel about having tried and not succeeding is so much better than spending the rest of my life wondering “I bet my life would be different if I did that soap thing.”
Rocky Balboa: “It ain’t about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can GET hit and keep getting up.”
I decided the next thing to do had to be a little more budget conscious and more in my wheelhouse. It also had to be something I enjoyed more than making soap.
It then dawned on me that back of the house (kitchen, chefs, etc.) stories were all the rage in television and in print. And I spent the better part of 15 years toiling away in the front of the house (waiters, bartenders, etc.) and yet no one was telling their stories.
Realizing that a television show was more than I could do myself and way out of my budget range, I decided to start a digital micro-magazine (about 5–6 articles per issue) built as a smart phone application. It had low start up costs so I partnered with a service provider that provided an easy to use tool (periodical.co) that made it super easy to build the app. And then I could outsource a lot of the writing while still keeping control.
So, I launched wait(er) Magazine , a monthly subscription micro-magazine (.99/mo) that focused on the stories of the front of the house of the food service industry. It was available as an App across mobile and web platforms like Apple, Nook and Android.
This was a unique idea that allowed me to share my own stories as well as sharing the stories others had. Because if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, if it’s one thing you have, it’s stories.
If you’ve ever hunted for writing work on the web, and luck enough to find it, you know you’ve been egregiously underpaid, if at all. I didn’t want to do that. I decided I was going to pay writers. And pay them a fair wage.
Since I was charging for the subscription, it didn’t seem fair to NOT pay writers. That’s just asking for bad karma. I posted a bunch of ads on craigslist across the country and selected the best of what I received.
My three goals with wait(er) Magazine were one, to provide a venue for unpublished writers to share stories about their experiences in the food service industry. Two, to provide writers an opportunity to receive compensation for their work and three to keep advertising out of the picture.
Here’s what I learned:
Some people are not very good at writing.
Some people are very good at writing.
Some people have very high opinions of themselves and their ability to write.
Marketing is harder than it seems.
I still love writing and it’s nice to share that with other people who love writing.
It’s exciting, motivating, frustrating, disappointing to find someone who is simply a better writer than me, but mostly exciting. It helps you raise your game.
It’s a fine line between vanity project and actual business model.
Even if you pay writers, they still procrastinate.
It’s hard to make every decision.
You’ve got know when to pivot.
Humility over hubris will always win.
Ultimately, my mistake with wait(er) Magazine wasn’t that I paid the writers, it was that I paid them too much. I had anticipated a faster ramp up for the alleged “boom” of micro-magazines (that boom never happened). And while I kept picking up subscribers weekly it wasn’t at a rate that I felt comfortable with.
And while I wasn’t hemorrhaging money, I was losing money. At the rate I was picking up subscribers, it would’ve been longer than I wanted to wait to reach the break even point. So I ankled the micro-magazine app of wait(er) Magazine, the articles are still archived online.
So, was this a failure? No. If we define success solely as being financially profitable, then yes, it was a failure. BUT, I was doing something I enjoyed, I learned A LOT and provided a venue, and gave exposure to some terrific writers. That’s a success. Not a perfect success. And that’s not looking back through rose colored glasses. wait(er) Magazine was a great experience.
So then, who defines failure?
I don’t know because it doesn’t really exist to me. Not as long as you put yourself out there and try. Sure, it may not work and you may get chastised, ridiculed and loose money. All of that is still a better feeling than spending your whole life wondering “what if.”
Besides, if you don’t do it, rest assured, someone else will.
A big downside is that people will inherently dump all their own fears and insecurities on you and your idea(s) (“Someone’s already done that”, “That’s too risky”, “What if you fail?”) . . . until you achieve success (“I knew you could do it”, “It was such a good idea”, “Can I borrow some money?”) — I’m presuming that is what happens anyway.
If you want to do anything yourself, you can never let the word “failure” be part of your vernacular.
You’ve got to know and understand that the odds are against you. Despite what you read and see, in business, people stumble and fall more than they run across the finish line. The trick is to get up and keep going.
And look, I recognize how odd it is to be quoting Sylvester Stallone but I’ll be damned if he didn’t nail it with that quote above. It is all about how hard you can get hit and keep getting back up.
You can go to the best schools in the world and learn the mechanics of being creative, however we define creative: business person, writer, actor, filmmaker, photographer, playwright, etc. The one thing they can’t teach you at all those schools is how to be creative.
For example, you can be taught how to shoot a picture. How to frame the photograph, focus the image, develop the film (yes, they still do that). But you simply can not be taught how to see the image. Being creative is an entirely independent experience.
And entrepreneurs are creative.
Creativity doesn’t necessarily mean making something out of nothing either. More than anything it means believing in yourself even when you’re so full of doubt you want to scream or bury your head in a pillow and cry. It means having the vision, drive and tenacity to find the energy and angle to keep going, pivot as needed and the intelligence to know when say when.
Seth Godin: Persistence is doing something again and again until it works. It sounds like ‘pestering’ for a reason.
Tenacity is using new data to make new decisions to find new pathways to find new ways to achieve a goal when the old ways didn’t work.
Telemarketers are persistent, Nike is tenacious.
Have I given up or stopped trying? Nope.
Neither should you.
