Back to the topic at hand. I was riding high last week. Every post was cracking the all-time top 10 viewed list. The Guest Wanderer spot was a huge success and my ad revenue for May was already close to matching the total for April. So I decided to take a shot and see if the momentum would carry over.
By financial measures any business person would probably classify my first "weekend sale" as a failure. I certainly didn't meet my dream scenario and I will not be leaving my day job for this full-time anytime soon. The fact is that after shipping is taken care of, I WILL LOSE MONEY. I know, that is a terrible phrase in business. However, I view the weekend as a total success. I broke my all-time sales record. I won't give specific numbers here. I'll save that for BABB's monthly recap. This means even though I expect to lose money people will be wearing my stuff and that's pretty cool!
So if I consider this to be a success, why would I title this article "I'm a failure..." In the U.S. we hate the word failure. I have personally spent thousands of hours of my life consoling students who thought something they did made them a "failure" and trying to help them pick up the pieces. Although the prevailing view in the U.S. is negative, I view failure as an extremely positive thing. I do need to take a moment to put this statement in context. Failure without learning is a wasted opportunity, but learning from failure is the best teacher I've had in my life. My apologies to every teacher I've ever had at Ely Elementary, Rugby High School, North Dakota State University, University of Phoenix, and Western International University but I didn't learn nearly as much from you as I did from my mistakes. In education, the learning occurred when I got my first C's in Applied Calculus and Chemistry my Freshman year. Honestly, this occurred because I was more worried about how to get my hands on a 30-pack of Miller High Life than taking a few minutes to review my lecture notes. I was devastated and knew I had to change some things in my life. My priorities improved only because of this failure to meet the expectations I had for myself. My taste in beer, however, improved when I had more than $13.99 to spend.
Even after learning from failure it never really dawned on me how negative we view the concept until a few years ago when I read a great book called Mistakes Were Made: But Not by Me. The book was a little bit of a life changer for me because it reminded me of how much I learned from my mistakes. In relationships, all of my friends told me I should stay away from a girl I dated. They explained to me the reasons we weren't compatible but explanation is not a great teacher. Failure was the teacher here. When things went South they went way South. To this day, she is the only person I dated that I never had contact with again after things ended. From that failure, I learned what I do not want from a relationship. I then proceeded to fail about 50 more times to find someone I could connect with before I finally found my current girlfriend. I carry these lesson with me in every interaction I have with Jenn. Sadly, for her that means that I'm probably a little more communicative than she would like sometimes.
At work I've failed at some point in all of these categories: job interviews, projects, day-to-day interactions, dealing with stress, working with students, becoming a faculty member, creating a new position for myself, coaching my teammates, developing connections, giving constructive criticism. communication, managing up, handling criticism, and on and on. This is the shortlist of things I've failed at. These are literally just the items I could think about with a specific memory attached in the time I wanted to take to write this article. Give me a full day and I could come back with a 200 page report. But with every one of these items not only is there a memory there is a lesson I learned. This brings me to another one of my word math equations:
Failure + Surrender = Absolute Failure
But
Failure + Tenacity = Unstoppable Force
About a year ago, I stood in front of a Toastmasters group and gave a speech with a very similar tone to this article. I told them about all the times I failed, about how it's such a negative concept in our culture, and how I view it as a great teacher. I explained an excerpt from Mistakes Were Made that talked about how Chinese children are taught math by being required to stand in front of the class and work out a problem until they get it correct. In our culture, the kids would probably laugh at the mistakes until the child was completely embarrassed. The teacher would mercifully let the child sit down and call on a volunteer. But for the Chinese children, the class doesn't tease. They support and learn from the mistakes the other child makes. I relayed all of this information to the Toastmasters group. They all clapped and appeared to take in the message and I was happy. As the meeting wrapped up at least 3 people took the time to come up to me to say "Great speech. Don't be so hard on yourself. You're not a failure." I guess I failed to get my message across.
With that, let me demonstrate a little tenacity by debuting this new design for (you guessed it)....$20. This week only:
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