How to fail successfully?
I got laid off my job. More precisely, the whole transmedia magazine that we had built up with our creativity, energy and heart’s blood got shut down.
It felt like: We failed. Or more precisely, I failed. Something that never happened before in my 28 years of life. Up until here, everything followed the rule of: Work hard and it will pay off. This time, that rule did not prove true.
But: Neither had we nor had I failed. In fact, within these 18 month we not only managed to create a contemporary digital magazine, to truly live trans- and multimedia, but also made our magazine significantly more successful than other longer-standing formats - something even an outsider could tell just from looking at the users’ feedback.
All of that did not help. End of 2015 was also the end of me working on average 12 hours a day in my beloved five-in-one-job.
Since then, I have been reading a lot of advice stuff, on the importance of procrastination, a case for quitting the job without a backup-plan.
One article I could not retrieve among the many listicles on successful people said that successful people fail successfully. But how the heck do you fail successfully?! Is there more to it than fall and stand up again? More than the famous “learn from your mistakes”?
What had our mistake been?
The longer I thought, the more I realized we were not making the rules we had to play by. Sometimes we didn’t even know these rules.
So, why not make the rules myself? I have a yet rough idea for a journalistic concept, I know a bunch of people who would form a powerful team, I know what to repeat and what to avoid - what holds me back from realizing that idea, creating my own business? Work hard, so that it hopefully pays off? Making the rules, I’ll play by?
The answer is: Nothing holds me back.
More so: People I’m telling about my idea mostly encourage me by saying they can well imagine me doing that, asking critical questions, offering their help, start brainstorming ideas right away, jokingly suggest to invest or recommending helpful advice:
For now, I’ve pushed the restart-button. Making myself one of the blank pages I have stared upon so many times. And slowly start to scribble notes and ideas on it, hoping it’ll all work out.
So to all of you out there who feel they have failed: There’ll be a moment when you start believing in you and your ideas again. And probably that’s what’s meant by failing successfully.
We’ll see.
