Embracing Failure to Achieve Success

Hey, Dave, I have a confession to make.

What's that, man?

I'm a huge failure. I feel I've failed way, way more times than I've succeeded in my small business career.

Oh. Oh, yeah. I, you know, I, I, as we were preparing for this episode, I, I had a refrain in my head and, and it was, I'm a loser. Right. You know, like. Because that's that. Yeah.

We talk about positivity and the whole framework stuff on the show all the time. And I, and I think it's always good to dip back in and talk about failure. You know, I've lost millions of dollars. I've walked away from a company that I founded for just for a buck.

Yeah.

I've invested in countless businesses and projects that have never created a dime of revenue. But there's a flip side to that, and I'd love to dig deep into that today on the small business.

Well, yeah, let's talk about it. Yeah. Because there's a lot of different types of failure, and they can very much lead to good things.

They can.

Are you ready to small business, man?

I am absolutely ready to small business.

He's Shannon Jean. I'm Dave Hamilton, and this is Small Business Show 291 for Wednesday, September 2nd. Thursday, September 3rd. See, I failed already. Shannon. 2020. Yes, indeed. And Shannon, you are right that this is show number two ninety. No, I think this is. Is that right? Is it. It's not 291. Am I get. Am I failing at that, too?

I think it's 292.

So we already did 291. Is that right?

Let's see. Yeah, we already did 291 was with Victoria last week.

It sure was. Oh, sorry, man. We're just failing left and right.

They're stacking up. But that's okay.

But that's, but that's kind of the point is that these, for me, anyway, my life often looks like a series of failures that just sort of cascade on one another until there's success at the end of the road.

Yeah, that's right. And I think that talking about it and going through it hopefully will help others out there that are at different stages. And maybe you're in the, you know, the bowels of a terrible failure right now, but know that you're going to get out the other side and you'll be able to look back on it, you know, for me.

Don't talk about bowels. I had surgery yesterday, Shannon. Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

That's why it's not Wednesday, September 2nd, it's Thursday, September 3rd.

That's correct. Yeah. We had little hiccup there. But you're back and you're safe and you're. Did you do the belly button upgrade? They give you a little jewelry, you.

Know, I asked, but it turns out no. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, I gave them one instruction. I said to the anesthesiologist before, you know, things started, I said, look, you have there. You have many jobs here, but one is the most important job you have. She said, what's that? And I said to wake me up at the end. And so she succeeded. See, I don't know if there was a series of failures in there. All I know is she woke me up at the end, and that's the. That was how I judged success. So there you go.

That's pretty good. Yeah, that's good.

Yeah.

So, you know, and that. That's important, too, is looking for every. Every success. You know, the. The key for me is I failed so many times. Some of them huge, some, most of them smaller, thankfully. But I've never let one of those failures stop me from eventually moving on. Developing that revenue stack that would help build wealth over time. And, you know, there's a saying, you know, I never fail, either win or learn. And it's been attributed to a few different people, but. So we'll just let it hang out there.

I don't know who actually said it. Yeah, yeah.

But my premise here for today's show is much of how failure impacts your life is how you frame it, how you look at it, the way you spin the story. And we talk about that on the show all the time, that as small business owners and entrepreneurs, we have the luxury of creating our own story. Right?

Yes.

And I think so many people miss that opportunity is, you know, you get to frame it. You get to create how things work, you know, and you get to come up with the story, how you share it, what you talk about to. Not only to other people, but to yourself, which may be more important.

Well, I think that's the most important. Yeah, yeah. Because you got to believe it before you can, you know, sell it to others.

That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So for me, I always. It's all about persuasion, and I'm trying to persuade myself that that failure helped me to learn something valuable. And you may have to write it down, you know, whatever else you're going to pull, pull out of it, and then you can build on what you learned from that failure. And sometimes you need to really distance yourself before you can look for that tidbit of information. Because you may be. There may be anger, there may be disappointment, self loathing. You know, if you failed and you're just tearing yourself up on it, but you got to keep working at it each day and look at, you know, what positive things have come out of those failures. Very, very important, I think, as you think and how you think about it.

Yeah, yeah. You have to be able to look. I mean, most, you know, there's the other phrase that is, you know, most overnight successes take 20 years. Right. Or happen over the course of 20 years. But, you know, those 20 years are not usually all roses. Right. And so you have to look at every success that you have. This is part of how I hack my own brain or persuade myself. Two terms meaning the same thing is whenever I have a success, I do take a minute and look at. I post mortem it like, okay, what did it take to get here? It's like, look, I failed at this, I failed at that. And I'm almost looking for the failures because I want to associate the failures with a positive feeling. And so it's like, right, okay, I did that. So the next time, it's like, all right, we failed. Great. What did we learn? Let's, you know, let's. Let's try again, or let's move that forward. And I. A word that I've. I've found myself trying to use more and more, and I think it's starting to get into my, you know, internal vernacular is I don't try to say, let's get past this. Let's, you know, forget about this. It's, let's get through this. Because that way you're embracing the reality of, okay, this is a failure. And of course, the year 2020, and especially the whole Covid thing, is a great opportunity to say, let's get through this. We're not gonna go back, we're not gonna forget about it, but we have to find a way through it that does allow us all to succeed and do things. And that's happening in varying degrees, depending on your industry and all that stuff, of course. But we are getting through it. And it's not ignoring the realities of what's going on, but it's accepting them and then figuring out, okay, well, how do I carve a path that sidesteps those things and gets through the problem? But you can do that in your own business. There's a million different levels that you can do that at. But I Like that phrase for myself, let's get through this.

Yeah, it makes sense.

And Apple, when they were in real trouble and the markets crashed and everything, they said that they were going to innovate their way through that problem. And I found that very, at the time, it was like, oh, what a really smart thing to say. I mean, I know they're speaking to investors and potential customers. I mean, any Apple Press event is very carefully crafted. But it was Steve Jobs that said it, like, we're going to innovate our way through this downturn or whatever it was. I was like, look at that. And then of course they, they stood up to that. They proved it. But yeah, I like, I just like the terminology. So I've been trying to make it my default language and I'm getting there.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, yeah. And, and a lot of that, how you, how you frame it and the speaking to others, you know, when you discuss this failure with your employees, your spouse, whoever, you know, you want to have that framing set up to where it serves your story. Even when you're telling yourself, who do you want to be? Do you want to be the flaky person that jumps from one scheme to the next or the focused, independent thinker? It's working hard to find success. That's. Oh, I just haven't found it yet. But I learned this. My takeaway is this. Remember, you get to choose that. That is the power of being independent. Being an entrepreneur is you get to set that framework.

And both of those things describe exactly the same person and same steps they're taking. You can just choose to look at it two different ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's really good. And, and you know, it's easier to do it once you've had six. Some success, obviously.

Yeah.

The more success you have, you're going to find it's, it is easier to talk about failure. There's no doubt about it. You can't.

I guess that's true. I, I still have trouble with it, but anyway, yeah, I have trouble with.

It, but I like, I, I, I can't think of myself in a, in a negative way. I just, I just have totally different outlook.

I, me, when you, when you go like to a Beck or when we could go to concerts, when you'd go to a Beck concert, you wouldn't sing along with the I'm a Loser loser.

Song because it's just not me. It's not true. And I change the words. I just make it you.

Yeah, I know. It's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And.

And there I was singing the exact same words, but from the Beatles at the beginning of the episode. That's right. Yep. Yeah.

Because I'm just such a firm believer in that, you know, we're programming ourselves every single day. I was working with a woman in this face grip Facebook group that I, that I manage about, you know, selling online and things, and she's, you know, creating marketing material and all this kind of really great stuff. And I, and I said, hey, not only is this good for your customers, it's good for yourself. Because you see this now. You know, you're looking at these branded materials, bags and shipping material, all this kind of stuff. And I go, that really helps your framing of, hey, I'm a legitimate business, you know, I'm, I'm moving forward. So how you think and how the things you look at, the things you listen to has a dramatic impact on your outlook and how you frame that stuff. And that's what has worked for me and allowed me to get through so much failure in my life and convince people all around me that we're going to get through it for sure.

So I have a tip that I came up with very recently. In fact, I mean, I think at times I've employed it over the years, but I came up with it recently that I want to share. However, the next thing that I want to share is our two sponsors. If that works for you, Mr. Gene.

That works for me, man. Yeah.

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Very counterintuitive.

Yes. But I'm finding it super. It frees me. It allows me to move forward, which is weird, but it works. Yeah.

You know, I heard a term, I was driving home from the mountains yesterday, and I heard a term that I want to explore more on the upcoming show is a cult of positivity and how it can impact you in a negative way and related to business. And I would think that, that thinking about it, I definitely have this issue. And your technique is an interesting flip side to that. Being able to get that negativity out there to help you, help you get through it.

Well, it's no longer, like, when I'm at the end of that process, it's no longer a bad thing. It's a thing that I've now learned at least one thing from. Because processing it, there's always something that comes out of it, you know. Well, we didn't get that sale. Well, why, you know, oh, well, we couldn't provide feature X to the customer. Okay, fair. Like now we get to decide, is that important to us? Because do we want to go through whatever we need to go through to be able to offer feature X? And now we can. Maybe we don't get to go back and get that customer, but the next one we don't lose because we have it, you know, or whatever it is. Or we can decide. No, you know, it's totally not worth our time. All right, great. Well, we've just proven to ourselves that, you know, we've had a real world example and we are okay not having feature X and losing that type of sale. Great. Moving on. No problem. You know, we can revisit that down the road if we want. So.

Yeah, I don't know, it's just. Yeah, I like it.

Yeah.

One of the ways that I, you know, have come to deal with that failure is using humor.

Right.

And to help me get through it, I, I think you gain more fans, more respect when you tell like self effacing stories about your failures. Because most people, you know, they know about your success one way or another. Hopefully, you know, they see it around you. Right, right. The way you carry yourself, maybe where you live, you're building, you know, where your business is. And, and as business owners, we're constantly pushing this marketing story, you know, this how we're great at that, which is, which is important. But when you share your failures, I think it really endears people to you and it shows them that, you know, you're just human. Right. And so again, it comes with having some success. You can't start out this way. But one of the things that has helped me connect with people is like I talked about on the show before, I think we even did a whole show about it, just the failure resume. And I, I read about this a while back and I thought, gosh, that's a great idea. And so, you know, we'll put a link in the show notes of. I keep an updated failure resume up on my blog and anybody can see it and I've had lots of people comment about it that, oh, that's, that's really different because I talk about my successes all the time and, but to have those listed out there. And of course I put a positive spin on just about everyone. I learned this and I met this person and this, I created this Partnership with that because it failed. And, you know, but it's something that, that you might want to look at and, you know, it works. It allows you to connect with people on. On another level.

No, yeah, that. That does make sense. That it. Yeah, you got to give people something to connect to. Like you were saying last week when, you know, the, The. That speaker took the stage and said, I'm going to tell you a story about, you know, my. My failure that I've never shared before or something like that.

Really powerful.

Yeah. Yeah.

Especially when I said, please don't tell anybody. Don't put it on the Internet.

Yeah, don't put it on the Internet. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's really good. It's. But on the flip side, you know, I think having a strong. We. We've talked about it here on the show. The. A success list.

Right.

Even small, little successes that you can look at. And, you know, because people often overlook their own successes, you know, you need to build yourself up because that's going to allow you to get through this, fit these failures quicker and to be able to kind of tease out the important parts of that failure. And that success list, small ones, large ones. It's going to help you overcome the inevitable failures. And, you know, we'll put a link up there on the show. We've got. Excuse me. A description of kind of how the success list can work. We all have successes every single day. I guarantee it.

Yeah.

And you can start out small and you can add some big ones along the way, but I would say the small ones really stack up and. And they're just as important. So what we're trying to do here is, you know, build you up enough and point out all the things that are working right. So you have the freedom to talk about those failures. Which also has some really powerful benefits to you as well.

Yeah, yeah. No, well, that success list is for you to hack your brain, to remind you of all those things that are just like, yep, here it is. Like, oh, that's right. I. Yep. I. I am a competent human being. I can do this stuff. One, you know, little or even one big failure isn't going to stop me. I know how to have success even, you know, and you can measure that any way you want, and that'll get you.

And you're comfortable with it, right? Yeah, that. That list gets you comfortable with. Okay, I'm successful because I think many of us had a. Have a hard time kind of patting ourselves on the back and recognizing that. That we've made, you know, this was a success and I did well here. And we're all often, I think we're all taught to, you know, recognize other people's success. But it's, it's maybe even more so right to recognize yourself, especially as a small business owner, because you're constantly giving out attaboys and patting other people on the back. But there's not a lot, you know, when you sign the paycheck, there's not a lot of people telling you you're doing a great job. You have to find those things that tell.

You have to tell yourself. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, you got to tell yourself and you. So I think it's all about creating a mix. Success obviously helps you live, you pay the bills, create your business, build wealth over time. And along the way, these failures should make you stronger, wiser, hopefully without derailing your march towards inevitable world domination that we know you're on. And it's just being able to put these things together and so that you can succeed.

So you can succeed. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And you know, one of the things that I often see too, that I wanted to bring up and get your feedback and see if you've seen this as well, is I see business owners over and over, always swinging for the fences, to use a baseball analogy, you know, to seeking out home runs over and over and over. And I have not done that. And maybe I missed out on lots of opportunities. Maybe, maybe. But what I've done is focused on sticking with that baseball analogy. The singles and the doubles with an occasional home run when those opportunities came along. And by building out those day to day skills, it's allowed me to react quickly when much larger opportunities were available or came along.

Well, that's it. The singles and the doubles create your cash flow. Yeah, for me, you know, and it's like, let's just get it, get the machine running. And then like you said, when the opportunity comes along, now you're prepared, more prepared.

Don't have that day to day stuff going, you know, I wouldn't have been able to take advantage of those bigger opportunities. I wouldn't have had this, the background skills. Right. I wouldn't have been able to convert things really quickly. And that's a really good point that you, that you bring up the, your cash flow and everything else. And I've done that as well. I always have things that I do each day that generate revenue. I've talked about it on the show before, you know, and I always look at that, how much revenue have I generated today? And there's long term projects that maybe you're going to do really well on. But you know, okay, I've got to pay the rent, I've got to pay the mortgages, I've got to meet payroll. Then I move up from there for larger opportunities. So you create this stable revenue stack that I know that even if I fail on some of these larger projects, it's not going to be wiped. I'm not going to be wiped out.

Right, right.

I still have these other revenue streams coming in that are good, that are stable and they keep things moving forward. And it gives you or gives me the freedom to experiment and take more risk like that. And I would encourage you to look at that. How are you stacking up the revenue to make sure that, you know, the day to day stuff just works? Because you can't risk it. You can't risk not meeting payroll in two weeks because you took some big, you know, gamble that something was going to pay off. You've got to have all that stuff covered.

I think so. I, I'm certainly more comfortable when I have that stuff covered. I mean, I, I know, you know, there's stories, I mean, especially a meeting payroll. There's the, the famous story of how Fred Smith saved and created FedEx.

I just listened to that.

Yeah, right. You know where he, he knew he was on his way back to Memphis. He knew they didn't have enough money to make payroll. And he was connecting through Chicago and he knew that what he was doing if he got on the plane to Memphis was to go back to shut down the business. And he's like, I don't want to do that. So he looked on the board and he saw a flight to Vegas and he took the flight to Vegas and he put it all, I believe he put it all on red. I'm sure whichever color he put it on is very important to the company. But he took all of the company's money and put it on red or black, but it was one of them. And he won. And so he basically doubled his money. You don't quite double your money because that's not how Vegas works. The house always wins. And then he used that to fuel the company and off they went. I'm sure Fred Smith will tell you because he's happy to, to, you know, talk about himself or always was. And, and he says, like, I'm sure I'll tell you that that fueled future risks that he took. Like, okay, you know, you can take these big crazy risks and really get it done. And, and you know, they proved that over the years. I mean, you know, when they partnered with the postal service because FedEx realized that they had all these planes sitting around all day waiting for the evening sort of so they could fly their overnight packages around the country. It was like, wait a minute, the Postal Service needs stuff transported. We could do that during the day. And now suddenly they leveraged all these planes and all these pilots that were, you know, sitting there and generated a whole lot more revenue for the company and for the pilots and for everybody else. You know, so, but I mean, you know, you need to be, you need to be willing to take some level of risk for your company.

Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you know, if you, if you, I would argue that if you build up this, these different revenue streams and have this revenue stack, it allows you to take more of that risk. You're just going to get more comfortable with it because, you know, oh, I'm not going to have to go to Vegas and on red and do it. And one of the most fascinating things that stuck out, I listened to podcast called Business wars and they were talking about FedEx and UPS and the first day that they started the overnight service with FedEx at one plane and they were hoping to get, you know, maybe eight or nine hundred packages as the first day. And when Fred called back in the next, hey, you know how to go tonight? What do we, you know, work? What do we do? Da, da, da. And they had six packages. Not 600. Yeah, but six. And you know, it just goes to show it's that age old thing starting out. You just don't know how, how things are going to work out. But you know, even those small little things and you know, he didn't say, oh well, it's not going to work, you know, six. We got to keep going, got to keep fine tuning it. And you know, I come back to what I started in the beginning is that framing how you frame the story. And I know that Fred Smith is way more comfortable telling that story about six packages now as a.

Yes.

You know, multi mega millionaire, whatever, he's, whatever he's worth.

Yeah.

And built, you know, this, this huge organization, this worldwide thing that, that, that's a great part of being successful is that you can talk about how much you've screwed up.

Yes.

I can't tell you how freeing that is. And it works great. And like I said it people, you gain more followers. You know, we talk about building your personal brand. It endears you to people because all of us have failure in our life. And if all you hear is somebody talking about how great they've done and over and over, I've never had, you know, my success stacked on top of. It's not authentic.

Right, right.

We pick it up, you know, our BS detectors, like. Well, you know, I don't know about that. So when you can slip those failure stories in there, they're really powerful. I would encourage you to look at that. So my key takeaway here, you know, is build that solid revenue stack. Start small, don't overlook the. The free money on the table. If there's some way to, you know, generate revenue, build solid cash flow systems, then to your point, Dave, take more risk, try new things. See what happens. And when you fail, take what you learned and then start on the next thing.

Yeah, that's it. That's the way. That's. I think so. Yeah.

Definitely works.

It definitely works. It. Well, it has to. You just make it work.

That's right. There's no alternative. Right.

That's.

You're not gonna go work. You're not gonna go work for somebody. No, you're gonna work for yourself. You're gonna have that freedom. You're gonna build your business, then you're gonna go build another business. Maybe along the way you're gonna sell that business or more than one.

Yep.

All of it is going to help build up wealth, not just monetarily, but everything that we learn with these small businesses. And we're excited to have you aboard listening. For sure. For sure.

That's all I got this week, man. You got anything else? You good? Yeah.

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Take care, everybody.