A trip back to the start: Unfiltered reflections on the role of failure in success - Gabriele Areolite

Last week I travelled back in time: I visited Córdoba, a place I lived in when I just left Italy - my home country - for the first time. I felt like I needed to walk some old beaten paths as a part of my constant search for answers.

I am finding myself in a time of introspection, a moment for me to recap what I have done in my life and look at the choices I have made, analysing what went well...and what went wrong.?

This trip was a significant jump in the past, all while I am working to unveil Memories of the Future. I had the chance to see the same things again, but this time with different eyes:

“Now that I’ve lost my sight, I can see clearer”. [Cit.]

Failure = Success

There was a number of thoughts running through my head during and after this visit, standing before the sight of history and immovable pillars of human heritage. Thoughts about the uselessness of conflict and the power of synergies, about cohexisting and helping each other succeed.

And when I think about success, I can’t help but thinking of the role of failure in every good success story.

As entrepreneurs and ambitious individuals, we all aim for undisrupted success, but let’s face it:

Failing is just as much important as progressing.

It is a physiological part of the process. Conscious of this, I embrace failure without regrets, and instead of thinking about what I could have done differently, I am now strategising on what I am going to do next.

I am enjoying this planning phase, as I feel like spending more time with myself can only help me grow, figure out who I am and where I am going. Giving myself a set direction, having short as much as long-term goals, is as much of a necessary step in my life as it is within every new project I launch.

I was strolling through the streets that made me who I am, those places where I learned how to live, survive and thrive...and there it hit me. That’s where I can do better: making plans before acting!

I am a risk taker by nature, despite being a very logical thinker, I tend to follow my instincts before logic. Even when my brain tells me there is so much more to consider before making a move, my guts keep screaming “Go for it!”.

I owe part of my success to that, as I have acted impulsively in many occasions, and hit the jackpot.

I was probably never ready for any of the big steps I took, if you ask me. But that made me even more tenacious and motivated to exceed expectations. That’s where my saying “You’ve got to exceed to succeed!” comes from.

Planning vs Jumping

While I recognise the positive outcome of following my instincts, I feel like my ideas often lack of proper planning.

The more the attempts, the more the failures: That’s simple Maths.

But then, I can’t help but thinking that, no attempts equals zero chances of success!

So when is the right time to take a leap of faith? And where should I draw the line?

There is no handbook answer to this question: All you can do is pile up valuable experience that may help you differentiate a bad idea from something great. If you don’t learn from your experiences, and especially from your mistakes, then success might as well be outside of your range.

So I end up wondering, if I only trust my guts and my brain has a secondary role in my decisions, what aspects of an idea should I look at (without making an accurate plan), to immediately conclude it is not a good one?

One of them is certainly the fact that my business solution actually solves something for a good number of people. But what if I haven't taken any time to run this into the numbers, haven't made any fancy market sizing nor a business plan that could be pitched to anyone else than myself.

What should I ask myself to easily predict failure, then? Can I turn my subjective point of view into an objective evaluation?

Enthusiasm vs Facts

I often find myself sleepless because of an idea running through my head.

I guess it is a typical curse for creative people - too many ideas and not enough lives to turn them into reality.

Each new idea may seem great at the beginning, most probably carrying the synthesis of your own interests or triggering certain personal emotions, which make the possibility of realising it an exciting scenario.

But what I need to ask myself next is: “Is my idea going to make someone else as enthusiastic as me? Does my idea contain something very important and interesting to me, but completely irrelevant to the rest of the universe?”.

To make of this a concrete example, let’s assume that for some weird reason I had a passion for rats and came up with the idea to open a rat-petting café in Córdoba, choosing a place I love. I would be excited about it, as sipping tea while caressing a rat is what I’d like to do every single afternoon.

But what I need to do now is ask myself:

“How many other people in my city share my passion?

Are other people even interested in something I like so much?

How many are going to show up at my cafe and pay to pet rats?”.

The answer probably is “Not as many as I need to recover my investment, and possibly make a living out of it”.

The urge of Connecting

The time when I decided to start CONNECTICLUB back in 2016, I did it out of my own wish, trying to contribute to the local environment as much as fulfilling my own need to find a safe place to interact with peers in my city, somewhere to meet locals and expats at the same time, and break down the barriers that kept me from socialising.

The idea was just right! Many other people felt just like me: Before I realised, I had created a community, and without making any structured plans, I was answering to a need and solving a problem.

I had even found the way to promote the concept well, so that more people could get to know about it. But that all came with a considerable effort in the form of time, money and health...none of which were ever recovered.

The community members naturally began asking for support with finding a job, relocating, getting trained to succeed at interviews and entering the corporate world, as well as with starting a new project, promoting their business, and so forth.

I found myself with so many business opportunities, and at the same time nothing worth my time, money-wise.

I ended up pausing what I had been trying to launch, due to the structural limit of not being able to run this with any return, all while my focus and priority was growing my import/export company.

Regardless of that failed attempt, I kept CONNECTICLUB and its values in my heart, as it meant something beyond business for me: it was my way to share what I knew and support others, being a point of reference to a whole community that was interacting without any barrier nor discrimination.

Then following some changes in my corporate structure in 2023, I had the chance to restructure and launch this project again, this time with a more structured plan: A Coworking Centre in Malta, a space where starting and growing entrepreneurs could thrive, interacting with our team and with a collaborative community of peers.

The inauguration of CONNECTICLUB highlighted the immediate interest and enthusiasm of a number of potential members, which set the hopes that a solid base could be built, for the project to grow and take off fast.

What happened next was a different story. Things I hadn’t counted with, in the close-to-zero pre-launch plans I had made:

• We had the chance to work with several partners, and to discuss opportunities of cooperation with other potential key players. However, their show of interest and promises ended up being less concrete than we would have needed to achieve the structure I had first envisioned.
• As a direct consequence, we found ourselves stranded and without resources. In the absence of those key partnerships, we had to increase our efforts and make things happen. We started to build our own assets and look for our vocation.
• Our team found itself dealing with all sorts of requests, from clients having the perception that we could solve practically any problem. That created a phenomenon of time dispersion where the investment does not pay off, in the short nor in the long term.
• Furthermore, the same situation turned out to be annihilating the seek of a key focus for the project, drifting away from activities CONNECTICLUB could flourish and succeed within, while leaving aside all those “opportunities” that turned to be dead ends.
• The next step, which leads to the present moment, was beginning to figure out a different mission that could bring the concept to success. Among the strategies we are currently implementing, there is the recent choice to spin off our Marketing and IT services, by creating a parallel brand called XSE3D to succeed. (pronounced "Exceed"), particularly focused on outsourcing clients’ projects and outstaffing their vacancies with talents of all kinds, operating from our new offices in Tangier.

As of today, I am not afraid to say that CONNECTICLUB is still a work in progress, a near-to-blank white sheet to write on. I still firmly believe its success will depend on possible future partnerships, complementing our structure and creating symbiosis to achieve a great equilibrium.

Closing thoughts

I am not sure I learned my lesson from this “false start”, not totally convinced in my head this was actually a failure and that I should take it as such.

I made most of my life-changing choices out of instinct [See my previous article]. Does that make of me a bad strategist? Am I just an impulsive risk-taker?

I am attached to my brands, my ideas and my projects, at times too proud to admit I didn’t plan all things well in advance.

At the same time, that doesn’t discourage me, as walking through my own beaten path keeps reminding me that diving into the unknown was never a bad choice for me.

Sometimes it works, some others not. But if we want to succeed, we need to take our shots and be able to embrace failure as part of the process, even when the pill is hard to swallow.?

Rising from the ashes, living of a new life, waking up with a new idea…these are the things that lead us entrepreneurs to success.

One lesson I have certainly learned in my life is that I shouldn’t give up trying, and that missing too many shots doesn’t mean I am going to miss all of them!

So I keep trying, using my resources as best as I can, reinventing myself every single day, and never surrendering to the idea that something won’t work just because I didn’t have a perfect plan in place.

Didn't I look at all the facts and numbers, before jumping in the void? Not the end of the world! I am a learning-by-doing type of guy, I always figure it out, at the end.

I can't ignore the fact that this worked for me. Not without any efforts...but it worked.

So I will keep doing it my way, daring and dreaming.

Perseverance and resilience are a great recipe for an idea’s success, regardless of how long the learning process may take.

Post Scriptum:

Dear Readers,

I'll be getting deeper into the topic of evaluating a good business idea in my next releases, focusing on other key factors such as:

• Time as the most valuable currency?
• The challenge of Scalability and Sustainability
• Underestimating the lack of resources

As my new project slowly takes shape, I am going to keep publishing my thoughts and unveil some of the content of my future books and the products I'll be launching on the market.

Hashtag 64 is much more than a brand to me: it represents a decade of personal development, across which I have built my philosophy about existence, my own theories about technological advancement and the future of our race, from now till the year 2064.

I am excited to share my thoughts with the world and break the silence I have been keeping for many years on my inactive socials. Your support and comments are a great booster to my initiative, and I am grateful for any inputs or feedback from my readers.

Sincerely,

Gabriele Areolite