Here at The FortyFive, besides all the standard holidays, we celebrate a few that are unique to this corner of the InterWeb. One of them, instituted this year, is TB The Elder Day, the birthday (and commemoration) of my Father.
The other is Failure Day.
Failure Day, as longer time readers may remember, commemorates 02 August 2005 when I and my business partner laid ourselves from the company we had started 16 months earlier.
After 10 years in the Biopharmaceutical industry, jobs mostly with long commutes (up to 120 miles roundtrip), I made the decision to set it all aside and go into commercial real estate with my friend of long standing. He was doing well at it, so I was (of course) going to do well at it. There was little standing between us and wealth beyond our dreams, and I planned (and lived) accordingly.
Until, of course, that fantasy came crashing down.
In the course of 16 months, I managed to burn through all the money I had set aside, buy a new house we could not really afford, and find out that I was really not that good in real estate. By the the time the whole sorry story had played out, we had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in home equity, savings, and lost wages.
God was gracious in spite of my idiocy; within a month I found another job back in the biopharmaceutical industry (with a commute, of course). And He "unburdened" us with a house we could not really afford by conveniently arranging a layoff and move across the country to New Home 2.0 (which saw us lose all of our equity but - thankfully - not owe anything else on the loan or sale). And slowly - very slowly - we rebuilt our financial life.
Am I sorry I tried? At some level, no. I learned a lot about contracts and real estate finances and how investments work (even if my own investments were not well handled at the time). And the confidence to at least try something new has stuck with me, even if the stakes are now much lower.
At other levels of course, yes. The decision to leave the job I had at the time? In retrospect, likely I would have been laid off within a year anyway (as happened to my former work colleagues), so maybe no. The financial foolishness? That is 100% on me and was 100% the wrong decision. I got greedy, got starry eyed, and did not listen to wise counsel (mostly TB The Elder, who kindly did not "remind" me of this when everything collapsed). Even in my "I have a new job" phase, we could have made more responsible life choices that would not have left us so financially vulnerable.
And so, once a year, I celebrate failure. Not just this failure but all the failures. All the times that I tried something and it did not work out. And remember those things I did not try and maybe should have - because you never know what might happen.
Over the years, a quote I read from Gouveneur Morris (1752-1816, a signer of The U.S. Constitution) in the book An Iron Will by Orison Swett Marden has stuck with me:
"If I were to wipe out twenty acts, what should they be? Should it be my business mistakes, my foolish acts (for I suppose all do foolish acts occasionally), my grievances? No; for, after all, these are the very things by which I have profited. So I finally concluded I should expunge, instead of my mistakes, my triumphs. I could not afford to dismiss the tonic of mortification, the refinement of sorrow; I needed every one."
I too, need the memory. Because at some level, what are we without our failures?
Happy Failure Day.
Indeed TB, adversity can be a great teacher no matter the origins. It's the repeating of the same mistakes that indicate perhaps stubbornness/hubris. Learning from mistakes is part of what Life is about........:)
ReplyDeleteNylon12, one of the great sayings I have heard later in life is "A fool learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others."
DeleteThe immediate lesson I learned was how much I appreciated a steady paycheck above one which might be more, but would be very infrequent.
Well, we can't predict the future, can we? A successful venture is considered genius while an unsuccessful one is considered stupid. But we never know beforehand how it will turn out.
ReplyDeleteLeigh, no-one I know ever starts anything assuming they will fail, yet people fail all the time. I have especially noticed this in failed relationships like romantic ones: no-one goes in thinking "Gosh, I sure hope this does not work out and I am emotionally devastated and there are lifelong impacts." Yet it happens all the time.
DeleteI have read many books about how your chances of becoming wealthy increase dramatically by being self employed but that the chances of running a successful business that allows you to be profitable is exceedingly slim so the ones that create wealth are a very tiny sliver of all businesses. So I greatly admire those who have gambled and tried to create something that falls into that tiny sliver. I have thought about it many times myself but never had the courage.
ReplyDeleteI sort of fell into things by accident by getting hired into an established business as one of 50 employee owners and we were able to grow the business significantly in those years I was there. But the risk was largely gone at that point which is why I consider my employment there as dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time, one of the few times that has happened in my life.
I've always felt I have learned more from failure than success. Success just makes me take success for granted until failure eventually comes along and humbles me again.
Ed - The term "side-hustle" is the latest version of this, something one works on part time or "for only hours a day" and generates income enabling one to quit one's day job. To your point, the chances are slim and to be honest, probably more folks have made money on books talking about how to do it than have done it.
DeleteI, too, was doubly lucky in that when I "came back into the fold", I did not have to start over and was able to pick up where I left off. The fact my career field is generally well paying and we have been relatively good managers of our resources has helped us get to a more comfortable place now. The only real impact is I do not get as much vacation as I would like.