The issue of celebrating failures of the successful
Fears start-ups and students have in common and how to break down your goals to get started finding, and living the dream
We at Steps make digital tools for mental health. We focus on students and “the fear of being judged by others” which is holding us all back from doing the things we want. In our work we have found some interesting similarities between our users and startups, us self included.
In the startup community failure is widely celebrated. We love to hear, read and talk about failure — The problem is that in 99% of the cases it is from those who have already succeeded. We are inspired by others who try again and again and finally make it. Not by those who keep trying and keep failing. So if we haven’t achieved success yet, we look towards those “who have it all” and it can feel overwhelming and lonely to get there — who wants to hear that story?
Students feel the same: They define themselves based on grades, studies and what job they have. They look up to those working with cool and purposeful projects and jobs. So before achieving it, they don’t share their worries about following their dream job, because; what if they weren’t good enough to get it? Or maybe worse; they don’t have a dream to follow! For both the start-ups and the students these tensions get them further away from trying out stuff, learning from their mistakes, and eventually succeeding.
Break it down
But rarely does a start-up become a unicorn overnight or students find the dream job to fulfil their purpose in the first shot. The solution to both is to keep the dreams big but start small and break it down into manageable goals.
The problem is that most of us want to see results fast and we get impatient. But it’s simply not possible to acquire a lot of skills or to change everything at once, so by starting small, and taking one little steps at the time the transformation will happen slowly but steady. Breaking goals down makes it much easier to get started, to see progress, and to achieve and celebrate the small wins that make dreams come true.
If you want to become a Youtuber, a Management Consultant or the next AirBnB for wheelbarrows, find out what it takes. What skills, network, brand or building blocks do you need? And what is your first small step to become better at getting those? Also, starting to work on general skills can also give you ease of mind if you are not sure what your dream is yet. Being good at giving a speech or presenting your argument in a discussion, will properly benefit you no matter what you end up doing.
How to get started
To give an example, let’s try to break networking down. Though the term is overused, it’s often an essential skill to accomplish things both professionally and personally. And basically it’s just about;
- being comfortable in approaching people,
- sharing your story in a short pitch,
- figure out what part of your story a person finds interesting or how you can help them,
- and most importantly, connect with them afterwards if you think it can benefit either of you.
Then start to practise each thing in the order you prefer and learn from the times it didn’t go as planned. If 1) “approaching people” is awkward to you or you are not used to it, start with situations where you will only have a short conversation before you can get away. Like saying hello to the bus driver, ask a staff in a shop a question, ask your aunt at the next family event how she’s doing. By slightly increasing the risk of an awkward interaction, you learn to handle the situations by identifying improvements each time it didn’t go as planned. In that way you can be much more confident, that it will go well when you stumble into a manager at an interesting company or the hot girl from your neighbourhood. For 2) “your pitch”, people always ask, “what do you do”? so practise your response(s) in front of the mirror, so you know what to say depending on who asks — You get the point.
All of these things might not be hard for you to do, and they don’t have to be, but only if you practise and actually go out an do those little things, will you improve.
Success is created outside of your comfort zone
So, the most important lesson from the failure stories from those successful companies and people is that they have used the “the fear of being judged by others” to motivate them, at the time where they were still working hard for the small wins, and kept doing so, even though they were unsure of a successful outcome.
Steps gives you a place to start
We at Steps look at the social situations that most students are faced with and want to improve in. We have broken them down into small steps to make it much easier to get started, and added the tools and content in a free-to-use Messenger ChatBot.
To see more about how our users start working on their social goals or try it out yourself, visit us at https://www.facebook.com/godosteps/
