Episode 038 - Failure Enthusiasts

The majority of what you're going to do over the next couple of months in your business is going to fail. What do you think about that when you hear me say that? Failure is just part of what we do. It's what we take away from that failure that determines the success that we have moving forward. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. All right, here we are back. It's episode number 38, the Content Amplification Podcast. Jodi, today's show is not about positivity. However, it might be a little bit. What are we going to talk about?

Yes.

What are we talking about today?

Today, um, through inspiration of, uh, the technical difficulties that I've, I've faced today is about failure.

Failure. There's been a lot of failure over the years in business.

Yes.

And I'm pretty sure our listeners have failed once, at least once. And if you've only failed once or never failed at all, you're not doing it hard enough.

Exactly.

At least that's what I've, I've experienced. So that's what we want to talk about today, is, is the importance of failure in business and what can you learn from it. I personally think you shouldn't try to avoid it, but you also shouldn't be seeking out failure. I think you need to embrace it when it happens and figure out ways to learn from it and become stronger on the other side. We don't want to throw too many clichés in the show, but in essence, that is what it is, right? It is a lesson.

Yeah, absolutely. And just to get my one cliché for the show out, I've, I've heard many times the quote, and it's always kind of resonated with me, is, you know, if you're not failing, then you're probably not succeeding either, right? Because when you look at anything that's worthwhile in life, you have to take a couple steps and, you know, make a couple mistakes to get there and get to the point where, you know, you do consider it success. Otherwise, it's not really a very ambitious goal.

Absolutely. And I truly believe that, you know, success for everyone is different. So if you took on an adventure and it failed, you know, that could be looked at as a success, right? You know, it wasn't right for you. You may have taken things from that that you can use for, you know, another venture that's going to take you further, right? So there could be successful elements of that. It doesn't have to be, you know, completely negative.

Exactly. Yeah. And my kind of purpose of this podcast and what I want people to take away, because I don't think it's a very common outlook on failure, is that kind of idea that there's different types of failure, right? So, you know, the first one, which is probably the one that people really only focus on, is the preventable failures, you know, so that's, that's actually human error. That's when, you know, say in our business, we make a mistake that could have been avoided. And then there's obviously the unavoidable failure. So that's things like, you know, with COVID-19, it's not like businesses could have foreseen this or anything. Their sales were bound to dip for a little bit in most cases. But then there's also something that a lot of people would probably think is an oxymoron, but it's actually called intellectual failures. And what that means is essentially you took a risk, it didn't work out, but you've gained something from it. So in the same way that you gain revenue in your successful endeavors, in failing, you've gained, you know, data and information and intelligence to do it better next time and, you know, eventually have it be better than it ever could have been.

Absolutely. And I mean, an experience of that, or one that I see multiple times over, you know, probably the last 20 years of doing business, you know, has been that a business owner has an idea and they're like, you know, this, this idea is going to be fantastic. It's going to be the best thing. I'm going to become rich and all this kind of stuff. And they devote so much time and energy in like building out this idea from all the marketing assets and all this kind of stuff. And it takes them, you know, sometimes a couple years to do so. And then they go and they launch it and it's crickets. Like it doesn't succeed and they're like, this is a failure. Well, you know, they could have learned that maybe it wouldn't have been, or they went from what they perceived it as being a success when they could have done like a minimal viable product and tested it and seen, you know, what can I do at the bare minimum to see if the market is there for it. Yeah. And then if it's there, then you can expand upon it. And that's really a kind of a great lesson to learn from that is, you know, you're spending too much time seeking that perfection because you think this is going to be a success. But in reality, no, it's our clients and the market that determines whether it's going to succeed or not because they're the ones that need to buy that product or service.

Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, business is completely a trial and error situation, specifically marketing as well. You know, like that was one of my personal challenges in, in going down this career path because, you know, I'm very much a perfectionist. I want everything to be perfect. I want my plans to work out. I want to be successful, right? As most people would be. So it was really challenging for me to shift that mindset into, as opposed to, you know, failing and, you know, being down on yourself and losing confidence into Okay, this is one step towards the ultimate goal, right? And I think a lot of clients get confused with that and get discouraged when, you know, if you take something like Facebook advertising, which we all know is a pain in the butt and really, really challenging.

I failed many times at that.

Yeah. And really challenging to get right. And, you know, I think we can pretty much say with the with confidence that you're not going to get it spot on the first time. There's trial and error that, that needs to go into that to gather the information to be successful.

Absolutely. And, you know, in, in marketing any business— and I'm going to talk on the marketing side, or even, even from running in the business— there's so much change happening that, you know, you try something, it doesn't work out as, as you ideally would hope it would, and you may say, okay, I'm gonna I'm going to do a reiteration of this, but the goalpost is always moving, right? There's always new stuff out there. People are evolving. Your clients are evolving. So being okay with, with always kind of striving for that and just kind of shortening the amount of failure elements that you might think and try to think ahead of it, you know, is where we really have to go. And we talked about Facebook ads just a moment ago. You know, that is the biggest change. That's always changing their policies. And, you know, even though we spend so much time learning from what we're doing, You know, next month what we're doing now may not work. So I mean, there's going to always be an element of failure in, in what you do.

Exactly. And you know, like I've said many times before, marketing, um, you know, working in marketing makes you a forever student. And you know, risk, every risk that you take, and you really do have to be, um, you can't be afraid of risk when you're running a business or, um, you know, trying to market that business. Because if, if you don't take a risk, you're not going to be successful. And you know, risk is a word that can certainly be very closely related to failure, right?

And this is going to bring it to a point that I've had for a couple of years now. And I think the way that, and you can be against this thought process at all, and that's perfectly fine. But I think the way that the schooling system has changed over the last 10, 5 years or whatever, where we're trying to set children up for protecting them from failure, right? You know, that everybody gets a trophy, everybody gets a participation award, you know, everybody gets picked equally. We're creating a future society where they don't have the resilience, the capabilities, the coping mechanisms to deal with failure. And that was one of the biggest things when looking at what does failure do to you as a human being is it builds resilience. It builds that ability to keep going, the motivation. Whereas, you know, if you tried something and it worked 100%, you'd be like, this is easy. And then you're gonna get, you know, complacent and you're not gonna really strive a little bit further to, you know, improve upon it. Whereas if it didn't go as well or you failed, you should, you know, in most cases be motivated to be like, how can I fix that? How can I go the next step further? Some people might not be, you know, as resilient and they might like give up, which that's fine. Um, but for a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners, they strive off of that, you know, always trying to improve mentality. And I was looking online before this episode to try to find some, some proof behind this, and there was actually a study done at Northwestern University, the School of Management. And what they did was they looked at a group of medical students who, you know, applied for funding for their research. And the ones that got the money, they put them in a success group, and the ones that didn't, they got them in a failure group. And that's how they determined that. So they then followed them later on, and they found that the group in the failure group were 6.1% more likely to publish a high-impact paper than those in the success group later on, because the success group was like, this is easy, and they weren't motivated to go any further. It was that kind of like getting 100 on the first test of the year, you set that bar and you're like, well, I'm awesome, right? And I'm not going to really strive for it. But that's the kind of thing I know personally, that's how I have always over the years looked at things that failed. And I know a lot of other business owners that I personally know, you know, where they have had a lot of failed opportunities, you know, they're so motivated. And, you know, you look at those, those people that come to the media and they're like, wow, like the the Elon Musks, the Bill Gates, the Steve Jobs, like the people that you're like, wow, they're so successful. Like they've had a million failures prior to what you're seeing.

Yes.

Right. And it's just something that's out there.

Absolutely. And while I certainly agree that it builds character and it can build resiliency, I think there's also a fine line, right? Because, you know, along with the studies saying that failures can actually make you more successful in the long run, which is absolutely true. There's also studies showing how negatively children in school can be impacted by being told that they failed a test or that they failed this course. And a lot of that has to do with the negativity surrounding the word. I think it's not so much about You know, the participation medals and stuff, you know, that it gets a little goofy, but I think it's about changing the perception of the word failure. I think it needs to be turned into a word that just means you didn't succeed this time instead of, you know, you're a failure, you know, you suck at this, you don't provide any value, you're not good enough for this. And I think that's where the real problem lies, even if you translate that to business, right? If you fail at something and you're so focused on the fact that it is considered a failure, you are actually more likely to fail in the future because you have that mindset.

It's an interesting perspective. And, you know, you look at how they report on, you know, younger children in their report cards, you know, it's, you know, needs improvement, right? Words like that. Whereas once you get older and you should have developed some coping mechanisms, they get into more of the graded scale of either, you know, percentages or, you know, 8-letter grades and those type of things where they're not saying you failed, but, you know, necessarily you're looking at it and, you know, you know, a 90% to some people may feel like, like a failure, or, you know, they didn't do as good, whereas a 70% for somebody is like awesome., right? And it's basically where you position yourself in that scale. So, you know, I see both sides of the coin there. And also looking at, you know, why, like, why is that happening? And, you know, this podcast is mainly about business and helping people, you know, market themselves better and use that. One of the things that I wanted to look at was like, why do people normally fail? That's what the episode's about, so we'll use that word. Fail at marketing their business. And I think one of the biggest things when they're starting out or even getting into digital marketing is, you know, they're not sure where to even start, right? So, you know, they're kind of positioning themselves, you know, at different points in the whole, you know, marketing ecosystem, and maybe they're in the wrong starting spot, right? So just kind of getting your compass reset will give you better success that way.

Exactly. And a lot of that does come down to the data and the analytics of it, right? Like a lot of times people assume marketing is just about the creative and the strategy, but all of that is based off information that is gathered, right? And, you know, in terms of people being, you know, we've seen client after client where, you know, their brain is just scattered all over the place because there's so many things that they could be doing that they decide to not do anything at all. Because they don't know where to start. And, you know, the best advice for that is just to pick somewhere and just start. You know, it doesn't have to be perfect at first. It can be rough and you can fail and figure it out as you go, but you definitely have to start.

Absolutely. You know, there's so much information out there. We call it information overload. And, you know, you're trying to analyze what you should do, when you should do it. You know, even down to social media, how many times should I post in a week and this kind of stuff. And you kind of get this like analysis paralysis happening where you just, you can't move, right? And then, you know, you just feel like, okay, I can't do this and you kind of give up. But one of the things that has been my kind of, I don't know, thorn in my side personally in business has been jumping from opportunity to opportunity. Right. I'm an ideas kind of person. So, you know, in business I come up with different ideas. I'm like, okay, we're going to go do that, right? And I go do it a little bit and, you know, it doesn't work out. And I'm like, okay, well, I'm not going to do that. We're going to do this one, that type of thing. So, you know, that's an issue sometimes with a lot of people. And if you're listening and you, you resonate with that, you know what I mean? You know what? You don't really fully give it the attention it needs. So it's not the opportunity. Is a failure. It's just that you haven't fully committed to it, right? And commitment is another big part of it.

Yeah. And, you know, obviously this circles right back to, to the concept of resiliency. You know, another cliché, I have to— we all know the story of Thomas Edison, and, but I'm not sure if everybody knows this quote, which I think it's really, really funny, honestly. When he was getting interviewed, He had failed over 1,000 times at creating the light bulb. And one interview, someone asked him, how did it feel to fail 1,000 times before succeeding? And he said, I didn't— oh man, now I messed it up. Not as poetic as him. Anyways, he said, I didn't fail 1,000 times.

Oh God. You're failing at this.

I'm failing at this, but I'm okay. I'm gonna get it this time. Okay, here we go. I didn't fail a thousand times. The light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps. So in terms of looking at marketing strategy, um, you know, through, through resiliency and failures, it's, it's a step-by-step process, trial and error, right? Like You're not going to get the result that you want right away. It takes time and it also takes time to even get the data and information that you need to make educated marketing choices and business decisions. So it comes back to that resiliency piece.

You know, and there's a lot of different elements that play into, you know, whatever you're trying to do, whether you're, you're launching a podcast or you want to do, you know, a YouTube channel or, you know, you're building an online course. You know, there's difficulties or technical issues you may have to come up against. There's mistakes you make. You're human. You're obviously going to make mistakes. You know, there are times when, you know, you could be running ads and, you know, you put an extra zero in the budget or it went to a daily budget on Facebook instead of a lifetime budget, and suddenly you spent an extra $1,000 that you didn't know about, right? You could be like, wow, I totally failed at that. But you made a mistake, okay? It happens all the time. You know, and obstacles. So those are those things that are happening that you really didn't have control of or even knew it was going to happen there. Like the Facebook update that happened for iOS 14. I mean, that changed a lot of stuff, put people in a lot of financial issues, and even the growth of their business was impacted by it. Well, that was an obstacle. But being able to look at it and be like, how can we come around that at a different angle and become better at it? And having a process in place like an impact assessment. It's like, okay, this is what happened. What could we have done better to, to position ourselves to prevent this? Or, you know, how could we implement something when it does happen to respond faster to it? You know, a lot of people and businesses also have like multiple backup plans. So they're like, if this doesn't work, you know, we're going to shift to this focus and be able to flip that switch a lot easier. And in small business, that's a lot more realistic than big business because you can pivot very quickly.

Yeah, of course. And I mean, that really comes down to the whole concept of being able to identify by what type of failures they are, like I mentioned earlier, right? So if you're looking at a preventable failure, that solution is going to be, you know, having a conversation with whoever it was who made the mistake. If, you know, if you're in a position of management or if it was yourself, just figuring out what went wrong and then put in the measures to prevent it. And, you know, supervise in a way that— and, you know, create policies, whatever it might be that the problem is, to, you know, prevent it next time. So it does become a, a, a success instead of a failure in that sense. Um, but in terms of like avoid unavoidable failure, it really is about resiliency. Again, you know, there's nothing that you could do about it, so just move forward. But when it comes to, um, intellectual failures, it's about dwelling on it, which I think is kind of funny because You know, everybody always says, oh, don't dwell on it, just move forward. And, you know, sure, that may make sense for the first two types of failures. But when it comes to an intellectual failure, you want to dwell on it. You want to think about it and think about it and think about it and then figure out what went wrong. What can you do better next time? Why did it fail? You want to analyze it until you know every single detail and have a plan moving forward.

Absolutely. You know, as we near the end of this episode, I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to also answer a version of it too. So you've been doing a lot of work with clients on social media. What do you see as, as, you know, a very common failure that people are most likely making when doing their social media for their business?

Is it bad that like 10 things came to mind? No, it's in terms of failure, I would say just very simply the, the, the strategy they're taking in the sense of being so clean cut with social media and not showing any personality. Because while they, you know, say that they're being professional and sticking to their, their business identity, it really is just boring. And, you know, people aren't interested in it. And they're not showing their business personality, because anybody who works for a business is part of that personality, and you're not telling me they're that boring, right? So I think just lacking the overall liveliness, I guess, of, of, of their social media is probably the biggest failure I see.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if a funeral home could make their social media engaging and entertaining, and I guarantee there are funeral homes out there that have a personality behind their marketing than any business could. And I'm pretty sure it exists. I'm sure we just have to look for it. Now, I'm going to give kind of my thoughts on another side and what I'm more or less working with clients has been in launching concepts and projects. So, whether it's a podcast or a course or anything like this. And I think it's somebody's neglect to actually look at where is our white flag moment? And what I mean by that is, is if you're launching a podcast, you have to look at not just, hey, this is what I want it to be, but how much time are we going to let it go before we realize, okay, it's not doing what we want it to do, right? So you look at most episodes, you know, you're in the 50 to 60 to 70 episodes of a podcast before it starts to gain some actual traction and you'll start to get that engagement that's happening. That's there. You know, they launching a course and, you know, it's like, okay, well, you know, how many people do we have to enroll through this before we realize that, okay, this is, this is a success or this is a failure, right? So that white flag moment is where is that line in the sand where we say, okay, these are what we're going to evaluate this on. And if it doesn't match that, we'll raise that white flag. We'll admit defeat and we'll move on and we'll learn from everything that we did. And I think people just give up too fast, right? You're basing success these days on, you know, 10 or 5% of what you see online of all the success stories, not the 95% of failure stories that are happening out there or how long it took them to get them to get there, right? You know, the, you know, the, the thousands of attempts to get that product the way it was. And I think that's what it is, is we just We're impatient, right? We want that overnight success, that viral video that, you know, and a funny story behind that is I used to have a, do a lot of video production early on in the marketing side, and I'd have people calling me asking, hey, can you produce me a viral video, right? And I found that funny because it's not the video that is, it's just how it's picked up and No real viral videos and viral content. You can't really architect that very well, right? It just has to, just has to grab hold to work. Yeah. So that's my advice is just, you know, look for that evaluation moment in the future and say, okay, this is what we're going to evaluate this on, right? It could be the amount of time spent, you know, revenue. It could be multiple factors. Yeah. We don't do a podcast to make money off it. We do a podcast to, to share knowledge and help people.. And realizing that, you know, if we can help one person achieve something or learn from it, that to us is success. I mean, we could do this for years, never get a client off of this podcast. I'm never going to consider that a failure, right? It keeps us thinking about what's current, what can we share, what we do that, which then feeds over to the work we do with our clients anyway. So, you know, it's just, what is failure to you?

Right, exactly. Now, I have one question for you too, because I came across an article that was talking about failure enthusiasts. So they shared similar opinions to you in the sense that, you know, failure shouldn't be avoided in, you know, children's lives. There shouldn't be the, you know, no such thing as that and shelter them as much because failure is what develops character. So I guess my question is, are you a failure enthusiast?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I'm noticing this early on in my son is now if we try to play something, he always says he has to win, right? If there's any chance that he's losing, he completely shuts down and like doesn't want to do it anymore. So I'm trying to get that across that I'm like, there are times in life where you're not going to win, bud. Like, it's, it's just the way it is. And you just get up and the next time you just strive to be better at it and improve. And that's, I think, what it— what you need to look at is, is you're going to get knocked down. Here's, here's my cliché, right? You're going to get knocked down, but it's just how fast can you get up and keep going, right?

Absolutely. I think that's a great way to end it. Nice cliché.

Perfect.