The Bad with the Good

You hear a lot of people complaining about social media, the way that people use it to only present the good that’s happening to them, to post highly-curated filtered images of their lives that can make others feel less-than. You hear a lot about that.

So let me serve you some bad with the good.

I am a Pollyanna by nature. I can’t help myself. I tend to see the good in situations, even negative ones, although I admit sometimes it takes me a minute to get there. I’m pretty proud of the business and the life I’ve built, and love to share that in words and pictures whenever I can. I definitely like to use my own thoughts and freedom and good fortune to cheer other people on. We’re in this together, so each individual success can inspire more success.

That said, sometimes things just don’t work out.

Sometimes I fail.

I made the difficult decision to pull the plug on my beloved online course. I love this course, feel like it’s something I created that’s so beneficial, that so works, that is so needed. It’s been the entire focus of the last six months of work, the end-goal of every blog post, of so much planning and creation and video and design. I was so excited, just couldn’t wait, to teach the material to a new group.

And yet, guess what?

For all that, only 1 person bought it. One. Person.

It is so hard for me to share that, but share it I must. Because being transparent can’t only be about the good stuff. Nope. Ya get the bad with the good.

Dudes, failing sucks. You know the difference between a personal failure and a business failure?

Nothing.

It all hurts.

Maybe in a way the business failure hurts more since it’s so much more public. To which my solution is to make it even more public, to talk about it loud even more, in hopes it helps me and hopefully someone else to get through this unpleasant set of feelings a little bit more easily. That wouldn’t be a bad outcome, now would it?

Won’t lie: I definitely cried when I made the decision to cancel. There was definitely some bruised ego in there, some fear about how it would look, what people might think, how I was supposed to move forward.But guess what? I’m more committed to helping others figure out their relationship to their numbers, to fixing their pricing, than I am wed to the specific form in which that happens. I’m just not willing to just discount all of that work I did, all of what I created that I KNOW works and has helped people in the past, just because this time I didn’t figure out how to connect the marketing dots. Nope.

Failure is just a success that hasn’t happened yet.

What matters is what we do with failure, how we use the bad, same as we use the good, to learn, to grow, to lift others along with us.

I failed. I was sad, disappointed, mortified. And also: not dead.

So you can bet I’m back to the drawing board, hell-bent on using every bit of this experience that didn’t go the way I wanted it to, to get bigger, get better, help more. Yes, truly: failing sucks, but winners keep working anyway.