#glugbrum

Ted, and particularly the SF startup scene, have made failure their own and I consume these fail tales like Dim Sum on a hangover. But just like said glutinous balls of indistinguishable crimson meat, I’m left wanting at the end of every meal.

We consume failure as a benchmark against our own abilities. There are more self employed creatives than ever before. In the absence of a Creative Business Rule Book, we’re all off searching for guidance, advice and a bit of insider knowledge wherever we can get it. That’s what makes fail tales so popular and we’re all beginning to realise that popular content is good for business.

And the fail tales work. They increase links to our site, they get us RT’d across social media, herald invites to speaking engagements which eventually (please don’t ask me exactly how) result in new clients.

However, after months of consuming other people’s failure, I learned little, if anything at all.

I’ve learned that founders back out and employees lie. I’ve learned that markets crumble and big brands rip off the little gal. I’ve learned that talented people are expensive and relationships don’t always go the distance.

After hours of consumption, my only take away is how unhelpful it is for speakers to claim ownership of these failure-contributing symptoms. That doing so implies some governance of factors far outside our control.

Ideas fail because of external forces and internal cockups. Either one or a combination of both. By all means, list the external cock ups; the cultural and economic shifts that rendered your idea invalid. The wage bills required to attract staff to a city with a housing crisis, the emotional cracks exacerbated by financial concerns. But don’t pass them off as failures you could have avoided.

I want proper cock ups. I want to know what happened when you tried to fight your investor. I want to know why you spent your savings on office furniture. I want to know why you deleted poor online reviews and then publicly argued with your customers.

I’ve made failure a ‘thing’ at Well Made. And while we didn’t want to ever build a reputation as bumbling incompetents, we did realise that to do it well was to do it with complete honesty.

http://vimeo.com/104527785

I can’t watch this video of myself because it still feels raw. The repercussions of borrowing money we couldn’t afford to pay back were felt for a long time. However, the lesson - don’t use the past to predict the future - is an important one. That’s why I wrote the talk.

I share our failure stories because I need to hear them myself. I need to know what real failure looks like, so I can distinguish it from a painful blip. Fail hard, fail better only works if the fail bit is genuine.