This is a transcript excerpt from a Capitalism.com YouTube Q&A episode ("How to Fail 75% of the Time and Still Succeed? | #FFLTV Ep 11 QA", Feb 17, 2017) featuring Ryan Daniel Moran answering a viewer question about his failures. Moran estimates a ~25% hit rate for his entrepreneurial ideas ("batting average of about .250"), describes common personal failures (workaholism, difficulty disconnecting), and recounts specific business setbacks: shutting down a cat-scratcher brand run by a partner, a timeline app that was overtaken by Facebook (loss ~ $50,000), unsuccessful tech investments including several six-figure losses, and a modestly performing restaurant (Fresh Planet in Avon, Ohio). He emphasizes learning from failure, doubling down on strengths (internet/physical product brands), and reframing what constitutes true failure.
Questions this video answers
About .250 (25%).
Approximately $50,000.
A restaurant called Fresh Planet.
Yes — he states he has had several six-figure investments that failed.
YouTube commenter pinch and Squeal asks, would you please talk about your failures in.
This world of social media where everybody is just putting up what's great in their lives? I actually really appreciated this question. This came as a comment in YouTube where someone was saying, you have all these successes. What about the failures? Oh boy, I've got quite a few of them. Look, I actually say that in my life, if I was a baseball player, my batting average as an entrepreneur wouldn't look so good. I, I probably have a batting average of about 250, which means that about 25% of the entrepreneurial ideas really bear fruit. But the ones that do do amazingly well. I don't talk about the things that we're experimenting with that don't work so well. Maybe I should. Maybe it would just humanize the entrepreneurial experience a little bit more. I think the most failures that come up regularly is as an entrepreneur, I sometimes have workaholic tendencies. So as the result of working 12, 16 hour days grinding my way to success, I think the biggest failure that comes up for me right now in the totality of my life is the fact that I have a really hard time disconnecting and I have to force myself not to check email, not to check Facebook, not to check Slack so that I can actually decompress because I will fill in the time void with work. And what that ends up doing is I see all the problems and then I need to fix them all and then I get exhausted and then there's no more creativity. But I have learned in the last couple of years that the more structure that I can give myself to actually free up time, that recharges the batteries and allows me to be creative and productive. But I have projects that have been failures too. I've never talked about this publicly, but the cat scratchers that are so famous in my most watched video was run by Esther's mom and she decided she wanted to be a full time mom and didn't want to build that into a big brand. And so we shut that down. So that wasn't some big success. It served a little purpose, but it wasn't so much of a success as that we shut it down and we could have kept like beating our head against the wall trying to build a business or a brand that neither one of us cared about that much, but we chose not to and so we let the meow mommy go. I've also been very public that I have invested in and started tech companies. They didn't go so well. That's not my skill set. I don't need it to be my skill set. So I had a business called my Timeline which was basically a way to archive your life. We've talked about that here on the show in and like a week after we went live with that Facebook came out with Timeline and just crushed, crushed that little business and I had like 50 grand and that that was lost. I would even like. I've had several investments, six figure investments. Like I doled out cash and the business didn't go anywhere and there went my six figure investment. I have, I own a restaurant in Avon, Ohio called Fresh Planet that when compared to a lot of my Internet businesses the numbers on that pale.
They don't look nearly as good as if I had just like bought a cash flowing website or bought an e commerce business or put it into real estate that basically keeps the lights on, has a little bit left over and serves as a tax write off at the end of the year. I love going there when I'm in Ohio, but that wasn't a blistering success either. One thing that I have learned in the midst of failure, two things. Failure is like the perfect time to reflect upon what's working and not what's not working and what you would do differently. And I find that on the other side of failure usually comes your best successes because you learn a very important principle of being more intentional in the next opportunity that comes up. And specifically what I have learned from from a lot of really investment failures is never to deviate from what your best skill set or what your greatest interests are. For example, I always thought I wanted to be a big time real estate investor. I'm probably never going to be the guy that buys thousand unit apartment buildings. Let's leave that for the experts. And I might invest in you if you come to me with a stellar deal. Where I'm really strong is Internet companies, physical product brands double down where you are strong. That's where you will have the greatest return on your time, the greatest return on your investment and also position you in the best chance for success. I can't even say success. It chokes me up. So when I bring that up to say that I have always failed when I've tried to do something that I am not good at doing. That's what I've learned from failure and I've been able to mitigate that by learning what I'm really good at and focusing there. Also, it's important for us to examine what exactly is failure. We all have this loose idea of what success is. But reach into your pocket and show me success. Heck, reach into your pocket and show me freedom. There is no universal definition of what these things are. It's a rule in your brain. If I do X, Y and Z, I am a success. If I do xyz, I am a, I am a failure. But we're mostly unconscious about what these rules are in reality. Like failure in a business would be like we're out on the streets, right, and can't eat. Like we live in modern day society. Which means it's actually really hard to fail because A, you got closer to your goal or B you learned something which makes it easier for you to do it next time.
That's the reality of things. So let's be gentle in how we judge our results. Success. Is it success if we're closer to the ultimate goal? By the way, if you hit your goal, you feel exactly the same once you get there. So let's celebrate progress rather than perfection. What is failure? Is it that we don't feel any different? Like we still haven't made it? Because if that's the case, we can have all the success in the world and still feel like a failure. So if we have a loose idea or actually a really defined idea of what success looks like and what failure looks like, we can more properly adjust and also judge our own goals and our progress. But all we can hope for is progress in life as measured from where we came from. Because there is, when we get to our goals, we there it's almost never that we feel any differently than how we were before. So achieving the goal and not having fulfillment, that's the ultimate failure. Because then we're just kicking fulfillment further and further down the road and we could be successful but inside feel like a failure. So what is failure? It's hard to fail if you look at it as getting closer to what you want or learning something which once again gets you closer to where you want to be. It.
