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Redefine Success Pt. 4 - Reframe Your Failures · The Daily Writer

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Smart Business Writing Podcast, the show that helps you share your message, increase your impact, and grow your business through the power of writing.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is the fourth part of a four-part mini-series on redefining your success.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if you didn't listen to parts one through three, I really encourage you to go back and check those out because there's some really good stuff there.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course I'm going to say that, that there's good stuff there, but I really believe there is.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, I wouldn't have done the shows.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Just as a refresher, though, on what this series is all about, the main idea here is that it's important to define success so that you set yourself up for a win every single week.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we're talking about practices and habits that are within your control and that can set you up for those all important wins.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the tip that we're talking about today, and this is the final part of this series, is why it's important to reframe your failures.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is an important element of redefining your success, is looking at your failures in a different way.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now this may sound kind of strange, but if we're redefining success, how does failing at something mean that you're actually succeeding?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's the answer.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: When you have failed, it means that you have tried.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: It means you're having an experience where you can learn something.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Just like John Maxwell says in his book called Failing Forward, which by the way is really excellent, you can use failure as a stepping stone to greater things if you learn from that experience.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, we're taking those experiences out of the frame of failure and we're putting them into the frame of success.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: I had several big failures last year, and one of those was putting together a client proposal for doing a whole suite of training, podcast production, and ghostwriting for them.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it was pretty much a lock.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: I thought this was really going to happen, and I had actually spent dozens of hours putting together this proposal.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as it turns out, it didn't go through, and it really bothered me for several weeks.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: However, as I really dug into the situation, it was clear that even though the proposal itself was really good and it was well put together, it just wasn't the right timing for the client.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Furthermore, I had also made some critical errors in the process that I have since learned from.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: So as it turns out, this was one of the best learning experiences that I had had in a long time.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: In the moment it was really frustrating, but later on I realized how much that I had learned from it.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: They say that failure is the best teacher, and in many ways I believe that's true, but we only learn from failure if we're open to it.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: So ask yourself honestly, are you open to learning from your failure?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've had to ask myself that question many times the last several years, as I have tried a lot of different things that have failed.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I already mentioned one recent thing.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have nearly enough time to go through all of my failures over the last few years, but here's one that uh looking back now is kind of funny in a way, but at the in the moment it was really frustrating.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Several years ago, when I was just dipping my toe into the waters of business, I set myself up as a seller on Amazon.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is their business called Fulfillment by Amazon, or as some people call it who are in that line of work, Amazon FBA.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And literally, this is what happened.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I shipped about a thousand books to them.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: These were my own books.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: These were not books that I had gone out and purchased, these were my own books.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: I shipped about a thousand books to Amazon, and I actually had to buy special equipment for wrapping and labeling the books, and it's pretty much what I spent a good chunk of the whole summer doing is working on that business.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of stuff to learn, and it was a lot of work processing those books and getting them listed and just going through the whole rigmarole of doing that.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, obviously I didn't learn very much because it ended up being a complete and utter failure.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: I did make a little bit of money from it, but it didn't even come close to offsetting all the vast amount of time that I sunk into it, not to mention the hassle of shipping so much inventory to them.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: In the end, I actually shut down that Amazon business because very few of my books were actually selling.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, get this.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: When Amazon started charging for space in order to store your items that they were selling, I actually had to pay Amazon to destroy my remaining books so that I wouldn't be charged for storage.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let me say that again, just in case that didn't sink in.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: I had to pay Amazon to destroy my own inventory.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, they were going to charge me to continue storing it, but it wasn't selling, so I didn't feel like I had a choice.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or I could have had them ship it back to me, which would have been really expensive, and these were books I didn't want in the first place.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it was such a crazy, crazy thing.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: That was a major business failure for me.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: I lost some money on it, but more than that, I lost a lot of time.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And um I learned that I didn't want to be an Amazon seller.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it just wasn't something that brought me any joy at all.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was just doing it because I knew other people were doing really well with that, so I thought, hey, this is something I could do and make some money to help my family.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that's not to say that if you're doing that kind of work, that if you're selling on Amazon or doing something like that, that you can't be successful because tons of people are really, really successful at doing that.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't something that worked for me.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Either I didn't have my heart in it, or I didn't know enough, or I did something wrong.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know what it was, but anyway, the whole thing just ended up being a massive, monstrous failure.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's okay.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because what actually happened as a result of that was that it pointed me to other types of business and work.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I keep in mind this whole time I've been working at the college, the college where I teach here in St.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Louis, I've been doing that the whole time.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: This was just a side business.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So when the Amazon business failed, I thought, wow, I'm really not good at this kind of thing.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that pointed me in the direction of freelancing and podcasting and blogging and all that kind of stuff, which is all stuff that I'm still doing now.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: So in a way, that was not really a failure.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was an experience that pointed me in the right direction.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was a signpost, if you will.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if failure is the best teacher, well, I definitely learned a lot from that experience.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I don't believe there really is such a thing as failure.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think that failure is just a construct in your mind.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: We use this concept of failure as an interpretive lens that we use to evaluate events that happened, that we perceive as bad or as failures.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, whenever your book doesn't do very well, whenever a client says no to you, whenever you have an off month financially, when you're not getting the work done, when you feel stuck, those things are not objectively bad.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Those are just events that happened to you, and you can interpret those events as points of learning and growth instead of pure failure.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Again, they're just things that happened, and and what you take away from those experiences depends on how you interpret them.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: The failure only exists in your mind, not in objective reality.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if it sounds like I'm talking about metaphysical gobbledygook, I don't believe that at all.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: This this is how I honestly think about failure.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: There is no such thing as failure or success, really, when it comes down to it.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's only a series of events, and you can interpret those events as failure or success.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So when it comes to things that you perceive as being a failure, take another look at how you are framing those events and see if you can't frame those as a learning experience rather than as just a pure failure.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hey, that's my encouragement to redefine success on your terms and to begin stacking the deck in your favor and reframing the way that you see failure.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Focus on what only you can control, and you'll have wins every single week.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hey, that brings an end to this series on redefining success.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hope that you've enjoyed it.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: These are things that I feel very strongly about and things that I try to practice, but I don't do it perfectly, and you probably don't as well.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's okay as long as we're on an upward path of growth and of learning.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: You can shoot me a message on Twitter at Kent Sanders, or also on Facebook at Kent Sanders, or you can always shoot me an email, Kent at KentSanders.net.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I keep forgetting to mention this.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: You can find a lot more resources for writers and creatives on my website, which is KentSanders.net.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Alrighty, my friend, thank you so much for listening.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: I truly appreciate it.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, remember that your writing has the power to change people's lives.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: I will see you in the next episode.