Learning from Failure in Business

Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

David: When we talk about learning from failure, it doesn’t just have to be our failures. We can learn from the failures of others.

Jay: Oh yeah.

David: We can learn from the failures of our friends, our family, our parents, our children. We can learn from any type of failure that we meet along the way. And when we do that, when we learn from other people’s failures, we are saving ourselves a lot more aggravation.

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing learning from failure. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, David. Once again, it’s a pleasure to be here. This one, again, another important topic. I think we have a tendency, when we have failure, to not want to try that again, as opposed to saying I don’t know who said it, but fail forward. Right?

So like it or not, we’re a result of our failures, and we’re probably going to fail more than we win. So defining what we do in failure, I think, is very important.

David: Yeah, I think this particular topic for myself, I know, has been absolutely critical in every aspect of my development from the time I was a child.

When I was in grade school and I wasn’t always the most motivated student because I wasn’t interested in some of the topics, I would not do well in certain areas. And that wasn’t great. I mean, what I should have learned from that is do a better job of it, anyway,

I didn’t learn that at the time. And maybe that’s why I’m an entrepreneur today, because I think a lot of entrepreneurs start out the same way.

It’s like you’re on a path. There are specific things that just really interest you that you can focus on diligently. And there are other things that you can’t.

But also just an example, I know throughout my own life, you’re going to be able to learn something from everyone you meet, whether it’s positive or negative. So you might as well take advantage of that.

And if you recognize that you can pick up on these things fairly early on in most relationships and decide to learn from them, everything gets a whole lot easier.

Jay: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with you. Once again, I think all the podcasts we’ve been doing recently self awareness. So important. Personal inventories, so important.

Do you even recognize the failure? Are you deliberate about what your response is going to be? And if so, I think you can turn it around and make it a positive. If not, I think it’s just by nature going to become a negative.

David: Yeah, and whenever we’re going through something in business that we would categorize as a failure, and that varies widely in business, as you know, to a complete business failure, I mean, that’s something you’ll learn from for a really long time, when that happens.

It can be small things, it can be large things, but if we look at each of those things as an experience, there is very likely a lot that we can learn from that.

What was it that caused this problem to begin with? I know in business for myself, most likely cause of issues and ultimate failure has always been, In some way related to communication.

We weren’t communicating properly with the other people, or they weren’t communicating properly with us, or they weren’t communicating honestly with us, or however it worked out.

But a lot of it, for me, boils down to communication failures. And when you’re aware of the areas where these failures likely happen, you can then pay closer attention going forward so that you don’t repeat those types of things.

Jay: Yeah, I grew up kind of in the retail industry and, when a failure happens, you have managers who want to just find the closest person and, yell at them and blame them.

But then you have others and I’ve learned that usually it’s not like you said, a person problem. It’s a systems problem.

So is it your communication that’s bad? What is it? And if you can fix it, is it your training? You didn’t train, you know, whatever it is, and that goes for yourself as well.

Finding and identifying that you’re actually going to accomplish something, as opposed to just the visceral, you know, I got it off my chest, but now I’ve destroyed somebody.

David: Yeah. And when you’ve got the right processes in place in your business, it becomes a lot easier to determine was the problem with the process or was the problem with the employee not following the process.

Jay: Yes.

David: Right? Because if the problem was with the process, it gives you an opportunity to fix the process so that it doesn’t happen again.

If the problem is with the employee not following the process, then you can encourage the employee, and you can train the employee to follow the process more closely next time.

And if you have an employee who continues to not follow process after process, then you’ve got a hiring problem, most likely on your hands.

But it’s a whole lot easier to identify when you’ve got the systems in place and you’ve got the people in place following the systems or not following them to identify where things are going wrong.

Jay: Yeah, and the danger is if you do this wrong, and again, I think it happens in our internal persona and also with other employees, if you’re constantly blaming people and it’s really a system situation, what happens is you create a “why try” or “you can’t win” atmosphere, right?

So if employees are constantly being blamed, when they weren’t trained, when there wasn’t a good system, they’re going to start saying, well, why should I even try?

It’s something I call minimum expectations mode, right? I’m going to show up, I’m going to do as little as possible, stay under the radar, and collect a check. I think we do that personally as well.

If we keep hitting a wall and we’re not aware of it, we’re not trying to learn from it, we’re not deliberate about it, we adopt a “why try” attitude as well, right? Well, every time I try something, I just fail. So I’m not gonna pursue this anymore.

David: Yeah, I agree. I think if most people in an organization take personal responsibility for their actions, whether it’s the employer, whether it’s the employee, doesn’t matter.

If an employee has something go wrong and they take personal responsibility and say, “okay, what could I have done differently? What should I have done differently? Oh, I should have followed this procedure better,” or, “oh, I missed this,” or “I missed that.”

If they recognize that there’s something they could and should have done better, then they are learning from that failure.

Same thing if you’re the employer. If something goes wrong, you look at yourself, you take personal responsibility and you say, “what could or should I have done better? Should I have taken a longer amount of time to train this person? Should I have made the instructions more clear?”

Because if everybody is looking to themselves in terms of what they could do better, then you’re not doing the whole blame game thing. You’re literally taking responsibility for yourself. And when everybody takes responsibility for themselves, Everything’s better.

Jay: Yeah.

David: And when nobody takes responsibility for themselves and everybody’s finger pointing and I’m blaming you and you’re blaming me and we’re blaming other people, it just doesn’t accomplish the result.

So learning from failure is something I think that we all have to try to concentrate on? To say to ourselves, all right, if this didn’t work, what can I do better? What should I do better? Who else has helped me? Could I have asked for, should I have asked for? And you may go through something and say, you know what?

I really feel like I did everything I could possibly do in this situation. And sometimes you’ll do that and things will go wrong anyway, but at least you’ll know, and then you can get feedback. Well, listen, this is what I did. This is the process that I followed. What else could I have done? What else should I have done?

And if you can get positive input on that, then it’s helpful because it allows us to grow. And I think the whole idea of learning from failure is that it does allow us to grow. It allows us to advance, allows us to get better, and ideally it prevents us from failing again the next time.

Jay: Yeah, one thing I know for sure, failure is going to happen. It’s going to happen.

And so having a system, having a recognition, okay, failure just happened. If it’s in an organization, this is how we handle it. Let’s look at our systems, our training then our individuals, or if it happened internally, okay.

You know, you’ve talked about writing things down. What did I learn from this? What should I do next time? Because a lot of times like you said, you did everything you can. And so sometimes you don’t need to beat yourself up. You don’t need to make changes. It just, it’s going to happen. that’s the reality.

David: It is. And when we talk about learning from failure, it doesn’t just have to be our failures. We can learn from the failures of others.

Jay: Oh yeah.

David: We can learn from the failures of our friends, our family, our parents, our children. We can learn from any type of failure that we meet along the way. And when we do that, when we learn from other people’s failures, we are saving ourselves a lot more aggravation.

I remember growing up as a child and noticing things in adults, where I would say, “I don’t want to do that. When I grew up, I never want to do that.” And you see things in other people where you go, “I want to do that. That looks good. I’d like to be more like this person or I’d like to be more like that person.

And if not doing that, if you’re only noticing, “Oh, I’d like to be like this. I’d like to be like this. I’d like to be like this,” and you’re missing out on the things that you don’t want to do. Those are the biggest traps, right?

Those are the things that are most likely to mess you up. So, when you’re able to recognize failure at a relatively early age, recognize that you don’t want to go there, and then determine the steps that you can avoid, to not fall into those traps, you’re going to be doing much better.

Jay: Yeah, I love this. I love this.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. In today’s world, I mean with resources like what you provide with YouTube, I mean, I see somebody in my house and they’re trying to fix something and they’re just trying to figure it out and I’m like, have you gone on YouTube yet?

Because there’s gonna be 50 videos on how to do this. I have a plasma television in my house. It’s gotta be 20 years old. The screen is still spectacular. I had two of them. They both died after I had them for three years. And I’m like, these are expensive. I don’t want to…

So I went on YouTube and I found out first you can solder new capacitors into the board. And I’m like, I’m not soldering anything. But then I found another website that said you can buy the PowerBoard for 50 bucks, and it just plugs in.

I did that to both TVs. They’ve gone on for another 15 years, each of them. And I’ve fixed a washer, I’ve fixed our fridge, I’ve replaced shocks, I’ve learned how to code.

I’ve learned how to do all of these things because people have put together these systems and you’ve put together resources where you should be able to fail less, or be more focused or more advanced before you get to those places.

David: Yeah, no question. And I’ve said this to so many audiences over the years when I’ve done presentations.

I would say the reason I’m standing up on this stage today is not because I’m particularly smart. It’s because I feel like I’ve made every single stupid mistake you can possibly make. And if I can keep you from making just one or two of those, you’re going to be light years ahead. And so, so much of what I teach to my clients, is based on the potholes that we want to steer around, the things that we want to avoid, because it can save you years.

It can save you decades of your time. And that’s what I find so rewarding in our work with clients is that when we’re able to identify specific things that they can avoid doing or specific things that they can do that will allow them to advance their goals and their outcomes and what they’d like to accomplish for themselves and their families, it’s incredibly rewarding.

Jay: So how do people find out more about how you can possibly help them out?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call. Check out the video on that page and see if it makes sense to schedule a call with us. If it does, great. You can schedule a call right on that page. If it doesn’t, at least you’ll have a good idea of what may be possible for you. Some things that you might not have considered in terms of the growth of your business.

There are things that you either don’t yet know or don’t know the intricacies of that could be slowing you down, right? Because it’s not always about, “well, I didn’t know that.” It’s about, “oh, I didn’t know exactly how to do that.”

Those minor details make a huge difference. Could be something like that. Or it could be that you know a lot of what you need to do, but you’re not doing it consistently.

Our work with our clients is designed to address both of those things. What to do and how to do it is one part of it, and then actually getting it done is the critical part. Because that determines what’s working for you and what’s not.

Jay: Such a great service that you provide, David. As always, it’s a pleasure.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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