Love this site! Thanks to Stuart Battersby of Chatterbox for crafting today’s post, which we can surely all relate to and make good use of…
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Failing sucks – we wanted something that we cared about to happen, to work – it didn’t. Shit
. I’m not arguing that failing at something is damn annoying, but it’s not true that it’s totally bad – there’s usually some unintended good output or maybe something that was learned so that next time we can do it better. @positivefail (or positivefail.com) is here to try and get people sharing some of these experience. In a nutshell you tweet what the failure was and what you learned from it with the hashtag #positivefail. If you can tolerate my mind ramblings (and potentially take them with a pinch of salt!), read on and I’ll give you a little context to it…
@positivefail, or something like it, had been on my mind for a little while before making it (free plug: it looks awesome because of Xiaoying). I’m Stuart, a co-founder of Chatterbox which we formed last year after I completed my PhD. At this point I had a decision that I needed to make – I could go and find a job, it may end up being a really cool job and I’d have a nice income. Sorted. The other option probably couldn’t really pay me and had no guarantee of working, however it did sound bloody interesting, was based on something that I (and my co-founder Matt) had worked hard on so far, and if it worked it would really work! As I spoke through my options with some people a common theme popped up: what if it all goes wrong? At first I was mildly annoyed at the negativity I was getting (granted, not everyone was negative, but it was present). But maybe that was the wrong way to think? I was only viewing the really bad side of the potential failure.
I think the points are that 1) people can be really put off from doing something due to the fear of failing (I nearly was) and 2) I think we can be overwhelmed by the blatant negatives involved with the failure. These are both inherently connected problems. I think that, in taking on or doing something moderately risky, one needs to not shy away from the fact that it *may* not work out as we hope. We can easily see the wonderful & beautiful goal of it working, but preparing yourself for it not to is essential too. What could be taken from the process that went wrong this time that has made you stronger and more informed so that next time, it could go better? Look at the longer term picture, not just the short term. And further, if we can see that we’re not the only ones who feel like this, and that many others do, then it may be that little easier to see those positives. Right now Chatterbox is growing well and fingers crossed this will carry on, but there is always the chance it won’t and I have to be real about that. It’s early days, but through the process already I’ve learned, for example, much about developing a relevant & targeted product, the value of effective networking, experience building scalable business models, how to programme Django, and more. Along side this I’ve met some awesome people in the London startup community.
Now clearly my context, and this blog, is geared towards the start-up world. But surely the problems, fears and goals that I’m talking about aren’t just limited to this context – there must be many things in life, both work and personal, that are scary. The reason I wanted to make @positivefail was to help people to share those experience and let others who are considering doing something make a more informed decision. It seems to be going fairly well, I had a lovely comment from the great @stringfellow who said that the actual act of trying to summarise the positivefail in 140 characters made him find the positives he didn’t know were there. Unintended, and nice
. Of course, it’s not just @positivefail that is doing this – there’s a great London meet up (I fully intend to make a visit soon!) called FailBoat who have some great speakers and networking to try and stop people being ashamed of the bad days. In speaking with Jon Bradford at Springboard I was also reminded of talk by Jon Callaghan of True Ventures in which he openly said that as a VC they invest in failure. By taking the longer term view of the teams they work with, failing once allows them to learn and so next time they’ll be armed with all this knowledge to go and build the most awesome startup ever. Cool stuff.
So, where to next? Of course check out positivefail.com and head along to the likes of FailBoat London. In the meantime, chill it’s an exciting world out there!





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