Ep. 33 – Failure
5 Minute Rants by THE a.m.
A podcast predicated on the journey of business and life.
Ep. 33 – Failure
Failure is actually positive.
Ownership = Forward Movement
Fly the Plane.
Fail Fast.
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Failure is actually positive. Ownership = Forward Movement Fly the Plane. Fail Fast. Episode Transcript. […]
July 16, 2023
Episode Transcript
Michael Abernathy 0:00
Hey what’s up, everybody? What’s up? Welcome back to THE a.m. Welcome back to 5 Minute Rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thanks for joining us today.
So I want to talk about failure, guys. All right. So the whole point of this show, is to really talk about everything that is predicated on the journey of life and business, anything and everything really in that aspect. And one of the biggest things that I think is universal to all people is failure.
Now, here’s the thing with failure, we tend to really be scared of failure for whatever reason. I think that as people, we have an irrational fear of being wrong. As a result, we get stuck. We don’t tend to progress in certain areas, we avoid things that actually could really benefit us, right? We avoid moving forward in certain areas or having certain pursuits in our life, because we’re Just afraid of being wrong. Well, here’s the crazy thing, and I’m going to throw this out there. I don’t think failure is as negative and has as negative and impact in our lives, as we may think, okay?
Now, yes, there are things that are detrimental, that we shouldn’t have done or bad decisions. But here’s the thing, if you actually grow and learn from it, you can pretty much seem to overcome and do whatever you would like to, to move forward out of that situation or position that a bad decision got you in. But in order to do that, you got to actually own that you failed. So, what I found in my life personally, is that the faster I fail, is actually the faster I move forward in the direction that I want to go. See, when I fail, I’m actually headed in the wrong direction. I’m headed into a place or into an area in life or business that I don’t want to go in, that I don’t want to be a part of, and as a result, when that failure occurs, that’s actually like a road sign. It’s actually like an exit sign saying, “hey, you’re not heading the right direction.” You’re going, you know, 75, north, not south, right? You’re not actually headed to the beach, and it’s like, oh, my gosh, I’m not.
But we don’t take failure like that. A lot of times, we take failure, and feel like an idiot, or there’s like, what I call self deprecation behind that, okay? And it’s like, we’re trying to avoid being wrong, and we’re trying to avoid failure for those reasons, versus actually really looking at it and going, wow, now that I failed, I can actually change what I’m doing.
So I think an important aspect of failure is you got to have ownership in what you do, you got to have ownership in the decisions you make, you got to have ownership in the actions you take. If you have ownership, then you can actually have authority to change it. So an example of that is, if I went out and took my neighbor’s car to go get painted I’m gonna be arrested for vandalism, probably, trespassing and other things, why? I don’t own his car and now I’m painting it. It works same with failure. If I don’t own that I failed, I don’t actually have any authority to change it. I haven’t actually taken it into my possession, and actually given myself the authority to change that decision, or to move in a different direction. And so I’m saying this, because I really believe it’s important for us, if you want to move forward, you’re actually going to have to acknowledge failure, and you’re gonna have to have ownership in your life towards that failure.
So here’s what I found personally, the faster I fail and the faster that I own that failure, the faster that I move forward in life in the direction I want to go. So my business partner Andrew and I one thing that we say all the time is fly the plane and fail fast. Hey, let’s try and take the plane out. Let’s ship it. We’ve built what we built. Let’s fly the plane. Let’s ship the sucker. Oh, we get down to the runway, we don’t have wings. Great! We failed! We didn’t even get to take off. Back to the hangar, bolt some wings on. Awesome, let’s go fly the plane again. Awesome, we start going down the runway we begin taking off, Great, we totally forgot all the seats and the cockpit and the windshield because there’s like wind in our faces. We didn’t think about that. All right, land it. Let’s bolt it on, and before you know it we’ve got a fully functional plane, but we’ve got to own, that we forgot the wings. Hey, we forgot the windshield. Hey, we forgot the actual cabin, the body, the seats, the instruments, all the things right? Oh, the extra fuel tanks, those would be important, and so on. But because of flying the plane and saying let’s ship it, hey, we failed, hey, we own it, let’s do something about it. The plane gets built and it happens rather quickly.
Nothing in life is just enormously made quickly just like that. Everything takes small steps. and even the big companies that are funded or things that you’ve watched grow big the way they happen are hundreds of 1000s of little actions and small steps being taken all the time. But in order to know whether you’re actually heading in the right direction with those small steps, you got to fail. You got to see what’s wrong. having what we call small iterations in feedback to show us where we’re failing and broken is one of the best things that we can do in our lives personally when the best things I’ve done in my life personally and in the company. So anyways failure is a great thing and ownership is a great thing and I’ll catch you guys on the flip side peace.