10 Ways to Survive, Learn from, and Crush FAILURE - #OneRule

You gotta be prepared to fail.

Treat failure.

How to handle the failures.

Surviving failure.

We are afraid of failing. Really not afraid to fail.

Learning from the problems and mistakes.

Learn from the experience.

Failure to me, I'm not scared of it.

Failure is not a problem.

In order to be great, you know what I mean, you gotta be prepared to fail greatly as well. You know what I mean? It's all about how you handle the failures, you know, and I'm good at handling failures. Yeah. And I'm good I don't know, I'm probably not that good at handling success. I can handle failure better than I can handle success.

Sometimes I look back, I look back and, you know, where did I get off going to New York to say that I'm gonna be an actor? You know, I mean, where? But I think the thing that's really helped me is to, you know, a lot of people, when they treat failure as a, personal kind of horrendous defeat and really let life kick them pretty hard. And I like to look at things and say, God, you know, I mean, if it didn't work, I want to know why didn't it work. You know, why didn't it work? And really, you know, I tried to lift myself up and had the courage to really evaluate it and learn from it and say, you know, what happened? Okay, let's go.

We should know how to handle the— not only how to handle success, how to handle the failures. Particularly you are in the management environment, Vartan. I want the young people to understand how to manage the failure. Because any task you do, you have to come across problem. Problem should not become the captain of the individual or the project chief, and the project chief should become the captain of the problems and defeat the problem and succeed.

I wrote and directed Putti Thang.

But then didn't the studio lose faith in you during it?

Yes, they sure did, yeah.

And they took you off the film.

They took me off the— well, I had already shot it, and it was during the editing process. They hated my cut. They let me do— they fired my editor, got another guy, and let me do one more cut.

Chris Rock was the star.

He was, well, one of the stars.

Yeah, he read the script, he liked it. The— I assume the studio read the script and liked it.

Yeah.

Wasn't that a character that was sort of on the Chris Rock Show?

Yeah, Pootie Tang is a character we did on the Chris Rock Show.

Right.

And you worked on that show and you said, hey, I created the character there.

Yeah, I'm gonna make a movie about Pootie Tang.

Well, Chris asked me, do you think there's a movie in that guy? And I said, that's, that's a little nutty, but I'll try it.

I would have told you no.

Well, of course you're going to say yes.

You let me know you wanted to Movies, yeah, very badly. And so the network, that show was very popular. The networks, I mean, the studio was probably excited about it.

Sure.

You go out, you shoot the thing, you write the thing, you do all of it. And at what point does the studio say to you, listen, you fuck, what have you done here?

I remember that point, right? It was a great moment in my life.

Who comes to see you?

It— I went, had to be— I brought— they summon you. I got flown out to LA.

Are you thinking, wow, I'm getting flown down?

First class.

They don't even tell you?

First class. I have no idea. Well, I kind of smelled something, but yeah, they took me to Paramount, you know, those It's like you feel like you're going to the White House. And I went to John Goldwyn's office. He was Samuel Goldwyn's grandson.

He's a big guy, I know that.

Yeah, and so I'm in his office. I'm in the most important office at Paramount. He was running the studio at the time, and he just, I remember I walked in and he's shaking a little, he was so mad. And he just unloads, everybody was there that was involved in the movie, and he just unloaded on me and said, "This movie is unreleasable. You have wasted my money. This is irresponsible. I have a problem with everyone here." And then this guy who was the president of MTV TV films, who they said, "Well, John, I don't think you really got the film." How dare you say that to me? I start screaming at company presidents 'cause of my movie.

There was nothing redeemable about the movie.

Not to him, but here's the thing is to me—

How do you go on in show business after something like that?

I'll never forget that moment 'cause I feel my whole, all I wanted to do was make movies at the time and that was being destroyed by Samuel Goldwyn's grandson.

He knows something, right? Yeah, he knows a little bit.

And I'm sitting there, but a part of me was outside of my body going, You are in the Paramount big office being yelled at by— how fucking cool is this?

Really?

You were able to—

Yes, I was able to enjoy it.

You turned it into a positive.

Absolutely, because who gets to have that very rare, beautiful experience to get to have?

You know, I read How to Make Friends and Influence People, but for you to have such a positive attitude as your career is going down, amazing.

Well, to me, the key is like surviving failure is a great— it just turns you— it's a very great experience. Tell me about it. Yeah, look, I went through all of that, Howard, And they killed the press guy. I grew up watching Siskel and Ebert on PBS, you know, when it was that show. And so I always dreamed when I was a kid, someday Roger Ebert and that other dude who's dead are gonna look at me through the camera and say something about my movie. And here was Roger Ebert saying, "Pootie Tang is so bad, I don't even understand what it is. This isn't even a movie, it's not even complete." He was like, "Why don't they shoot the director?" He was so hateful. And I'm having the experience of becoming famous for making a movie everyone unanimously thinks is awful.

A lot of the time we do have good ideas, but we are afraid of failing. I think especially for women, and I see that in my daughters, in my daughters' friends, fear of failure is what stops us more than anything.

Yeah, I agree.

And I was lucky in that I had a mother who was full of sort of this colloquial wisdom, and she used to say to me, you know, failure is not the opposite of success. Stepping stone to success. There is nobody who has not failed along the way. So I think it's very important for young women, especially as they are starting in life, to recognize that. Because otherwise, they only see people's successes. So I, when I speak, I speak of my failures. I had always wanted to be a lawyer, and I basically failed the LSAT. I'm a terrible test taker, and that was a devastating moment for me. What I quickly realized was that failure is nothing more than life's way of nudging you and letting you know you're a little bit off course. And Spanx would not exist if I had not failed or basically found the L-fat. I also was raised by my parents. My dad had this thing that he did when we were little and it made me realize that I'm really not afraid to fail at all. My biggest fear would be to not try something. And my dad, when we were young, my brother and me, we'd sit at the dining room table at night and he would say, "What did you guys fail at this week?" And if we didn't have something, he'd be basically disappointed. And it was complete reverse psychology, but it was brilliant because it caused my brother and me to try out for things we didn't think we'd be good at, and it made us less fearful to go outside of our comfort zone.

I think you might agree that we learn more from about our failures than our successes?

Okay.

Well, there's been so many challenges that we've had, and I think, you know, one thing I talk to my team a lot about is during those challenges, you have to really be a leader, and you have to lead with conviction. So the toughest times, which I've been through many, I mean, I can just say one time we were changing systems and we didn't back up anything properly. It was maybe 6 years ago. It was a huge mistake. So, it was when social media was really taking off. We were just starting Twitter and everything. But it was maybe a 6-month problem and we had to make the decision to be authentic and really talk about it with our customer and— or not. And the great thing is with social media, transparency is super important and being authentic. And just in general, that's how our company set up. But to have— so we decided to do that. It was— it took us maybe 8 months to get out of a really bad place of going to New Jersey, packing up boxes ourselves. Anyone— everyone on our team, I'm sure some people over there, including myself on Sunday nights at 2 in the morning would be packing and shipping boxes. And we had no visibility. So that was a perfect— but that said, we learned from it. We now have really good systems going in, working with SAP, which is a lot of fun. And so there's been so many, but I think it's really learning from the problems and mistakes is really the telling part, is how you go forward.

Many of you already have dealt with some very difficult times, so this is no different than some of you already dealt with. When you fail, it's okay to get depressed, it's okay to cry, it's okay to go home It's okay to blame others for a while, but eventually you have to get over it and move on. The greatest people who have ever walked this planet, and I'm not talking about business people, I'm talking about people like Nelson Mandela and Abe Lincoln, constantly had setbacks in life and failures. Constantly. It happens all the time in business, and some of your success will be how you deal with the failure, not how you deal with the success. When I get introduced, I always get introduced that in 1998 I was the president of Citigroup and in 2000 I took over Bank One. I was fired in 1998. So I went through a little bit of experience like this and it's a painful thing. My boss, who I'd worked for 15 years, called me in and said, "We want you to resign." To which I said, "Okay." I went home. I told my wife and children, I called my wife up and said, "Judy, I'm gonna tell you something, I'm not kidding," 'cause I always make jokes about things like that. But I wanted to make sure the kids were fine. I went home, I have 3 wonderful daughters, they were much younger then. I said, the oldest, youngest one said, "Dad, do we have to sleep on the streets?" I said, "No, hon, we're okay." The middle one who just graduated Barnard said, "Dad, can I still go to college?" I said, "Yes, dear, you can." And I knew things were fine when the oldest one who was going to Harvard Business School said, "Dad, can I have that little cell phone you have? You won't be needing it." I remind people when you fail at something, it's your— I told people about Citigroup as my net worth, not my self-worth. And I was able to move on. And yes, it was difficult. I did call my boss a year later. He did not call me, I called him and said it's time to break bread. We went to lunch together. I told him I didn't think he did the right thing for Citigroup, which is pretty obvious at this point, but— but I told him the mistakes I made and whether it was 40-60 or 60-40 wasn't important. I wanted to learn from the experience and move on.

Failure to me, I'm not scared of it because it just gives me the opportunity for change. I think change is very good, regardless in what shape or form it comes into it, because it makes you really observe and reorganize and rethink your life.

They've got their achievements, they're in that big world now, and failure is not a problem. How you deal with it is a problem. And if you don't deal with it, then you'll fail again. I always feel that Adversity has always driven Manchester United on. We don't like losing. And therefore, the human beings we've got in there, that character we've got in the dressing room has to come to the surface in moments where we've lost a game.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know what you thought of the clips. Which one was your favorite? What impact is it gonna have on your life, on your business? Leave it in the comments below and I'll join in the discussion. Thank you again for watching. Continue to believe and I'll see you soon.