I remember my first big work-related failure. It was when I waited on my first table, and spilled ten glasses of water on a famous person and his companions. You’ll be able to learn the details in this book when it’s released. For the record, I actually turned it into a positive experience. My first failure with my own business when I was about twenty three, and got the brilliant idea to start an audio equipment rental company. Parts of my plan were right on the money and well thought out. I got a great deal paying cash on a PA system and some other equipment, created some competitive rates after doing local market research, and did a pretty good job of promoting it with a Yellow Pages ad and some guerrilla marketing. The big flaws in my plan? Up-and-coming musicians never have money (who knew?) and as a musician myself, I was too much of a softie on collecting payments. I sold the gear a few months later, more or less breaking even except for the time I put into it.
My next big failure was when I helped launch and grow a small telecom company from about 30 clients to almost 600 in just over a year. The big mistake here? My business partner turned out to be a crafty and manipulative hustler, selling the accounts to another company right under my nose because I lacked the foresight to get my name on the right documents in the right way, because I was putting all my time into sales and customer service. I haven’t been naive enough to get screwed that way since; I’d probably make my MOM sign agreements if we started a business together today. I’ve had plenty of other failures, and plenty of successes as well. I haven’t gotten “rich” yet, but I’ve stayed self-employed, and not gone into debt or bankruptcy. The point here is, failure is not an outcome, it’s an event. Unless you give up. Then YOU are the failure, because all it takes to succeed in life is to NEVER GIVE UP.
The video clip below may be a failure of sorts. It may only get 37 views on YouTube. But that’s not my concern; I need to make some videos, so I thought that while I learn how to do it, I might as well FINISH one. The clip here took a couple of hours, but if I make another one like it, it’ll take about 30 minutes. That’s a success in itself. George Patton said “A good plan implemented today is better than a perfect plan implemented tomorrow.” At Facebook corporate headquarters, they’ve paraphrased this as “done is better than perfect“. However you wanna say it, doing something NOW is a success of its own kind. Me, I figure I have about ten more major failures before I can find that epic success I’m looking for.
