NOUN
mass noun
Lack of success
‘an economic policy that is doomed to failure’
‘an unsuccessful person or thing’
‘neglect or omission of expected or required action’
I love words.
I love how we piece them together like building blocks made from squiggles and lines and dots. I love how if you take a boat or a plane or even just drive across a border, the squiggles, lines and dots change.
I love how words go from our brain to our voice box and I love the way they shape our lips. I love the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ of French, the harsh throat hacking ‘chs’ of German, the ‘h’-sounding ‘j’s of Spanish and the dramatic, drawn out ‘a’s of Italian.
I love how words carry so much meaning and emotion; how one single expression can conjure up a thousand pictures in our mind and flood our body with sensations.
But failure is a word that not many of us like to use.
It’s said to have arrived on the English tongue after a journey from its Latin origin of fallere meaning ‘to trip, cause to fall’ via the French word fallir, meaning ‘lacking, missing’. And in its verb form, fail, it means to be unsuccessful in achieving ones goal.
It’s a morphological menace that’s cloaked in shame and drenched in negativity – and one that we don’t ever like to hear.
Round Two
Academically speaking, I’ve been in the boxing ring with failure ever since I can remember.
My curiosity spurred on a never-ending quest for knowledge and my competitive streak made me want to be nothing but the best in school. I was driven by the avoidance of failure, fuelled by the love of praise, and I would train hard to make sure that every round was a knock-out.
But for the last three months, failure has upped his game and there have been several bareknuckled rounds where I could have quite easily thrown in the towel.
I’m still in the early phase of starting up my business, Consciously Curated – and I have never worked so hard in my entire life.
The boundary between personal and professional no longer exists, I never know what day it is and I’ve somehow learnt how to stretch twenty-four hours into a hundred.
If I’m not glued to my computer screen, I’m on the phone or out for coffee, pimping out my brain to anybody who will listen. I’m talking to clients and prospective clients on every continent and I’m working around the clock – from six in the morning until ten at night.
Every day I’ve come face to face with a heavyweight challenge and it’s been one of the toughest bouts I’ve ever known – but it’s also been one of the most exhilarating.
It’s a Knockout
In the early days, I took my business down the wrong path.
Because I was working as a freelance writer in Koh Samui at the time, because I was loving writing my blog and because I’d launched Mindless Mag, I thought that Consciously Curated should be all about my lifelong love for storytelling.
I launched as ‘Consciously Curated, a content creation agency for conscious fashion’. And right from the get-go, there were so many failures – one quite obviously being the glaringly distinct overuse of the letter ‘c’ and a business name that most people find it difficult to say and write.
But I had this fire in my stomach telling me to keep my guard up and I was more determined than ever to fight on. So I cold emailed hundreds of brands worldwide and within less than a week I’d bagged myself my first few clients.
I was excited. It had worked. My business was off to a good start.
With each client I’d end up having an introductory phone call – a way to test the chemistry, draw out brand stories without them even knowing and of course, sell myself on what I can do. Once they were hooked I’d have to go away and work on a more tailored pitch.
I’d research their brand, their products and their competitors to pull together a one page proposal – a sustainability report on denim, an About Us page for their website or a blog about their brand’s inspiration.
Some brands snapped them up straight away and others didn’t even bother to reply to my email, but the ones who did only gave me more lessons to learn.
My work was good and thorough and I was making sure it was the perfect blend of storytelling and SEO. It took time and effort and I threw myself in with head and heart. But no matter how hard I worked, or how many hours I devoted, some clients just weren’t happy.
I think if there was a Chartered Institute of Telepathy, I’d been signing up for a practitioner course, because the task of extracting what’s in one person’s head and getting it down on paper is an absolutely impossible feat. We’d end up going back and forth and round in circles, tweaking the content to match the words they’d never spoken.
Time was being wasted, I was frustrated, my brain wasn’t being used to its maximum capacity and my return on investment was pitifully low.
I needed to change my game plan.
Failure is a Friend
The ability to power through these punches came from one character trait that all of us possess in varying measure depending on the situation we’re in.
For me, resilience had always been a strength I was commended for at work, but looking back, it was bound to be; it’s so much easier to stay strong and keep going when you’re swaddled in the safety blanket of the corporate world.
You have a guaranteed salary coming in every month and if you don’t win clients or broker deals, you’re not left penniless after days and days of sleepless nights and hard graft. If you make a mistake, you put your hands up, you say sorry and you move on.
Resilience in the start-up world is totally different game.
Throughout these last three months there have been plenty more instances of bobbing and weaving around the ring with clients, plenty of of low blows and heckles from the ringside crowd inside my head.
I’ve had hours and hours of my life wasted by people who talk but never do. I’ve been encouraged to spar around with dreamy ideas that end up being nothing but a right hook and a black eye. And I’ve contended with broken promises, false hopes and bogus expectations.
In fact, I’ve been beaten up so many times by so many miniature failures and there have been moments when I’ve been leaning with my back against the ropes, weak, tired and almost ready to give up.
But instead of giving up, these knocks only made me want to fight back harder.
This new beast mode resilience, the one that keeps me standing there with my gloves on, determined to be a champion, would not be possible without all that comes with the tagline of this blog – doing good stuff to be a better me.
For over twelve months now, every single day of my life has been dedicated, and I mean truly dedicated, to being the best version of me.
The meditation, the yoga, the fitness, the ayurvedic approach to sleep and nutrition, the constant effort to obliterate negative thoughts and positively rewire my brain. The open heart and compassion, the kindness in thoughts, words and actions to others.
That’s what has kept me going. All of that stuff. And that’s what will keep going through the failures that are still yet to come.
You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.
Richard Branson