INBOUND Bold Talks: Ekaterina Walter "Fail Your Way to Amazing Things"

So an executive is walking to his CEO's office, and there's lots of thoughts going through his mind. How could this project fail? What did the team do wrong? What could have they done differently? After all, they were entrusted with $2 million and a hope that this project will solve a great problem for them and for their customers. As he was standing in the CEO's office and he summarized sort of the result and what happened, he extended his hand, and in his hand was his letter of resignation. First the CEO was surprised, then a little bit irritated. His response was, I just invested $2 million in helping us learn something valuable. Now let's take that knowledge and go do better and find a solution that makes sense. Pretty positive response, right? I mean, great leadership too, if you really think about it. But it is the fear of the opposite outcome and opposite response that really, truly keep us from innovating, from living up to our full potential. It makes us hold back. Because failure is a very scary word, isn't it? Now, recently I had a change in the career. So I was running marketing for Fortune 500 companies for most of my career. And recently I started basically leading a startup. Now, when I was making that decision, a lot of thoughts come from my mind. Now, I'm a very confident person. I've done a lot of things, I've learned a lot of things. I know I'm going to make mistakes. I'm not intimidated by that. But there's this one defining moment in your life when you ask yourself, what if I fail? I must have said it out loud with one of my meetings with my friends, because he immediately replied, define failure. That makes you think. Now, John Lennon tells this story. When he was in school, his teacher gave him an assignment, the class assignment. And the assignment was to write down what you want to be when you grow up. So naturally, he wrote down happy. Teacher told him he didn't understand the assignment, and he told her that she didn't understand life. So what is failure? How do we define it? And why do we allow it to define ourselves? So I've talked to a lot of people because the topic of leadership and the topic of failure is very dear and near to my heart. I've talked to a lot of people throughout my life. I've talked to people when I wrote the book and asked them the same question when I interviewed them. I've talked to people before. I changed, radically changed, changed my career. And there is something that I found that is simply profound, or should I rather say, profoundly simple. It seems like success in Life depends on three big passion, purpose and attitude. Now you know, what does that mean? So if you really look at passion, this is what drives everything. This is what fuels you. This is what gives you energy, this is what gives you motivation. This defines who you are and what you want to do. Now, I believe that every single one of us is an entrepreneur. We've been taught differently, we've been told differently, we've been given a totally different definition of entrepreneurship. But I know that we are. Every single one of us looks at the world with this specific lens, and that lens is defined by our passions and what we love. So when we see the world through that lens, we see potentially different opportunities from what other people see. We see different doors open or close. We interpret it differently. So you take that passion and you define your purpose from there. What are you passionate about? That is your purpose. Your purpose is to execute on your passions, to build your dreams. When you get that purpose, when you finalize it, when you understand it, ultimately there's no higher power than that. You become absolutely unstoppable. You have clear definition in your mind. You know where you want to go. And honestly, you don't know how you're going to get it potentially most of the time, but you know you're going to get there. That truly drives you. You have no fear, you have doubts, everybody has. You know you're going to make mistakes, but you know where you're going. And from that comes the attitude, the attitude of maybe there isn't such a thing as failure and maybe you need to rethink some things that you were taught or some things that you currently know in order to get to where you want to go. So when passion and purpose collide, it becomes sort of this ultimate aphrodisiac. Think about this number. 5,000, 126. That is the number of attempts, failed attempts by Dyson to create a prototype for his bagless vacuum cleaner. As a matter of fact, from that he learned a lot of things. He created a culture, Dyson, of absolute innovation. A culture that actually encourages Navy tech curiosity, silliness, foolish ideas. The team was working on one of the projects and they flipped what they've known, the conventional wisdom way, on its head, thinking they're going to find solution for one project. Instead, they invented a different product. That day they invented Airblade, one of their most best selling products right now. Steve Jobs was investing in Pixar for nine straight years before he convinced people around him that computer animation is an amazing thing. As a matter of Fact, he credits the fact that he's been a great CEO to Apple later on in life to being fired earlier in life, something he considered a horrible failure. Flickr, we all know Flickr. Did you know though that it was supposed to be a gaming site? It was supposed to be gaming. That's what was the initial focus. They miserably failed at it because we're not in Flickr gaming right now. Right. But what they noticed is that the photo sharing element of feature was really important on the site. So they changed focus. They adjusted and adopted. Now, what about individuals? Let's take a look. Beethoven was told that he would never amount to anything as a composer because he was just strange and he would like to play music in a totally different way. Michael Jordan was kicked out of his high school baseball team. He cried. Henry Ford lost his business five times before he built a successful one. Disney was actually hired by a newspaper editor for the lack of creativity. He also failed at his business several times before he built Disneyland. Marilyn Monroe was told that she's unattractive and will never be able to act. We know how that turned out. Einstein, having spoken until he was 4, didn't read until he was 7, was called by his teachers, mentally slow. The list goes on and on and on. Now you may be thinking, look, I'm not Marilyn Monroe. I'm not pretty. I'm not Michael Jordan. I don't have a talent. But see, it doesn't matter because everybody's life and everybody's purpose matters and it contributes to their community, whether in a large way or in a small way. You matter to somebody. You may be somebody else's hope, somebody else's leader. Even if it's a small community of several people, it doesn't matter. If you think somebody small can't make an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito. Now, we were growing up believing that we cannot be an artist. Because, look, it's really not probably going to make you much money. It's not going to provide the safety you're looking for. We cannot be a composer. We cannot sing music because not everybody's making it in that world. We were programmed and destined to, to look for safe choices and be responsible. We are responsible is what we're telling ourselves when we grow up. But remember when we were kids, we were fearless. We were creative. Nothing mattered. Nothing could stop us. We were so darn confident and sure. So as you're looking at your life, you need to understand that doubts kill more dreams than failure ever does. I mean, it really does and the reality is that you need to define what failure means to you. You need to create your own definition of that word. As a matter of fact, you need to take the definition that was given to you by somebody else and rip it up and maybe you end up figuring out that your definition of failure that that word doesn't even exist at all and it's just small mistakes you make on the way to living your purpose. So today I encourage you to rip up what somebody else set you up to be or to do or to think or to feel. Throw it out and don't fear. Live your life passionately, lead with purpose and create movements. Ignite movements around yourself and dare to dream because if you don't dream, if you don't have your own dreams, I can guarantee you somebody else will hire you to build theirs. So dare to fail because you might just fail your way to amazing things. Thank you.