This is straight from the heart.
From my own experience with a fair share of solid wins and painful losses.
From an eternal optimist with a strong pragmatic bent who seriously loves winning.
From my core belief that against all odds, that you can grab a tiny piece of the collective heart of consumers by giving them something to hold onto—a product with a hint of their own personal future in it—and create a brand that tens of millions can make their own.
That’s the romantic side of winning.
Add a real pay window to that equation (thanks JLM!) and it’s as good as it gets. No—even better actually.
I’ve been lucky to land there a few times. I’ve been on the other side as well—everyone has—and as much as we romanticize winning, loosing seriously sucks.
It’s painful regardless of your personal track record. Painful even if you don’t need the win economically. Painful to the best VCs with amazing portfolios who just hate writing off the losers as par for the course.
This is only natural as it takes every ounce of yourself for years to build something. All of your heart splattered across your sleeve and shared with everyone in your personal and professional networks, and in many cases your friends and families as investors.
Damn—it’s a wonder of nature when success ricochets across these networks.
Not so the other way when you write the humble blog post thanking everyone from the heart for their help cause truthfully without a lot of help nothing happens.
So why this post?
Is the very idea of the acculturation of failure, some folklorish ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’ thing? Or ‘We live to learn and that in itself is a win’ set of bumper stickers?
Is there really an upside to failure other than it is inevitable and we simply roll on?
We luckily work in a business climate where the culture of entrepreneurship has become the foundation for much of what we do. I love this. Alongside of that, the vernacular of how we address the flipside of dreamed success—failure—has become a bit more mythos than it deserves.
I understand all to well the pathological effect that fear of failing can have on us. How it stops us from starting. How it engenders bad decisions.
Its reality that we all fail. It’s equally true, that you can’t fight with all of your soul to win over time and then decide that loosing is, well—good for you after all.
It is simply bad when it happens…but with benefits over time.
People are smart and they bounce back and take advantage of the gift of hindsight. They do it because its there and they learn. They do it cause its both therapeutic and elucidating.
In all honestly, the true learning of shuttering a company touches you at your very personal core.
So of course we learn from failing.
If I look back at all the ones that didn’t work, there are learnings about how we did this or that, should have raised more or less money, or certainly not counted on that big deal to close on time.
The real value is more about composure, like an athlete watching themselves on tape and learning how to recalibrate muscle memory to be different.
Here is where I depart from common startup lore.
I can’t say that I learn more from loosing than from winning. The opposite actually.
We lionize success.
And rightfully so. Winning is why we work. And winning is our well deserved reward.
We emulate and copy success. We hire people who have rubbed against it before to bring it to our team. We put it on the stage and pay money to be told again what we already know.
How do you bounce back from projects that we spent years of our lives and tens of millions of dollars of others money and the good will of our friends and families?
You bounce back by being smarter and winning the next time. You bounce back because even this noirish plunge is no more risky than the chance at real success in a corporate job.
You look inside yourself and discover whether you have the spark to do it again.
Business is not a game nor a lifestyle, it’s the work of creating value and wealth. There is more money to support people who can actually do this, then there are people who actually can.
So my advice to myself (and I still need to tell myself this), to my clients is always simply is to just do it if you have it in you. If you can be the leader great, if not, join another team and lend your skills.
The truth of it all is that as deep as the sorrow you feel when you just can’t make it work, winning is really all that sweeter.
It’s so worth chasing.
