Let's talk about failure

If you’ve followed me long enough you’ve probably heard me talk about my favorite book “The Way of Kings” while it’s Tolkienesque High fantasy might throw a lot of people off its grounding in things like mental health truly is what makes it so compelling to read. I first read it a little while after going through my divorce, and I found a lot of connections with some of the characters. But this isn’t a book review, I’ll save that for later. Let's talk about two situations where I “failed bigly” and why sometimes the outcome being a failure is a poor representation of what is actually transpiring. Or as the book references “Journey before destination” as an ideal to uphold.

The first failure I’ll cover is a fresh one and the wounds are not quite healed, for you see it happened over the past weekend. I recently moved back into my house after being a house guest for 5 months with a friend. His generosity was enormous, tolerating me as a house guest, not charging me anything. So, I wanted to properly thank him with something special. I ended up deciding on a trip to Chicago where he and his fiancée would enjoy a lovely spa day on valentines, and then we would all do an incredible cocktail making class at The Violet Hour, an exceptional bar I had visited years ago. For someone who has everything, I thought the experience is what makes the right gift. Everything was planned out, he was very excited, then unfortunately he got really sick. Suddenly a trip halfway across country became a burden instead of a blessing. We fortunately managed to get him recovered enough to fly back in time, but ultimately the entire weekend was shot. I even felt a little guilty for dragging him across country, silly I know.

The next failure is actually a work based one, it’s one I have been very hard on myself on, although others saw it as quite a successful venture. To add a little salt into the wound recently my memento from this effort got stolen in a burglary. I’m talking about an event I did years ago with Mark Hamill and Dr. Michio Kaku. That event was a bit ahead of all the AI hype, it focused more on RPA and AI Ops than Generative AI. In probably the wildest twist of fate in my career I was actually the one who drafted the copy Mark Hamill would ultimately read as our host, I aso sat in on the recording and was at the very least a co-director of it, ensuring the recording was going to my satisfaction. The content was top notch, Dr. Michio Kaku even made a bold prediction years before GenAI that ultimately, I am seeing as sage advice. When pressed on what are the skillsets of the future given automation and AI, Dr. Michio Kaku said: The skills that will matter most will be what we currently call the soft skills, critical thinking, persuasiveness, leadership, public speaking etc.

So, Nick you might be asking, you got to work with a Hollywood legend, a theoretical physicist event your CTO this is the kind of content that anyone would kill to have on their resume, where did it go wrong? Was it the content, nope. We received incredibly high scores, and the retention rate across the hour-long video was extremely high. Where it went wrong was the cost per lead. Unfortunately, we just were not able to draw as much as we’d want. We had a lot of things working against us unfortunately: a social media blackout due to some challenging real-world events occurring, what originally was a quiet period to slot the webinar in became rather packed with competing events, and ultimately, I wasn’t able to execute the plan I would have liked for promotion.

Now the funny thing is that if you ever gave one of these stories as an example in an interview for the question: Tell me about a time you failed? They would think you weaseled out of the question. But as you read along, I’m sure even the coldest of hearts could empathize and see where I would mistakenly attribute these as failures. Coming back to the book and the ideal: journey before destination… We don’t have much control at times over an outcome, what we can control is our process we use to achieve that outcome. And from there maybe a little luck. I’ve had things bomb and I’ve had things go viral and it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the two. Like Wayne Gretzky famously said you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

So, what has this recent event, and the past one taught me:

• Give yourself grace especially when you’re in the thick of it
• Own the outcome if you are the cause of it, but balance that with understanding some things are beyond your control.
• Adapt to the conditions on the ground and pivot fast
• If something didn’t work, interrogate why it didn’t work and remove that risk (if possible)
• Last celebrate the process you used to get there (assuming it was good) don’t throw it out because circumstances made things go sideways.