147 - What does it mean to fail?

Discussion - What does it mean to fail?

When we recorded this we had the pithy title of "failing in business or whatever", and as you can see I decided to change that. I have no explanation, other than that I think this is a better title!

This conversation started because of a change in the working situation of David. Until recently he had most of his work provided for him, but recently that's all stopped and so the work has dried up a little. David is now having to think about way of attracting clients and marketing himself.

This is quite a major change when you think about it. It's rather like starting a new job, and it brings up the possibility that failure is an option. A year from now, David could be in a position in which it's not worked out. No new clients turned up and he's having to rethink what he does for a living.

This reality could go in a number of ways. "The sky could be falling in and all is a disaster", or "This is fine and it's all going to be okay".

I suppose that we need to clarify what failing is...!

Well this is a hard one to pin down because it's completely subjective. Perhaps it's important to you to have substantial wealth and so failure would mean that you don't have enough to support the lifestyle that you aspire to. Other people might have more modest expectations and just having enough to pay the bills and keep things ticking over - putting other things in front of work and earning.

David sees success as freedom and I seem to see it as happiness, and so I suppose that not having either of those is 'failure'.

Are we the architects of our own failure? What I mean by that is if things don't work out is it our fault, is the state of the economy to blame or some other factor? David makes the point that in this line of work, where many of us are freelancers you need to self-motivated to get the business off the ground and so, you're in a great position to begin with. You likely have the temerity to stay in the game for long enough to succeed.

Do you plan for periods of failure? Do you have a war chest of cash in the bank in case you hit a spell where the work just dried up? It's quite miserable putting money away for a time when you have less, but it can be a great idea and can allow to fail every once in a while and not get to stressed about it.

Broadly, we cover the following:

• Clarifying what we mean
• Don’t most businesses ignore the obvious until it's too late anyway?
• Then there is trying too hard
• I think we picked a high risk business
• Tightening our belts
• Let’s end with some positives

It's an interesting discussion and as always, you'll learn almost nothing! ;-)