I Can Successfully Fail and You Can Too
On June 3rd, I had the honor of opening the TechRochester Virtual Leadership Summit: Forging Past the Pause with a story about how I’m terrible at home improvement projects. It was the right topic at the right time in my life about being a successful failure.
Watch the video I prepared for that talk here:
The transcript from the talk is below.
Hi, I’m Dan Newman, and I’m a failure. Let me introduce you to one of my failures.
This is a spigot! Well, it was supposed to be one. Like many of you home-bound during the quarantine, I’ve taken on a number of home projects. One of them was to install an outdoor spigot so I could water my garden. My tomatoes were getting thirsty and I had to schlep up and down the stairs with every bucketful of water. It was exhausting and I thought I could do it better. Even though I wouldn’t call myself a home contractor, I do consider myself a professional learner and thought I could learn my way through this home project. It can’t be that hard! There are youtube videos on how to do it! I got this.
After the third trip to the hardware store on the same day with this...to show for my efforts, you could imagine I was not proud of my results. Angry, yes. Disappointed, yes. Embarrassed to show my face to the hardware guys, triple yes. But, like I said, I’m a professional learner:
I learned that pipes come in different sizes!
I learned that the threading for pipes and hoses are different!
I learned that there exists copper pipe, black pipe, PEX pipe, PVC pipe, all kinds of pipes.
In this talk, I am not going to teach you about how to do-it-yourself plumbing. I could probably talk about how NOT to do it yourself, but let’s save that for later. See, I had to admit three times on that day -and multiple times leading up to and after that day- that I had failed. The first step of learning from failure is simply admitting that you failed and that you recognize it as a failure. That spigot didn't turn out how i wanted and clearly wasn't achieving the functionality I set out to do. Those poor thirsty tomatoes.
Sometimes we set out to achieve certain outcomes and they don't hit the mark and we know it but we still aren't sure why - we just know it's not what we want, or intended. Recognize that despite your efforts to achieve a certain outcome, you still can't make it work. Put on a little growth mindset: You can recognize that you have a gift on your hands, not an incomplete spigot.
Not only am I a professional learner, but I’m a successful failure. Failure is the only way you really learn, and while it’s a lot of not-fun to get there, being able to draw new insights from what doesn’t work or how innocuous events lead to tremendous mistakes is just how we learn. Our biggest mistakes are our biggest sources of learning. Our biggest sources of learning are what helps us be better leaders, better employees, better friends, better humans.
Today, I’m going to show you how to be a successful failure.
Ok, I admit it, I have a podcast. My thought partner and I do a podcast about failure where we interview people about their biggest failures and how it changed their perspective. We’ve interviewed musicians, pizza shop owners, entrepreneurs, and just really nice people to hear their stories and learn from their mistakes. Here’s a clip from our first episode where we interviewed a rock musician who had to completely reshape his identity after realizing his dream was destroying him:
As you can imagine, hearing story after story of failure leads you to start to see themes. One theme that we both have noticed is red flags. Red flags are those data points that indicate that things may not work out the way you want them to work out. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to see them in advance...and then you ignore them and feel dumb. More often, though, is that they don’t show themselves as red flags until after the failure has happened.
Every guest of ours on the podcast has talked about some inflection point where they looked back and realized what went wrong. It’s fascinating, really, that a lot of our guests took intentional breaks where they reflected and learned from their mistakes. They started to see the chain of causality that led to the fallout and were able to make new decisions in their lives to pivot and change.
This is the second secret of how to be a successful failure. As I said before, step one is admitting you have a problem...or that you’re the problem. Hopefully that identification ends with, “Gee, I guess I need to change and evolve.” However, that change-and-evolve step requires that you reflect on your mistakes and identify the chain of causality that led to the failure. You have to find the red flags.
Red flags could look like:
Not hitting your sales targets
Being unable to sleep
An unknown credit card transaction
A feeling in your knee.
A quarantine.
The quarantine is a giant red flag.
I started a business around helping businesses retain their talent. If you can remember, before the quarantine we were in a candidate’s market. Employers were trying to find ways to keep their employees from leaving. For those of you at tech companies, it’s not a foreign concept that a highly-skilled engineer would leave a job simply to get a pay bump because they knew there was a demand for those skills.
With all the layoffs and uncertainty wrought by COVID-19, employees are instead worrying about keeping their jobs, rather than their next one. It’s a big change. It’s a big red flag for a guy like me that nobody will want- let alone can spend- to try to entice employees to stay. Things have changed. I had to change.
During those long nights where I stared at the ceiling with these thoughts in my head, I stewed on ideas.
How can I do what I am passionate about- helping people have amazing experiences- when nobody seems able to afford or want those experiences? Which led me to step 3...
Here’s step three: you have to talk about the failure. You have to get out of your own head and out of your comfort zone to bring in the wisdom and perspectives of others. You have to hear other stories of failure to start to see the threads that connect the red flags. Simply start by identifying the progression of flags, either by journaling to yourself, talking with a close friend, at a networking event...
That’s just about when I ran into the F word. Not failure. Fuckup.
There’s an organization that talks about failure called Fuckup Nights. It’s a grassroots chapter-based failure showcase. In your city, the local Fuckup Nights chapter showcases a few people who are willing to get up on stage and talk about their failures.
It’s like a TED talk after a few rounds at the bar. It’s funny, it’s humbling, it’s unvarnished, and it’s instrumental in making you and the people around you a successful failure. Let them explain:
I was in the final stages of reigniting the Boston Fuckup Chapter when it became clear that a group gathering with booze and failure isn’t going to fly when we’re sheltering in place.
Even though it looked like hosting an event wasn’t going to happen, I was using the opportunity to reflect on my own failures. I was inspired to come up with my own failure story to open a show when I, ironically, realized my red flags were looking right at me.
I had a business failure on my hands. In the months leading up to this reflection, I had been spending a lot of time doing what I thought I should be doing. I was sending a million cold messages to people on LinkedIn because that’s what I thought a sales development rep would do. I was optimizing my website to get detailed analytics because that’s what I thought a web marketing manager would do. I was trying to schmooze a million people at networking events because I thought that’s what a business development executive would do.
Here are all the business cards I collected at events. How much new business did I get from all of this? One client.
I was spending so much time shelving my skillset away instead of figuring out how to meet the market needs using my unique skills: over ten years of leading workshops, speaking at events, and helping people learn. I was stressed. I wasn’t sleeping well. My poor girlfriend.
With the quarantine red flag, I could either ignore it and continue swinging with the same strategy, or I could sit down and rethink things. I realized I was spending too much time doing things that were not producing results and I was miserable doing them. Not only that, I had to admit that employee retention was no longer the right positioning in a market where every other LinkedIn post is talking about being laid off and trying to stay positive.
With this revelation that a change needed to happen, I talked with peers, former colleagues, mentors, my parents. I barfed my Sunday Scaries into a document and invited people to tell me what they thought of it. I chased down a few crazy ideas. I hosted my first free workshop. I met more people. I kept talking about it.
Through this “talking about it” I realized that I had a great skillset for quarantine: running remote workshops and panels. I had been doing it for the past 10 years. Why wasn’t I spending my time running workshops instead of sending a million cold-call LinkedIn messages?
Since I’ve made that pivot away from typical sales to workshops, speaking, and coaching, I’ve closed more deals during one quarantine month than in the six months before lockdown. Perhaps part of it is due to all the effort from before, and I’m open to admitting that. It’s too early to say that these decisions are 100% right- we’re all trying to make quarantine work- but I feel far more confident and driven with my choices. I feel like a success, even if all I am is a successful failure.
To recap the ingredients to a successful failure:
Admit that you messed up.
Reflect and identify the red flags.
Talk about it.
It’s simple, though hard. It’s straightforward, but backwards. In and of itself, making the most of failure will not make you more successful today, but it will retroactively draw value and meaning from yesterday. You’re playing the long game, my fellow failures. It may take a fourth trip to the hardware store to finish that home project, but there’s so much wisdom you’ll be able to share with your neighbor when they start their next project. Or yours.
And may your failures be spectacular.
