A short YouTube interview between Ramit Sethi and Tim Ferriss about failures and false starts. Ramit describes collecting failures in a Gmail tag (expecting it to grow "two to three per month"), explains his strategy of keeping core life areas stable while taking risks in business, and offers small personal details (e.g., car choices). Tim distinguishes types of false starts, frames inexpensive failures as data, cites a recent campaign that reached "10 to 15,000 students" with DonorsChoose as a partner, and recounts an early failed audiobook product titled 'How I Beat the Ivy League'.
Questions this video answers
Two to three per month.
Honda Accord.
Volkswagen Golf.
Approximately 10,000 to 15,000 students.
DonorsChoose.
Chapters
This is a good question. It's a good question tied up on how many false starts have you guys had in your past before the right idea hit. I love this. Well, okay, I have a tag in my Gmail that's called failures. And actually, I mean, it's grown because I've had it for a long time, and if it's not growing by at least two to three per month, I feel like something is not quite right. Failures can be basically, they can be something as little as the person I wanted to meet doesn't want to meet with me, or it can be an entire business collapsed. I take a lot of different opportunities, and I'm going to put it in this way. I prefer to have the big things in my life very stable where I live. I don't like to move very often. Taxes. I'm ultra conservative on taxes. Yep. But my car, I have a Honda Accord because I'm Indian.
I have a Volkswagen Golf because I'm from Long Island.
But then there are things like negotiations or my website or promotions where I'm ultra aggressive because I understand that and I know the risks. So the way that I can afford to take a lot of risks is to be really stable in certain things, consciously and then consciously aggressive in other things. And that's why there are a lot of failures.
Man. False starts. Where do I begin? So I think that there are different types of false starts. And not to turn this into a motivational speech, but the only failure is when you don't try. No, honestly, if you learn something, if you are able to gather data from a relatively inexpensive failure that you can apply later, it's very valuable. So the latest tweet to Beat campaign that some of you may be familiar with that I ran, which will end up helping, probably. I'm just guessing, but like 10 to 15,000 students, and that's nothing to turn your nose at. But it's not nearly as big as I'd hoped. But the data that I gathered through that, because DonorsChoose has been an awesome partner in gathering the data and helping me to interpret what worked and what didn't, will be hugely impactful when I apply it to the next campaign and combine the best practices from both of the big experiments that I've done. I mean, you name it. The first product I created was the audiobook how to what the Hell was It? It was How I Beat the Ivy League. I listened to it the other, like, a few months ago, and I was just like, oh, my God, this thing is awful. It was not Awful. It was good effort on my part, a for effort, but it was an example of building a profit. I'm sorry, building a product before picking the market, which, as some of you may know, I just don't agree with. I think you want to pick your market and then design a product for them. That thing failed horribly. It didn't sell anything. I think maybe my mom bought a copy. I don't know. It was just a huge catastrophic failure. And I didn't throw away the tapes until like two years ago. I couldn't bring myself. So I was like, the orders are coming someday, someday they're coming. And I finally got rid of them. But I learned a lot. I learned the lesson that you don't design a product and then find someone.
To sell it to.
You go the other way around. Both of us, I think, have had.
A lot of false starts.
And you talk to any. Honestly, guys, we both know some really, really uber successful tech entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in different industries. And there are days when all of these people do not want to get out of bed because they've screwed something up. They had some PR disaster, they have to fire half of their people. It is just mess and crisis after mess and crisis. And that's part of the game. That is part of what you sign up for. If you want the learning curve that's this steep that comes along with being an entrepreneur who's doing things that haven't been done before, you are going to have to contend with and learn to emotionally deal with setback after setback after self doubt, after criticism, after hater after hater. And that's okay because it makes you really strong. And Thomas Watson, who is the founder or co founder of IBM, once said, to double your success rate, double your failure rate. Figure it out, make the failures inexpensive, gather the data and then step back up to the plate of that.
