Failure and Redemption

Aggregate change happens faster and faster these days but committing to personal change is the hardest.

Depression leads to introspection which leads to processing but change... man, change is the hardest.

Everyone pays lip service to it but the fundamentals to change are complex, and if you're older, with established responsibilities, recombobulating yourself and moving to the next level... man, that's heavy.

Therapy helps, support group helps, destroying your ego helps, but sometimes these are all very privileged. Sometimes you don't get the benefit of affording therapy, finding support, or get the time to learn humility.

And you're doing this in the midst of aggregate change happening around you, beholden to trends and action from others around you, and still needing to sleep on a bed, eat solid food, exercise, and maintain your sanity.

Sometimes when people ask me what luck is, I explain it as such. Luck is when all those things align in a way to assist you on your way.

Most people end up getting lost in the fray, a lot of the people I met during the web 2.0 cycle disappeared. And it's likely the new people I meet in the upcoming cycle will end up disappearing too. Who will remember the stories when the actors are gone?

In the end you just gotta keep pushing, keep swimming, keep going. Either you'll get it, or you won't, accepting is salvation.

It is interesting to see this from a (former) CEO's perspective. I've seen many big company executives who get stuck in stage 3. I knew that my last big company was destined for failure when the CEO bought everyone a management book about dealing with change. He seemed to be saying, "its not me, its you". If he had a bit more humility, he could have made the changes to get the company moving again. Of course, it can be hard to accept responsibility when egos are big and failures are politicized.

In a startup, you have this process not just for the company itself, but for each setback (e.g. in fundraising, customer acquisition, customer issues, etc.). Establishing a culture of accepting responsibility and learning from failures is absolutely critical. I think the biggest thing I've learned about my time in the startup space is how to deal effectively (or at least better) with failure.

It's more or less the Stages of Grief (with shock and surprise being an early form of denial). Failure is a form of grieving and loss, grieving for the end-of-life of a project and losing the identity attached to the project ("I am project lead"). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model]

What's more interesting is the acceptance of the transient nature of things. All things begin and ends. You might not know when it is ending. You can, however, see the signs of the end well before things end. Shock happens after a prolonged bout of denial, that the end is near.

I'm not sure how this integrates with entrepreneurial tenacity, other than that, it is much easier to find creative ways to move forward when you're not desperately trying to find ways to hang on to the past, your identity, and the "way things are supposed to be." Sometimes, it's the fundamental assumptions that needs to be let go. When you do that before everything falls apart completely, I suppose that's called a pivot.

Fantastic post. Entrepreneurs should make it a goal to go through the steps as quickly as possible. But you can only do that when you fail a lot. Why? This allows you to simply own failure and not let it slow you down.

The road to success is a process of failing in increasingly smaller amounts. Success is not achieved by avoiding failure, but by how it is handled. Those who continue on the road in the face of failure may eventually find success, but those who stop moving forward never will.

This is how founders should deal with startup failure