Failure is just Succeeding Slowly

bycaeristhiona

75 followers

4 years ago

I've wanted to work for myself since before I was technically old enough to have a job. I've started businesses from artisanal tea blends to homeopathic healing to freelance writing. The grand total I've made from my various endeavors has been less than $10,000. Spread out over about 15 years, that's not much.

There's a lot of pain that goes along with that kind of track record. My partner hasn't always been supportive, and has required increasing amounts of convincing with every new business venture. It's not easy to share your living room with piles upon piles of raw herbs being mixed and remixed into increasingly obscure natural remedies, or to be asked to taste an endless stream of unusual and generally fairly unpalatable tisanes. There have been a lot of late nights, working long hours at a day job and then coming home and pounding away at blogs or submitting lowball proposals on freelancer boards.

It's a truism that you will build circuits in your brain to expect whatever you encounter most. It's these thinking shortcuts that enable us to function in everyday life, but which also set up some of our worst thinking traps. It has to be a special kind of insanity to pursue these kinds of careers that are built around an astronomical assumed failure rate. Even in the training videos on this site, they (correctly) warn that your first niche will almost certainly not be your last, and you may have to start and restart the process in order to find a profitable blog subject, even with all the concept testing tools they try to give us.

The amount of work to get any kind of solo work off the ground is massive, requiring hours and hours of work before even presenting the idea to the outside world. It's not just a matter of missing out on instant gratification; you have to decide to delay gratification for weeks, months, or maybe years - and then be okay with the fact that when you finally launch this thing into the void, gratification never comes, and you have to start all over again from the bottom. Whether you're creating an affiliate blog, writing a novel, or building an app, there's so much below the surface of the tiny iceberg that is your pitch to the world. Even the dumbest, most doomed-to-fail idea represents hours of work that shows a certain character that commands respect.

At times like this, platitudes about how persistence breeds success can feel insulting. Surely some kind of success would have come by now? Or from a more cynical standpoint, surely for every success story there are thousands upon thousands of people who work equally hard and never succeed? And from that perspective, wouldn't it be better to just...stop?

The key to thinking traps is that they try to find patterns and then apply those patterns as often as possible. It's one of the things that prevents our brains from burning out constantly - it loves to create thinking shortcuts to free up space for real problems. And when you repeat a pattern as frequently as most aspiring entrepreneurs repeat failure, there's a pretty strong confirmation bias toward failure.

The key I've found to breaking out of these thinking traps is to view my projects as linear instead of circular. Starting my failed tea business wasn't a project that I finished - it was one series of steps in the long path toward owning my own business, one that taught me valuable lessons about business fundamentals like running an online store and a Facebook page. Pursuing a freelance writing career wasn't a closed circle, it was how I learned (for way too little pay) to do all the writing that goes into promoting a business solo, and also the first time I was able to work with a virtual assistant, whose talents were sorely wasted on me. Each failure isn't a failure, it's another lesson in the strange little business school I'm creating for myself. Every attempt has been more successful, building on the lessons learned in the previous attempt. Maybe this won't be my last stop on the entrepreneurial journey. It doesn't really matter. Wherever I wind up, this project will have been an integral part of its success. And if this is where I land as a business owner, it would never have been possible without a long string of failures.