Recently I began looking at aspects of my ideas, why I pursue some, and why I don’t. Some of my ideas are extremely volatile in, they’re for specific market conditions. Other ideas aren’t as frail, but have more upcost than I like to admit, like an idea for a tech-savvy restaurant that I have. There are ideas that fit into categories of doable, not doable, far off, abstract, and the list goes on. I have about 100 ideas a day that go through my head while I’m taking a shower, reading, shopping for groceries, eating out, you name it, I usually get an idea for a product, or service that would enhance that outing.
My mind simultaneously sifts through the garbage ideas to the good ones, so I decided to analyze this process as best I could. I realized a lot of the ideas I sifted through as “not doable” were totally doable, it was just that failure was a very big player against it. Risk was too, but risk is involved in just about everything you do, depending on how you look at it.
I started to realize that failure is not a bad thing, without failure there’s no success. If you were always successful you probably wouldn’t make a very good product, would you? Unless you’ve lost you don’t really know what it’s like to win. I began to realize that, I’m going to fail no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, no matter how smart I get, no matter how much venture capital is poured into my ventures, it doesn’t make a difference. I can build the most feature-rich, user friendly, cross platform, widgetized, web 2.0 social network in circulation, and I’m still going to fail in some instances. Some part of it, some where, I’m going to fail. The difference is how I look at those failures, as I’m sure you’ve heard before. I’ve messed up quite in my business life, but I’ve learned my lesson. I made mistakes and they left a bitter taste in my mouth of everything leading up to that mistake, and why I made it. Another confusing aspect of failure is that it’s not always good to change failure, sometimes failure is good. For example, myspace.com, to most people that do anything in the web industry, myspace is the ugliest web site they visit. Myspace on the other hand doesn’t have to worry all too much about browser compatability, because they use tables. To you, myspace’s lack of design is a huge failure on the biggest website in the worlds part. To myspace, it’s a huge success because every web browser in the world displays it the same way as the next.
When you consider something a failure, you should consider it a success in learning. Of course there are “hard failures” such as, not delivering on time, but even in a failure like that, you learned not to procrastinate — hopefully. Trying to never failing is like trying to nail jellow to a wall, it’s just never going to work, it’s never going to work. Instead, welcome failure, realize you’re going to no matter how hard you try.
In a few web startups a friend of mine and I worked on we tried to offer all the features. We offered all the functionality. The AJAX, the web 2.0, the modules, the customization, but we ran into a problem. We offered way too much, and we started getting confused. We spent a lot of time getting to that point when we realized, neither of us would ever use half of the functionality we were creating for the web site. It wasn’t feasible, and still isn’t. We realized people don’t make decisions unless they’re given them to make, so we decided to decide for them, and take away their decision. Another failure we had was never launching that first start up, because we simply had too much work to do, and it would have never ended. The list of features was insane, so after months and months of work, the project just dwindled into nothing because we got so burnt out on working on it all the time, and getting nowhere.
We realized we failed in thinking that all the features is going to attract all of the traffic, but we came out succeeding in realizing that we didn’t need to do that, and we could devote more time to perfect the idea and making it simpler rather than bulking it up. Our ideas have since gotten so simple it’s not even really useful to talk about them, because they’re not exactly special, they’re just the kind of ideas that you wonder why you didn’t think of, but the reason you didn’t think of them is probably because you either didn’t want to fail, or you didn’t spend 9 months on one project only to realize you were going about it the wrong way.
Sidenote: We could have continued building the site, we were close to being done but we both realized that no one would want to use it because it was so bulky, ajax dependent, browser dependent, and just disgusting. The code was beautiful, the functionality was flawless, but it’s execution was terrible and confusing. The project I’m talking about has actually been redrawn and is commencing development in about 3 weeks. I will post more details about it as developement progresses.
We cut our losses, admitted our success in failure, and walked away. You should too. Don’t beat yourself up for failing, or sucking, or being terrible at whatever you’re doing, at least you’re failing. It’s impossible to never succeed, even if you fail, you’ve succeeded in failing. It’s a rash way to look at things, but it’s realistic and it will make your life a lot easier, as well as your entrepreneurial ventures and businesses.
Keep in mind, there’s a difference between failure and defeat, and no I’m will not be a motivational speaker at your next church camp.
