Welcome,
I’m sitting in my offices just off Madison Avenue in New York City. It’s around 2pm so the office is starting to generate noise again after a lunch that’s aggressively trying to put people to sleep. My colleague has walked into my office, for the first time since we returned to the office with the ominous “Soooooooooooo” and a look of “oh shit” on their face. They are letting me know that the contract we were about to win for a major client is falling through for no other reason than that one of the individuals involved in the deal is on a Visa which we can’t accommodate for the project. We’ve been working on this deal for weeks, have put hundreds of hours in and now we’ve completely failed to make anything out of it based on a simple mistake. Could this have been avoided? Of course, but not by me or any of my team because we didn’t know that this was a problem. We have failed in our attempt to win the work because we failed to have the knowledge needed. So, I do what I try to always do. Give them a smile, tell them “we’ll figure it out” and set myself to the task of apologizing to the client and working out our next steps. It’s another in the ever-growing almanac of failures I’ve had, and I’m genuinely excited to go and figure it out.
Whilst we’ve failed on this one project, we’ll never make that same mistake again (In truth we’ll likely make it at least once or twice more, laugh at our stupidity, but then definitely never do it again). See, people seem to think that success is a staircase, probably because motivational speakers, self-help writers and Instagram quotes have been telling everyone that for years. You fail, you learn from it and you take a step forward. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case because success isn’t a staircase at all, it’s a huge, unstable, constantly growing pile of rubble. Whilst you do learn from your failures you rarely encounter the exact same failure twice so it’s not a neatly laid out staircase but a huge messy pile of mistakes, fuck ups and do overs. A pile myself, my business and everyone who relies on us is precariously perched on top of.
Those motivational quotes are really useful for dusting ourselves off and supplying the positive attitude and inspiration we need to jump back on the saddle, but they don’t give us the information needed to take the next step. The business books and self-help guides are a great source for that information but often focus on the wins rather than the failures. This makes sense, people don’t like to talk about failures (unless the failure was huge) because little failure don’t sell – “Look how bad I fucked this report up” is less tantalizing than “5 steps to being a billionaire” but no one has ever succeeded without the little fails. Usain Bolt tripped, Oprah Winfrey choked, David Beckham missed, Beyoncé sang off key and as a result they learnt how to avoid doing those things again.
Just so you’re in the know, the instability I mentioned; that huge pile of rubble, is part of every business on the planet. One false move, big or small, either in or out of your control can cause the walls to turn to rubble. Of the largest 20 companies in the world in 1990 only 5 still exist, but the people who created them are still doing big things. They experimented, experienced failures, used those failures to move forward and created new and better companies – and that’s what this blog is for. I’ve gone through alot of failures, I’m going through them now and have more to come, I’ve screwed up left right and center then, usually, learnt from it and will continue to do so for a long time because at 34 I’ve barely started. I’ll explore my failures, often in brutal detail being clear just how dumb I’ve been, talk about them, learn from them (hopefully) and take the next step on my rubbly way hoping that one day that pile will become a hill, the hill will becomes a mountain and once I’m on top of that mountain I’m confident it’ll be a bloody brilliant view.