Quitting After the First Failure

Business brain, episode 626 for Wednesday, February 26th. Levi Strauss Day 2025. Oh, the music didn't go. Why didn't the music go? Well, no, that's weird. You know what? I'm letting it roll. That's it. It's real. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain now with music, the show for folks who like to dissect and analyze and use bits and pieces of information from us, from you, to help tune our business brains each and every time we get together here in Durham, NH on Levi Strauss Day. I'm Dave Hamilton.

I love Levi Strauss here in Lafayette, California, where spring has sprung. Although we do call this false spring. But it's going to be like 70 degrees today.

Wow.

I'm Shannon Jean and I'm glad to be here.

Yeah, I'm happy to be here too. Levi Strauss. There's an interesting story there about. Oh, how it was. One of his customers went into business with Levi Strauss to produce jeans.

Yeah, yeah. And they started. Didn't they start. He was. Had stuff to make tents or something and then he said, hey, what we really need are pants.

It was a San Francisco based company. He was born in Germany, moved to the US at 18 and joined his brothers in New York in their wholesale dry goods business called Jay Strauss Brother and Company. And they sold supplies. And then he opened a wholesale business in San Francisco selling merch. Like. Yeah. Clothing bags, napkins, bedding, combs, tents. And then one of his customers, Jacob Davis, went into business with Strauss to.

Produce blue jeans and pants with rivets.

With riveted denim pants. That was it.

Yep. Very important stuff.

Yeah.

That's awes. That's probably one of the. I don't know if it's first, but one of the first examples of the sell like during the gold rush, the guys that made all the money picks and ax or whatever.

Picks the picks and shovels.

Business picks and shovels. Business that I always think of Levi Strauss was like, oh yeah, that guy. That company is still around, right?

I know.

And massive. Versus, you know, somebody banging away.

1850. 1871 was when Levi Strauss and company as the gene maker so cool went into business. It was 1853 when Levi Strauss and Company started in San Francisco, but their pivot was 18 years later in 1871. Yeah.

Incredible.

Amazing. I know.

Yes.

Yeah. Crazy. We are in the podcast business.

We are.

And one of the. Sorry about the lip smack there. I really try not to do that. One of the things that helps fuel the podcast business is reviews and Printer Dave sent in this week's featured review. By the way, we feature all the reviews, a must for any small business owner. He says this is an updated review for 2025. These guys have been putting out excellent show, an excellent show for 10 years now and it's as helpful and relevant as ever. They're approachable and easy to listen to and they speak from experience. Business Brain is still a favorite podcast and his review from 10 years prior was the Small Business Show. Our former name is hands down one of my favorite podcasts out there. I learned so much from the guys and if you own a small business, do yourself a favor and subscribe. I also find that just by listening, I am even more motivated and excited to work on my own business. And that's Printer Dave in Canada. Thank you.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Printer Dave. 10 year review updated. That is amazing.

You can update your review too if you've already done one and you want to update it. And I'm going to tell you why you want to. You certainly can. You go to BusinessBrain show review and that gets you as close as we can get you to where you can click on the review to do it. And the reason you're going to want to do it is that here in 2025 we are going to give away a MacBook to one of the our reviewers. And to get yourself on that list, all you got to do is put a new review in or update your current review. It's good stuff.

Sweet. And then email us at feedbackusinessbrain Show. Yes. So we can get your contact information so we can hand you that shiny MacBook.

That's the key. Otherwise we can't. We don't know how to do the. We don't know how to do the contest if we don't know how to reach you. Patrick sent in a question to feedbackusbrain show and it's feedback fairly simple. I'd like to hear what people like about using Google as a background back end versus Microsoft in their businesses. So do you prefer Google or Microsoft for your business? Patrick says, I like the Microsoft products better, but video conferencing over teams sucks.

Can I answer that please? No, I. I am still in that, you know, ecosystem of a little bit of both, but I would prefer not. I would prefer to use each of them less and less and I have found myself like I really don't use Google search anymore because it's just not as effective as it used to be. And I use an AI either perplexity or chat GPT I think it's so much better. I do use Gmail, so I. And I do share docs in. In stuff, so. And I do use Office products and that's about. I don't use any of their email. I don't like the video. I don't like teams at all. All I hear is bad things. And for video conferencing, if you. We did a pre show bonus topic on the live stream this week where we talked about Zoom and video conferencing and I love zoom. I think it's great and. But I'm not, I'm not a huge fan of either of those two.

Yeah.

How about you?

I leverage some of the Google stuff. Far less of the Microsoft stuff. I don't think I use any Microsoft apps at all.

Do you use Excel at all?

I use numbers. No, I use something called LibreOffice which is open source Microsoft Office alternative for the Mac and it's free. I get. Go ahead.

Do you have to convert when you send it back to people?

Yes, that's why I use LibreOffice. The answer is no, I don't.

That's nice.

I have it all set to save in natively read and write in XLSX or Docx formats. Nice. Yeah, because I have to, you know, I get spreadsheets for proposals all the time and I have to be. I can't open those in numbers on the Mac and convert them back. It blows everything up. Yeah. My clients would never work with me again. So we use LibreOffice and we open it and we edit it and we save it and it's just like they have no, no one knows that we use that versus Excel and it's free.

That's really good. I gotta look at that.

Yeah, that's great. And then for our cloud based stuff, the, you know, the Google Docs, if you will. Yeah, we use Google Docs sometimes with some of the businesses, especially with our customers and clients will use Google Sheets sometimes. But internally it's all Synology Office and Synology Drive which is hosted locally on our own Synology Disk Station and it works out great.

That's cool.

Yeah, it's awesome. And nobody has my data.

Yeah.

The only downside is if either the Disk Station goes south or my. It's hosted here at my office. So if the Internet connection, my office goes south, I don't have access to it.

Yeah. Now I would say you have to be a little more technically inclined to set something like that a little bit.

It's not as bad as you might think. I certainly. You could do it. Like there's no. You don't have to be super nerdy and you're fairly nerdy. But you know.

Exactly. I think I could do it. But yeah, somebody who's not in the tech stuff at all I think would be a little, it would be a little bit. But. But I do the options but you know, you certainly find somebody to help you set something like that up. I think that's pretty cool.

Yeah. And if I wanted to I could put a disk station at say my business partners location and they would sync with each other and so if one and they could do load balancing and all that stuff that if, if my connection went down but you know, his stayed up, everybody else could still get to it and it would still do all the syncing and you know, that's cool. So.

Yeah, I love it.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah.

Pretty cool.

Yeah.

So I also today want to talk about. I mentioned this last week and I have. I can give you some examples but I wanted to talk. There's a. I see it. I'm going to make sure I phrase this right way I see it in different ways is that often people, especially aspiring entrepreneurs stop after their first failure. So I want to dive into that a little bit and talk about and I'll give you an example that I've just seen a couple times recently is and I'm in this know I have this weird auction liquidation business and I bought stuff this way forever. And that business is one that easily lends itself to. I tried it once, it didn't work and I'm if I. It doesn't work right. Because I failed it the first time and it I. Oh. So now what I've done is after I've saw that happen a few times in you know, this last six months or so is I, I always say now this business is about the averages and profit over time. Not this deal is amazing or this first deal is terrible. And so I'm never going to do it again. Right.

And is there any business that's not that you.

Well wait, let me bring it up.

Is there any business that's not any business that lasts a long term that is not about the averages and the profit over time?

Yeah, that's. I love that.

So I haven't found one and I don't know that I want to run one.

Yeah, no, it's not. But I will say that especially aspirational entrepreneurs or I call civilians that are just trying to get into this thing. I don't Know where the idea comes from that, oh, I'm going to start, I'm going to have success like that. That was my finger snapping. Sorry. And then I'll have a little more success and then little more and then a little more. And the, and the chart, the line on the chart will just keep going up and to the right.

Success is not linear, folks. Yes, I'm here to tell you, and the month of February 2025 has been here to remind me that success is not linear, folks.

Always that way.

Suffer some losses occasionally.

Yes. And I think the way, the way I try to teach people is that it's that mindset of. It is the systems you're developing, it is this foundation that you're developing because everything you're learning is definitely linear. Right. So the stuff you're learning, it, it.

It'S accretive in that once you learn something, it adds to it. But it's not linear. I mean, I stay at plateaus and then I learn something and I step up.

Yeah, okay, right. Terminology, terminology.

But you're right, it moves in one direction.

Yeah, it moves in one direction. Okay.

Whereas. Whereas. Profits. No, do not.

Never. Revenue. Profit. Never. No, no. But. So if you can. Going into things, whether it's a new project, a new business, you're launching a new service, whatever, developing that mindset and sharing that with people that are working with you on the team or on this project, whatever it is that, hey, this may. We don't know if it's going to work. So we're going to experiment, we're going to start, we're going to try, we're going to. And we're going to adjust. Right. Because I guarantee it's not going to work the way you think it is. And so, yeah, that's. You got to come up with a system to cut off that mentality that this doesn't work. I see it like I post about stuff and I'll see it in the comments like, I tried this, I failed. This doesn't work. And it frustrates me to no end.

I am so patient. I know I'm an impatient person at my core. Fine. I fully admit that. And it's part of what fuels me. However, when someone doesn't know something, I like to teach, so I can generally be somewhat patient There. Where I lose all interest in teaching is when someone does that, when they say, drives me nuts. It drives me. It's, what are we?

It's such a bad.

What a mindset.

Yeah.

And I know we might be, we might be Insulting some of you out here. And I'm sorry, but, but it is true that certainly from my standpoint, if you're someone who. The first I tried it, I failed. And I think this all came up when I was talking about AI last week that I had somebody that was. That said, oh yeah, I hadn't used ChatGPT in two years, which is just boggles my mind. And the last time I tried it, I asked it to do a search about me and it got the data wrong. So it's wrong.

It's wrong.

No, you're just not popular enough for it to have data about you.

That's right. That's how we started talking about this. It is that. That com. The comment that I get of like, oh, I tried this, it didn't work. I lost some money or whatever. I, I don't do this. But what I want to do is go back in the public comment, say, it didn't work for you yet. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Didn't work yet. But if there is no yet, if you don't give it the Runway it.

Needs or you use a tool like Chat GPT the wrong way.

Yes, yes. And yeah, you're doing it. You're doing it wrong.

You're doing it now.

You're doing it wrong.

With any tool. With any tool.

It.

Like I used it wrong the first time. Of course, there's nothing. It's about me learning how to use the tool. It's. It's.

Yes.

You know, we have to have open minds and neuroplasticity and we got to be able to.

You got to adapt and program your moist robot brain. Yeah, that, that I'm gonna. Okay, it didn't work this time. I'm gonna change what I'm doing here and adapt. I'm gonna record this data that's gonna help me make a better decision next time. And you know, like with these auctions, I always tell everybody, don't ever buy anything until you already know what you can sell it for. Right. If you wanna be a reseller, that's the first law right there is, you know, oh, I've researched it. I can sell this for $100. So it's okay for me to buy it for 50 or whatever.

Right.

And. And if you go into it from an emotional standpoint, oh, I need to make extra money and I'm just going to go in and this looks like a good deal and I'm going to do this. I'm. You're. You're going to be disappointed. You're setting yourself up for, for failure.

It's, it's. Well, you are. Yeah, you're presuming failure. And I think that's the part that I now that we're kind of dissecting this, that's the part that chafes me so much, is the presumptive failure of something. It's. You're looking for it to fail.

Well, you could. I, I mean people have their own worldview, outlook on themselves and then they, what do they call that project? You're projecting it into this thing and it's like, well, if they think I can't even say the words, I'm A F A I L U R E. I just won't say it. I'll say you are a failure if that's what you want to think. But I can never think that way. And so if, if you think that way about yourself, well, you're positioning yourself to fail. And it's just one more thing that did not work. I tried that. It didn't work. That doesn't work. This doesn't work. But you're selling yourself short.

There's the fear of success. And it's often been said by people certainly much smarter and more learned than me, if that's a word. I think it is that the fear of success and fear of failure are two sides of the same coin.

Absolutely. I see people sabotage themselves all the time. All the time. And so yeah, anyhow, it drives me crazy. But I think the answer is to adjust your framework before you even start, before you take even that first action is to understand like, well, I never lose. Right. I either win or learn. Which is a quote somebody made up. And so if you're like that, I tried to start a software company, failed miserably, but wound up publishing a best selling book because of that failure in the software company. So just change the way you, you look at it. And, and if you have other tips, you know, feedback at BusinessBrain show tell us other ways that we can share with everybody so we can all level up together.

Hey look, the music worked right on cue even.

It's amazing.

I don't know, I don't know why there was a four second delay at the beginning of the episode, but that's what we do. Thanks for hanging out with us folks. Make sure to visit BusinessBrain Show Review. We would love your review. And we're throwing a MacBook out there because. Well, because that's what it means to us. Feedback at BusinessBrain show as well. Send us a note like Patrick did. And we'll discuss it on the episode. And also let us know. Are you Microsoft, are you Google, or are you something else? We'll see you on Friday.

Yep. See you Friday.

Later. Keep living that charmed life.