If you're a failure and you know it clap your hands

Over the past 6 months I have coached a lot of startups and while I feel enormously blessed that they want to talk to me (don't tell them this but I have no idea what I am doing either!) the experience has meant for a lot of the time I have been feeling like I might be bi-polar.

I can start the day talking to someone who is struggling to get out of bed and then jump to someone who has just closed a round of funding and is expanding nationally when they could never have dreamed of doing so a month earlier, back to someone who thinks they'll have to give up their dreams and get a "real" job back to someone who can't keep up with customer demand and asks if I know anyone who would be good as an employee.

Counter-intuitively it is actually in the darker more difficult calls that I feel most called to because that is where most of my experience sits having 4 failures under my belt I know what it is like to face financial ruin, identity confusion, shame, depression and the overwhelming sense of 'I have let everyone down, I can't recover from this'.

The most difficult startup failure I have had to endure was the closure of Atma Cycles, I started it off the back of my successes (which gave me more confidence than it should have). I then invested everything I had and did a crowdfunding campaign which netted me another $23,000 from my family, friends and everyone else I knew. So at this stage if it were a poker game I was definitely all in, I had told everyone all about it and everyone expected big things. My identity was so wrapped up in the venture that to get them apart later required more then one breakage. Needless to say this bet had to win and it didn't, it was a massive failure and where a lot of my learnings come from.

These feelings and experiences are all part of the entrepreneurial journey it is just we don't talk about them and when faced with them we just put on a brave face and 'solider on'. This approach to coping is both unhealthy and unwise because by doing this we are discounting the journey we have taken and writing it all off as failure when this is never the case.

Firstly, being brave enough to take one step into the entrepreneurial journey is amazing. There is less entrepreneurship happening in the west and millennials are the least likely generation to become entrepreneurs in a century (in the US at least). So if you are one of the rare few who has tried to do something, thank you! It is through your efforts that this world changes. It is important to remember though that every time you step out you are embarking on an educational journey as well as an entrepreneurial one . It is through these tough moments that the skills, attitudes and behaviours of entrepreneurship are being built in you. Just like a painter doesn't start producing the Mona Lisa from the first time they hold a paint brush, entrepreneurship is no different, it is a skill and having failures is how we learn.

My question is; what are you going to do next? Give up or continue to use and refine your skills so that you can be part of building the future?

My advice when faced with the inevitable failures that will happen along the way is to go back to the start and go through your notes, calendar appointments, diaries and emails, all of it and write down the things this journey has taught you. Remember who you were when you started so that you can see how far you have come.

We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.

John Dewey

Ultimately, after looking through everything and writing down your reflections, you need to consider whether or not the journey was worth it? From my experience hindsight usually returns the answer that it was and if that is the case why not do it again? This time you are wiser, stronger and more experienced. As a side point there are no 'real' jobs out there. If Mike Cannon-Brookes feels like an imposter none of us have any hope, embrace the fact we are all just making it up as we go along.