Lessons Learned From My Greatest Failures

I want to encourage people to go after what they have always wanted with no fear of failure. Failure at the time can be devastating, but when we look back, it just makes sense that we had to go through certain things. Please take note that in the title it is not my worst failures, but my GREATEST failures. I used to see them as the worst but I know much better now.

As I embark on a new journey with Fixt, I was looking back and reflecting on individual failures that ate me alive at the time. I try to be as transparent about my life as I can, and I want people to see the bigger picture here. I am going to go through the greatest failures of my life and explain how it made me who I am today.

I look back at each of these, and I can smile when I used to be ashamed. I smile because these lessons were needed. We often want more success than we are ready for. I look at each of these as stepping stones.

High School Drama I Created

By the end of high school I had established myself as a dominating track and field athlete back in Toronto, but unfortunately, character is sold separately from success.

My parents raised me right so I know right from wrong. I learned in high school that you can’t half commit because it will come back to bite you. I was committed to the school, track but not my girlfriend at the time.

I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, and I left a trail of bodies because of my actions. I put friends in difficult spots; I never accepted responsibility for my actions and drama surrounded me as a result of it.

Lessons:

Own Up

The first thing this taught me was the importance of taking responsibility. When you do something, wrong you just have to own up to your wrongs. There is nothing else to it. When you can say that you messed up and do everything you can to make a wrong right that is something I will take with me my whole life.

Move On

I think we can get stuck in our wrongs for too long. Live, learn, and be better as a result of your mistakes. You have to be able to brush the past off and just keep trucking along. Moving away from Toronto helped me in letting go of the past and being able to move on and a build a better future.

Wanting to Leave Iowa State

After being at Iowa State for two years, I wanted to transfer because I felt like I was a big shot. I valued myself much more than I felt Iowa State did. I reached out to all these bigger schools like Florida State, Clemson and so on and no one wanted me. I caused so much havoc and stress for the coaching staff only to find out that I was not that good.

Not one of the schools I got in touch with actually wanted me. One coach even laughed at me. I got humbled to my core that day. I then had to go back to the coaches and say I was not transferring and then build those relationships back up from scratch. They could have easily stated that they did not want me anymore, but they gave me a second chance.

Lesson:

You are replaceable. Don’t for a second think you are too good to get replaced. You have to approach situations and truly be thankful for any opportunities that you have because they could easily go to someone else and the world will carry on just fine.

Making The Olympic Team and Not Running

I talked about this story in my book Endure and it was the reason I wrote the book. Coming up short at the Olympics was probably the only time in my life that I could say I was mildly depressed.

From age 7–22 I worked to make the Olympic team. I make the team in 2012 by coming second to my older brother at nationals. I end up watching the 4x100 relay from the stands while we are in London.

Lesson:

You have to trust in your own heart and your effort. If you know, you did everything you possibly could for something and can sleep well with your head held high; that is what matters. The Olympics does not hand out character, it is just a title, and a lot of people forget this.

Moving on From Cover Ground

Cover Ground was a blog for athletes my brother, and I had run since 2009. I wrote over 500 articles for it, and we did countless re-brandings and tried to sell a lot of different products through it.

The picture above was the first thing we ever sold online. We made custom made spike bags and while they were online we only sold one. After a week we were so embarrassed that we took them down only to find out later that a lot of people did want them.

What made walking away from Cover Ground feel like such a failure is that it helped so many people. I got a countless emails and texts from people who had loved my writing. This simple blog had taught me so much that to walk away from it burned.

Lessons

Learn by Doing

I learned many skills from Cover Ground simply by just stepping out of my comfort zone and wanting to learn. For example, I learned:

- Social media marketing 
- Video editing 
- Motivational speaking 
- Audio editing 
- Email marketing 
- Blog writing 
- Search engine optimization

If you want to learn about something, just start a business and start doing it. You just have to roll up your sleeves, get dirty and FAIL!

Opportunities Come From Being Different

I got jobs over more qualified people simply because I have so many things on my resume that make me stand out. I went to the Olympics, I started Cover Ground, I wrote a book and that is fascinating to people.

I have had a lot of partnerships open up to me because people see that I can build something cool, work hard at it and use it to do good.

You have to Know When to Cut Your Losses

There came a point years before stopping Cover Ground where I knew no amount of work would make it what I wanted it to be. I worked harder and harder on Cover Ground and still did not see the result I wanted. People pretty much liked reading my stuff and nothing else. Sometimes you just have to know when to let it go.

Losing a Best Friend

I started off 2016 with the worst of news. My childhood friend who I grew up with and went through high school running track with had passed away. I have not dealt with much death in my life and especially not of someone my age like this. It was an eye opener to say the least.

Lessons:

Be Kind

A lot of times when people think of the business they think of being ruthless. Too many people grow up thinking that to be successful you have to be horrible to other people. Even if this is true, I want nothing to do with it because being kind to others is just too valuable.

You never know what another person is going through. We all have the ability to change lives. One word, one comment can be the difference in how an entire life plays out. That is powerful, and I learned that I always have to choose kind.

Go After What You Want

The reality is that we are all mortal and one day we will all pass. The only way to live life is to live it chasing after the things that we want.

Why play it safe? We play it safe because it is easier and we always assume we will have time further down the road, but this is not true. One day we will all be wrong about the tomorrow we thought we were going to have.

Death is a great reminder that we all have too much potential to live our lives playing it safe.

What Are You Going to Do About It?

My friend always would say this to me when I complained about anything in life. He didn’t just want to hear complaints but he always encouraged me to take action. I learned I needed to always be the change I wanted to see in the world because of him.

Quitting Parilexx

When our blog Cover Ground had grown strong, we had to figure out how to monetize it. We did not want just to rely on ads, so we decided a clothing line for athletes would be a good route. Parilexx was one of the best businesses failures I have ever had. We had some shirts we released and sold 50 shirts in two days. It was the first time that I had ever gone to sleep and woke up richer.

I was in college at the time, and my brother was training full time in Toronto while we were doing this. He handled Canadian orders, and I managed the USA ones. Our ordering system was the first break down as we did not always communicate with each other on who was doing what.

I was the one who put the nail in the coffin on this because I felt like my brother and I were just not on the same page at the time. This one hurt deep down, though. We had put a lot of time and money into it, and I remember holding on to the excess inventory for so long. It broke me inside to have to let go of this stuff. Parilexx going down was the first time I felt like I was not made to be an entrepreneur. I felt fake and like I was unable to accomplish anything.

Lessons

Know Your Margins

I did not know this going into starting a clothing line, but I quickly found out how slim the margins were. Tight margins can make you feel like you are always spinning your wheels even when sales are coming in.

We would sell a shirt for $24.

The shirts would cost about $10 per shirt to get printed. You would assume that means you will make $14 for every shirt SOLD, but this is the assumption that gets you killed.

We had to spend money on

• a Website
  - marketing 
  - sales commissions 
  - shipping sleeves
  - Extra goodies

By the time you took away all of these expenses, it had made perfect sense to me why starting a clothing line was so hard to make money. You had to sell every single product just to have any chance of making money. If you did not do this, then you were just making enough to keep buying another print of shirts.

Get Customer Service Right

My favorite lesson from my failure with Parilexx came from customer service and learning to treat people right. . I learned to treat customers awesome. Even though I could not get the numbers right and figure out how to make money, we still had loyal customers.

In every single package, we would give people

- skittles or starbursts
- two lollipops 
- a quote
- a hand written thank you note
- a button
- and a sticker

We made it so that every time a customer opened a package people truly felt like they were loved. The messages I got from people about this experience is something I will never forget, and I will pour this same love into every customer we have with FIXT.

Blowing a $150K Investment

I am 19 years old at the time, and I get a once in a lifetime opportunity while at Iowa State. This experience ended up being an MBA for me even though I never actually did my MBA. An alumni came back with an idea he wanted to be lived out, and he wanted a bunch of students to do it for him.

Throughout this journey, we went through everything from legal issues, boardroom battles, teammates screaming at each other, trust issues and everything in between. It is a hard thing to explain, but it was both depressing and fun at the same time.

After about two and a half years we had to make a late pivot because we did not have the engineers we needed to build our product. We then decided to make a punch card application, and we were unsuccessful even making one dollar after all of that time.

Lessons

Stay Hungry

The investment money got treated as a milestone, but it was not at all. It was just something to help us get to a milestone. Once we lost sight of that, we acted like we had made it when we had accomplished nothing.

Don’t Get Distracted

In business, it is so easy to get distracted by things that don’t matter that much. You need to find those things that drive your business forward at that point and go after them. You can spend so much time worrying about what others are doing that you don’t get your work finished.

Giving Up On Tied Down Ties

Tied Down Ties was a failure that was easy and it was a no brainer to stop. I consider TDT to be a failure because I quit on it after about five months working on it. I know for a fact that it could have been successful because our margins were good and we were making a profit.

Tied Down Ties was a business I started with my wife because we both hated our jobs at the time. We decided to team up and start selling custom made wedding ties that my wife would make from scratch.

We stopped because my wife was burnt out and frankly I just did not care about it that much. I did not have that burning passion to do whatever it took to make it work. I am not a huge fashion forward person so to sell ties just didn’t feel authentic to me at the end of the day.

Lessons:

Follow the Passion Not the Money

To be successful in business, you need to have a passion for what you’re doing. You can have all the talent and knowledge in the world but if you just don’t care about what you are doing you won’t do the little things needed to be successful.

Be Product Obsessed

This has been the best lesson for everything I am doing with Fixt. TDT taught me to care about every detail of a product. When we first started shipping ties I was so nervous that people would not like them.

Every aspect of making a tie, I studied and I tried to learn how we could make our product better. I constantly was in touch with customers about it because I really wanted the product to be the best. For the first time I learned to be obsessed with the product.

Walking Away From Track and Field

I started running track when I was seven years old. To say the sport changed my life would be an understatement but life brings all good things to an end at some point.

Track and field had given me countless friendships, memories, and it allowed me to learn about sacrifice, hard work, and perseverance.

Once I had graduated from Iowa State, I ran for two years post collegiality and saw little success in the sport. My passion for business and entrepreneurship was growing at this point, and I knew it was my time to walk away.

Lessons

Quitting Is Ok

We live in a world that demands us never to stop anything. The truth is that most of us need to stop more things that we are doing. We all say yes to way too many projects. We try and please everybody and do what we think other people want us to do.

I wanted to quit after my first year of the post-collegiate track, but I held on because I felt like it was what other people wanted me to do. You can’t do what others want you to do; you need to do what you need to do.

Never Let Others Define You

I think we develop perceptions of other people and then we try to hold others in that box, so they always match our perception. These perceptions are why when athletes retire it is hard for other people. They only know you as an athlete, and it will be hard for them to adjust the lens in which they see you.

Bounce Back Entrepreneurs

I started to bounce back entrepreneurs for a short period because I realized that there were a lot of young hustlers out there with the potential to be great. Many young entrepreneurs lack guidance, and I wanted to be the person to go out and find mentors for young entrepreneurs.

I did not do this for very long because I ended up taking a position in Phoenix that was much too time consuming to keep running masterminds, and making products for young entrepreneurs.

Lesson:

Stop Starting

After I started this and stopped it within a three month period, I realised that the madness had to stop. I was not longer going to start things and then end them quickly. If I am not willing to put 10 years of my life in, I won’t even bother revving the engine.

Don’t Be Afraid to Lead

I learned that I am a leader. I did not see myself as one before this but after bringing people together who I honestly looked up to and seeing that I could create change and inspire them to go further.

I then went to my LinkedIn page, and I realized that others endorsed me for leadership because that is how they saw me. It was incredible to accept this, because it helped me to understand myself.

When it comes down to it, failure at the moment can be crushing, but when we look back, there are so many positives to take away. We learn and we grow, and we always develop into something stronger.

When it comes to Fixt, I have realized that the idea doesn’t mean anything. It is the execution of the plan that is going to matter. I need to focus on the implementation and putting amazing people around me.

Fixt connects injured athletes to the best therapists in their community. If you want to hear more about Fixt, please click here.