Failing Forward: Transforming Losses into Life-Changing Lessons - FDDTC #16

What's up, guys? It's your host, Devin Zander. And today we'll be talking about a superpower that all successful people have. At least 99% of them, I'm fairly certain. And this goes back thousands of years. We'll get into that in just a second. But. Hey, it's Devin Zander. I know I already told you that this is the From Delivery Driver to CEO podcast. These are lessons, tales, stories, all kinds of great stuff of how I went from a high school dropout and Jimmy John's delivery driver, you know, like throwing subs at people's heads to the CEO of an eight figure software and education company. So all that being said, let's get into today's episode. Listen, most people consider failure just that they consider it failure. They attach a negative connotation to it. They think it's a bad thing. They get their self worth from avoiding failure. A lot of people do this. I would say most average people attach their self worth to failure and then they're scared to take leaps. They're scared to do things because they're scared to fail. And if they fail, they're like, oh, I'm not valuable, I'm not worthy. I can't be happy because I failed. Whatever, right? However, what if I told you that, you know, this is incorrect, this is the incorrect way of thinking, because failure is in fact a good thing. And failure, not only is it a good thing, it is a key to two different things. It is key to success, and it is also a key to happiness. And it all starts with that little superpower. We're coming full circle that has been around for thousands and thousands of years that all successful people share. They all share the superpower. And it's called the ability to have perspective. And if you don't think that it's been around for thousands of years, please go look at the stoic philosophers from, you know, fucking 500 BC before Jesus was even a concept. There was gods back then, but they were like Zeus or, you know, I don't really know, maybe like Enki, the Sumerian God. I don't know. Right. But successful people all understand that perspective is such a powerful tool in their arsenal. And most people fail not because something didn't work right. You don't fail just because something doesn't work. When you're a kid and you fall off the bicycle, you don't just fucking get up, dust yourself off and say, well, it's not working right. People fail because they give up. Here's the truth. Success all it is what determines success. What determines how successful a person will be is this one trait. It's their ability to fail repeatedly and, and keep trying. All right? Show me a person who never gives up, no matter how many times they fail. And what I will give you back or tell you is, hey, that person's gonna fucking crush it. They're successful. I could have worded that better, but whatever. To do that, though, to get back up after falling over and over and over again, you need to have perspective. You need to understand that failure is not a negative thing. And look, whether or not you believe in God, whether or not you believe in whatever, anything, right? Something that I've discovered in my life is everything is part of God's plan, okay? And when you fail, it's not just random. You fail because there's a lesson you need to learn to progress. You fail because there's something that the universe is sending you to help you level up and get to that next level of entrepreneur, that next level of badass. Okay? And what that means is failure is a good thing. Failures are good. It's part of God's plan. It's a blessing. You need to revel in your failures and view them as joyous occasions because they're bringing you closer to success. If you're failing, that means you're trying. That means you're moving along the path. That means you're learning. It means you're getting better every single day and you're getting towards success. And that is perspective. Looking at the 1000 foot view of the whole plan, of God's entire plan, or the Creator's plan, or just the universe's plan, whatever you believe in, right? Because if we look on the micro scale and we see only, okay, I failed, I'm worthless, I give up. It's like painful. You cannot do that. You need to look at the plan. And we're all like, I was actually just talking to my business partner about this, Austin, because believe it or not, something I struggle with too, but we think that now. I forget what I was going to say. We think that failure is like an unnatural thing, right? And it's because we're looking at social media, we see these overnight successes, but the truth is, is there are no overnight successes. There's only what we see. We didn't see them in the back room, grinding away, sleeping on the couch, sleeping on the floor of their office for five years. You just see that come up and it looks like it's quick. But the reality is, and I've talked About this in a past podcast. Had to take my gum out. There's this thing called the tipping point. And when you see that overnight success, all that means is every single day, they were filling up their cup with a little bit of water. They were trying over and over, putting a little bit of water and a little bit of water, and it's kind of like that graphic of the guy digging right for diamonds, and he gives up right before the end. Every time we fail, we're learning. We're filling up our cup with a little bit more water, a little bit more water. And then eventually, what happens when a cup gets overflowing with water? It tips over, all the water spills out, and that's success. And it looks like a flow flood of it. It looks like a rush. So we're like, wow, that was an overnight success. But we don't see the millions of little failures of them pouring in water, getting closer and closer to that top, right? And that is the perspective, okay? We need to view these failures as learning experience. We need to view them as opportunities to grow, to level up, and to be the best versions of ourselves. We need to find a way to enjoy failure. And when you start viewing failure as a learning experience, when you start viewing it as you actually getting closer to your goal, business becomes so much easier. It becomes fun. You become happy when you fail because you're like, yeah, I'm on the right track. And look, the only way to become stronger is to fail. There's like, a quote in here. Let's see. I've been learning a little bit. Let me see if I can find it real quick. I know this is boring. I'm sorry. Feel blessed to experience failure. Cherish it. You're growing. Don't quit. Boom. Absolutely huge. And now I want you to understand something. Failure is not our goal. All right? Obviously, we're not here to fail. We want to succeed. We want to make a bunch of money. But it's a natural part of building a business. It's a natural part of doing anything. This is nature. We cannot fight nature. People have been trying to fight nature for millions of years. It just doesn't work. All right? You know, I know you'll be like, oh, but science, you know, we. Nature, whatever, okay? I don't care. Failure is a part of the journey, and although it's not our goal, we have to accept it's gonna happen and it's okay. And if we view it as a good thing, you're gonna be way happier and you'll probably succeed. A lot quicker because you'll try a lot harder because your failures won't be setbacks any longer. Okay? And the truth is, failures, as you grow, as you get bigger, they're gonna happen more. There's gonna be more and more fires to put out the bigger you get. Sometimes I think about when it was just me in this business and it was easy, and I was just sitting by myself in my house working every day. It was easy. Now it's harder. But that's just part of the game. And if you want to grow and you want to make millions of dollars, being an entrepreneur is literally just putting out fires. That's your job. Entrepreneurs get paid to solve problems. If you're selling print on demand shirts, people have problems. They can't express themselves. They can't express their love for their religion or their political figure or whatever. And then you sell them a shirt that helps them express that. Or if you're selling the print on demand jewelry, right? Someone wants to tell someone they love them, they have a problem. How can I most express and my love, gratitude, and appreciation for this person? Right. Oh, well, here's this necklace I just saw in the ad. It says it all perfectly. I'll buy that and that will solve it, right? So failures, setbacks, like fires, these things are going to happen. It's literally our job. It's what we exist to do. And that's why we're rewarded, because we can solve these things. Now I want to tell you a story that I've mentioned before on the podcast of times where how I really learned to have perspective. Okay, so story of how I got scammed out of $50,000. It happened about nine years ago when I was a fledgling entrepreneur and I only had. I mean, like, this was a huge chunk of money to me. I thought my life was over. Now the story starts back in 2014 or so, maybe 15. I can't actually remember the details. I could pull it up, but. And I had decided I wanted to build my first Shopify app. And what it was going to do was it was gonna allow Shopify store owners to sell their products directly in the Facebook news feed. And what I mean by that is people could enter their credit card information, they could do everything without leaving the Facebook news feed, because back then you could still embed little flash apps into Facebook. So that was the thing. You can't do it now. Although Facebook does has Facebook shopping now, which is really good, actually. It accounts for 50% of our store sales, so check that out. But that's A story for another day. Now, I wanted to make this app, but I had no idea how to start. So I went to this website called odesk.com. it's now known as Upwork. And you can go there and you can hire freelancers. And I no idea what I was doing, but I posted a job with my software idea. And essentially what I did was I just hired the most expensive engineer because I thought, well, if they're expensive, they must be good, right? And I didn't know anything about, like, stacks. I didn't know about front end development, back end development, database, like, literally anything that goes into software development. I knew nothing. I was as green as they come. I was what people would call in the scam industry or whatever, an easy mark, an easy target, right? Uh, so anyways, I hired this guy, he was from Russia, and he was like, yeah, we can get it done in like, two months. It'll cost this much. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? Um, you probably see where the story's going. Uh, obviously I was in way over my head. I had no idea how to hire a software engineer. I had no idea what I was doing. How am I going to grade his work? How am I going to know he's doing anything? I don't know. Let's find out. Let's continue the story. So, you know, he gets going, we talk about the project for a few days, we do some video calls, and I feel like we have a pretty good handle of where we're going, what we want to do. Two weeks go by. I'm like, hey, you got anything to show me? He's like, no, I'll have something to show you soon. And I'm like, okay, sounds great. Two weeks more to go by. I'm like, hey, you know, I'd really like to see something right now. And he's like, yeah, yeah, soon, soon, soon, soon. And this kept on for, like, months. And up to this point, I had never been, like, taken advantage of by anyone, at least in the business world, right? I've been taking advantage of, like, ex girlfriends and stuff, but that's a story for another day. So this goes on for a couple of months, like three, four months. And I'm like, all right, dude, I really need to see something. And now at this point, he was sending me code, right? And I can't read it. So I'm just like, okay, well, he's doing work. I see the code. Cool, right? And at this point, you know, someone's 50 bucks an hour, we're like, four months into it. So this is like $30,000 worth of work so far. And I'm like, yeah, cool. And then we reach like the four and a half, five month point. And I'm like, dude, I need to see something. Like, what? What is this? You know, time is running out. I need to get this app out. I was telling all of my customers and my affiliates that I'd have it ready like three months ago, like you and I had discussed. And he's like, soon, soon, soon. And I said, okay, well, I'm gonna bring in a friend to take a look at this. And I know what you might be thinking. Like, Devin, if you had a friend who understands code, why didn't you just bring him in sooner? And it's just simple answer is, because I was trusting, you know, I thought that this was going to go well and hire a friend named David Abrams. He's a great guy. He built another company, Demio, sold it, Amazing, great friend. And he looked at the code and by the way, it took the developer like two weeks to send him the code. He kept saying, soon, I'll send it to you soon. I'll send it to you soon. Should have been a red flag. I mean, it was. At this point, I was obviously pretty fucking angry. It finally does send it, and David calls me or he hits me up on Slack, I can't remember. And he's like, yo, bro, I hate to tell you this, but you got nothing, man. You got nothing. In fact, this guy, he doesn't even make these kind of apps. I took a look at all his stuff and he creates iPhone apps. He doesn't create web apps. He doesn't create these Flash applications. He makes iPhone apps. He uses. I can't remember the name of the language, Flutter or something like that. I don't even know if that was around then. And at this point, I'm like, almost $50,000 in. And I'm like, holy fuck, what am I gonna do? I tried to get my money back and that didn't work, which is crazy, by the way. And if I could go back in time and redo it, I would've got a lawyer. But I didn't think about that. I'm pretty sure if I got a lawyer, I could've got my money back. And I just felt like, dude, I don't want to do this anymore. This is awful. This sucks. I just lost so much much money. And it took me so much work to get this money. I just lost it all. It's gone. I don't trust people anymore. I don't feel like doing this anymore. I feel like giving up. Maybe I'm not cut out to be an entrepreneur. All these thoughts were going through my head and I didn't know what to do. And later that day, because I found out in the morning, come around like 11 or 12, 11am or 12pm in the afternoon, decided to go to my pool and I had an app on my phone called Audible that I had not used a lot. You know, little iPhone app. Had not used this app a lot. But I did have it. And the only book I had it on it was the 10x principle by Grant Cardone at that time, which was a great book. It's the whole reason I got the app. But I was like, fuck, I don't know what to do. Maybe if I search on my phone I can find something to help me understand what I'm supposed to do. By the way, this happened to be a test from God, a lesson from God. Just like I said, failures, setbacks, they're sent to us for a reason. Because we have a lesson we need to learn to level up and get to that next point. I found a book. It's called the Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. I've talked about it a lot. There's a copy of it on the desk right there. There's like 20 copies of it right there behind the camera. I love this book. Anyways, it taught me that there's no such thing as good or bad, like inherently in nature. Remember, failure is a part of nature. It is the natural order. And in nature, nothing is inherently good. There's nothing that is inherently bad. Things just are. And we attach labels to them. As humans, we attach labels to these things, right? So we're the ones who decide if something is good or bad. We're the ones who decide if we should get upset about something or not. And I once I heard that it made so much sense and I thought, you know, I'm not going to let this keep me from success. I'm not going to let this asshole keep me from my destiny, from my success. No, I just need to try harder next time. And I know it's a little bit simpler in reality. I was like, I need to hire someone who's technical. And that was a big lesson for me is that whenever you want to start a tech business and you're non technical, you need a co founder who is technical. And that was the lesson I learned. And it cost a lot of money, right? But it was a lesson sent to me from God I learned. We started a company called Smart Apps, which is now scup, and we went on to do millions and millions of dollars in app sales. But if I didn't have perspective, if I just said, well, fuck it, I can't do software, I'm clearly an idiot. I just got scammed out of $50,000. Like all this negative self talk, right? I would have missed out on one of the greatest opportunities and most enjoyable experiences I've had in my entire life. That is why perspective is important. That is why it is a key for success. Let's go over that quote one more time. The secret to success is how many times this person has failed and then tried again. All right, this is Devin, your host. This is the From Delivery Driver to CEO podcast. Make sure to, like, comment, review. Five star reviews, baby. And I publish episodes every Wednesday morning and Saturday morning. So I will see you on the next episode, which will be published this upcoming Wednesday. Thank you guys for listening and I'll see you on the next episode.