RR#114 - The joy of failure

59% of entrepreneurs are struggling with anxiety, and 63% with burnout.

That’s according to a survey conducted by The Hustle, a newsletter owned by Hubspot with 2.5+ million subscribers,

That’s not all that surprising when you think about it.

While entrepreneurship represents a path to wealth building and autonomy, it can also be the perfect cocktail for an enormous amount of stress.

• Financial uncertainty

• Work-life balance challenges

• Disproportionate amounts of responsibility

That’s what makes the inner game, or how we handle what’s going on in our head, so critical for anyone building a business.

I recently sat down to talk about this topic with Chris Evans, a serial entrepreneur who’s built multiple 8-figure businesses, and written about his experiences in his recent book, The Joy of Failure.

He shared 3 perspectives that hit home for me. So I’m sharing them with you to add to your mindset toolbox.

1. You are not your business.

Many of us who are building a business start to tie our identities to the success of that business. This is especially true for solopreneurs who are, in many respects, the business.

When things are moving up and to the right, we feel really damn good about ourselves. When they aren’t, we don’t.

And this is a dangerous game, for 3 reasons.

• Business growth isn’t a nice, linear line that points up and to the right, even when you’re growing year-over-year. Ups and downs are completely normal, so tying how you’re feeling about yourself to that kind of volatility is going to be a rocky road.

• A healthy sense of identity comes from within, and having a foundation independent of what’s happening externally. Tying your self-worth to anything external, like how many people buy your stuff, sets you up for an emotional rollercoaster that you can’t control.

• When we believe the success or failure of something makes us—as a person—a success or failure, we tend to get gun-shy about taking chances in order to avoid failing. Long-term, that actually prevents us from moving the business forward because we’re trying to avoid something that’s inevitable—lessons through failure.

Which leads me to the second perspective.

2. Failure is a gift.

In his book, Chris notes, “If you study the success stories, the icons, the inventors, the movement-makers, you notice something peculiar: their win rate is lower than you’d think.”

They fail. Regularly.

The difference is that they accept failure as part of the process of learning. It’s the inevitable outcome of trying, and it’s a data point for how to get better.

Examples of failure as a feedback loop are all around us.

• A torpedo makes its way to a goal through a constant series of failures in going off track and course-correcting millisecond by millisecond.

• AI learning models spit out bad outputs that are corrected, integrated into the next output, and improved—at exponential rates.

• In agile software development, failure is built into the process as developers release software in small increments, get feedback, and make adjustments.

If you accept failure as a necessary part of the process of winning, you process it differently internally.

It’s not a reflection of you doing something wrong. It’s a reflection of you doing something worthwhile, after all.

3. There is no “arrival.”

Goals are great. But the idea that a particular goal or sense of achievement is going to fulfill you is a fallacy.

There’s a term for it: Arrival Fallacy.

Personally, I fell into this trap rising through the ranks in corporate. I thought the next achievement was the one that’d bring a long-lasting sense of accomplishment.

The MBA. Check.

The CEO title. Check.

The next big bonus. Check.

And it never lasted.

I’ve fallen into this same trap as an entrepreneur, too.

Thinking for my first $10k month would offer a sense of stability and security. Then recurring $10k months. Then $20k, $50k, $75k.

Every time I hit the goal, the goalpost moved. And at no time along the way did I get that sense of security with online income that I thought it’d bring.

That’s the arrival fallacy in action.

When we realize this, we can disrupt the “if-then” thinking that drives it, get honest with ourselves about why we’re chasing what we’re chasing, and start doing the real work we need inside to experience that ‘thing’ now.

These are a few perspectives that have genuinely helped me as not just a businessperson, but a person.

I hope they’re helpful for you, too.

We dive deeper into this topic and get tactical on business growth, too.

Grab his book here: The Joy of Failure

Watch the full interview.