Accepting Failure

Hi, guys. My name is Donnie Rouse and you are listening to the podcast One Life Accepting Failure. What is failure? If you look it up in the dictionary, you'll see things like unfulfillment, unsuccessful loser, all these things. But is that failure? What if failure was all in your mind? What if there was no such thing as failure? I want you to just kind of ponder that idea. What if there was no such thing as failure? Hopefully by the end of this podcast, you'll realize that it really is this mental idea that you thought up in your mind that it really doesn't exist. When I first started out in the coffee industry, back in when I first. Not even when I got in the coffee. I'll go to. When I first purchased my first roaster, it was in 2007, I purchased a two kilo, which is a smaller roaster. And the first, you know, I started, I hooked it up and I started roasting coffee on it. The first time I roasted coffee on it, like the beans were, came out burnt and they taste like. It tasted like crap. It tasted really bad. That was my first go on this particular machine. And, you know, then I would go in and I would adjust it. I kept, you know, adding, changing different variables as a result of, you know, as a result of the prior roast, realizing, okay, this one came bad. What can I do differently? This came bad. What can I do differently? This whole process went on for three years before I ever sold a single bag of coffee. I tested for three years and three years. It was for me to understand everything that was going on in the roaster. Understanding that, alright, if I changed the, what they call the charge temperature, which is the initial temperature before the coffee enters the drum where it does the roasting, before I do that, what is the effect if I change that temperature, what is the effect if I change the airflow, what is the effect if I use this percentage of BTUs, what is the effect if I change that output of BTUs at this point in the roast? And I just kept doing that over and over and over and tasting my results to understand what I was getting in that cup. What I am getting at here is you can look at failure. I mean, if you want to say failure, you could have looked at that first roast I dropped in that machine and you could say, well, you know, yeah, it was a crappy roast. But I didn't say, all right, you know what? My first one, I'm never going to roast again. I'm giving this up, I'm done. Didn't say that. And if you were looking at me, if that were my state and you and I was expressing this to you, you'd be like, yo, Donnie, what the heck is going. Listen, this was your first time. What do you expect? Do you expect to do it perfectly your first time? You just got this machine. You don't even know the machine. What do you expect? Be easier on yourself, right? That's what we would say to one another. But yet in our own minds, we are so willing to call this a defeat and accept defeat. But what is the difference between failure and defeat versus success and thriving? It really is just a different state of mind, a different mental focus. It's having the end goal in mind. It's having this vision for what it is that you're trying to create, what it is you're trying to achieve. And that's what documents success and failure really. Because if you have that in mind, you know, you understand that every single step, every action you take is nothing but a little fine tune, like a little tune to get you slowly closer to the right direction. And then you take another step and then it's another micro adjustment, another step and it's another micro adjustment and another step until you actually get to where you want, where it is you're going, right? So if you adopt that logic, then what is success, what is failure, right? In that case, failure doesn't exist. If you look at a rocket ship, right, rocket ship is pointing with the end destination being the moon. There are mission controls there, okay, you know, we have the coordinates, we are set. If we just go straight, we will be right at the moon in 24 hours. All right? That is how you know. So there you're on the launch pad and you know the trajectory is straight up. All you have to do is go straight up. If you keep on that path, you're going to hit the moon. But what happens in the course of taking off? As you take off, there are a lot of different elements that you can't really account for, right? You kind of get knocked off track, you get knocked left, you got knocked right. There's wind, there's all these different variables that are preventing you from, from getting to the end destination with such in that straight line, that linear line. But success is not linear. And if you know anything about rockets, you know, there's all these micro adjustments, these boosters firing off that keep you on point. These, all these adjustments keep you focused on that end destination to get you there. The same thing is of life. And you have to look at Failure as being those micro adjustments, or like, I don't even want to use the word failure, but using those, using that feedback is what really what it is. It's feedback as that micro adjustment to do something better next time to change how you're approaching that destination that you're going for. Adversely, if the rocket never takes off, if it never makes that initial thrust to go to the moon, it's not going to go anywhere. It could have its aim set on that moon for days, hours, years, whatever it may be. But as long as. If it doesn't give that initial thrust, it's never going to get there. It has to leave the launch pad if it ever wants to make it to the moon. And that is really the logic I want to bring into. Into like your definition of what it means to fail, what it means to have defeat. Because those are all just mental constructs. They don't exist. They're just feedback. I remember watching, and I don't even remember the sport, so I don't even know if this is a good example to even bring up, but there was this Olympian who might have been the pole vault, I think, or it was running. And he. The first year he got there, I think he finished third. Then the next year, the next time, the Olympics, he didn't even place. The next time after that, he came into second. And then after that, he ended up going on to win the gold medal. He could easily have said, oh, you know what? Third. I'm done. I'm done. I'm not gonna. I gave him my all this time. I'm not doing it anymore. I'm done. He could have easily said that, but he looked for ways to improve, and then he moved forward. One year he didn't place. He gets. Then he gets second. I can't remember the sequence, but I think he might have gotten to second and then didn't place and then went to first. But it was those micro adjustments that he made. And again going back to. So what makes success a failure? If you wanted to put it into a nutshell, what defines success and failure is just your fixation on the end goal and being clear about what it is that you want and being excited and feeling the emotion of it. Because as long as you're in that emotion, like when I was doing the coffee, I knew I wanted to do coffee. I knew there was nothing else that I wanted to do. If you want to try my coffee, rouse coffee cold Roman espresso. It's the bomb. But I knew that there wasn't Anything else that I wanted to do, so I didn't. I spent hours even sitting by an espresso machine when I make espresso. I consider myself to be one of the most knowledgeable people on espresso. You know, I one of 300 espresso sommeliers in the world. And, you know, I do all these other certifications, but what got me there, right, If I. I pulled so many shitty shots of espresso, I could. I can't. I can't even count if I wanted to. There's probably more grains of sand on the beach than there are shitty shots of espresso that I pulled. But it was this, like, this compulsion and this interest for me to kind of know what is going on when the shot is being pulled and how to achieve that best shot is what kind of kept me going forward. So that. And I had so much fun doing it that I never looked at the. I never saw anything as a failure. It was just a micro adjustment. I was wanted to know how to do it, how to do it better. That was all the only focal point that I had because I wanted to. I've seen, like, you know, it's like proof is you. When you have the proof, when you've seen other people do it, that's proof that you can do it too. I've gone to these places. I've had amazing shots. I want my espresso to taste like this. And so I kept going and going and going until I achieved it. And as it was through that journey, through those. Those setbacks, or we'll use like, quote, unquote, failure. That's where all the learning was. If I didn't go through that, I wouldn't have a fraction of the knowledge that I do today with regard to espresso. I wouldn't have a fraction of it. So understand that your failures are there. You know, your setbacks, your failures, whatever you want to call them, they're there to help you grow. Those are distinguishments. Going forward, there's gonna be people who are gonna encounter the same thing. And as a result, now you have the solution again. So going back in a nutshell, when you have that end destination in mind, you have meaning. You have purpose behind it. You don't look at failure. You don't look at it. So, guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you do want to try my coffee, rarely do I actually plug my coffee business, but I do make some bomb espresso and roasted coffee. You can check it out. R A U S C O F F E E the product if you want to try my my signature is called Cold Roman and Nespresso. It is. It's. It's amazing. It's like a trip to Italy in a bottle. And it's the only bottle espresso you're going to find anywhere in the world that I know. And the taste is awesome. So you. You'll never try anything like it, I promise. But if you enjoyed this episode here, I ask you to please share it with friends, family, screenshot it, share it to your social media, invite people to listen to the One Life with Donny Rouse podcast, invite them into the One Life with Donny Rouse Facebook group. And that is it, guys. Have a beautiful, beautiful and blessed day. I hope this will reframe how you look at your setbacks in life, realize that they're just stepping points to get further on, to get more clarity in what you want and that you enjoy the journey along the way. Have a beautiful rest of your week. God bless and thank you for tuning in.