Failure Needs A Spotlight

Fear of judgement, comparison, and looking less than encourages us to mask or hide our failures or only speak of them in certain contexts.

It’s time that we rub the shiny off.

Revealing Instagram and Social Media for the perfectly curated highlight reel it’s become.

The addictive piece of technology employs the world’s most brilliant neuroscientists charged with 1 goal: to keep us glued to our devices.

Marketers followed suit perfectly.

Manipulating our vulnerabilities and monetizing our desires.

Filling our feeds with success stories and testimonials. Showing us the life we’ve dreamed about living. Cars, vacations, luxury homes, nomadic lifestyles, and Stripe payment notifications flooding their inboxes.

Failure is only ever shown if it’s followed by a comeback story about how they turned it all around and now possess everything we want.

Like a genie granting our wishes their courses become available as if some magical guarantee that it can all happen to us, all we need do is follow their simple 5-step framework.

I’m not sure about you, but this has never been the case for me.

No matter how many times I dreamed about being a guru posting pictures beside my Lamborghini, the failures I faced never had a comeback story to share.

And the wishes must have been used up because the tens of thousands I’ve spent on the 5-step formulas promising me results never brought them.

So then, what happens when the story isn’t worth posting?

What if we shared this…

Would you read it?

I spent 1,101 days working for free.

On July 14, 2021, I began working free of charge.

Partnering with a colleague turned friend to launch his business. In exchange for my time investing in building, launching, and running, I’d become a partner.

I spent 1,101 days investing my time and energy into something that may never have manifested into anything.

Over the last 3 years, I’ve spent time on:

• Calls.

• Running ads.

• Building funnels.

• Building complex email automations.

• Building, launching, and managing ad campaigns.

• Building multiple courses, memberships, and tech integrations.

Close to 200 hours invested.

I had no idea I’d invest over 3 years of my life into this project.

And, if I’m being honest… If you told me it would be 3 years and 200 hours on the slight chance it turns into something worthwhile, I’m not sure I would have kept going.

Delayed gratification is funny that way.

We must endure the ‘delay’ and trust we’ll see the ‘gratification’.

Except that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not guaranteed. And through all my other business ventures of the last 18+ years, the pot of gold was a mere fairytale where I would have ended up further ahead just by buying a box of Lucky Charms.

• A gym that left me $100,000 in debt.

• A supplement company that lost money.

• Courses and mentorships that left me worse off.

Just to name a few.

Was this going to be added to that list?

After 3 years we were finally seeing the concept get validated. With a lot of ‘hand-to-hand’ combat (what marketers often refer to as manual work and 1-1 work), we knew we had something.

People wanted what my partner had created.

Our ‘beta’ offer was selling, while it was not sustainable, it’s what we used to validate the concept of the membership community we were building.

The long-awaited time had arrived.

We planned the launch of the membership program.

That’s when things went horribly wrong.

The launch date was set.

We’d build a small but highly qualified list of 2,000 leads, hundreds of applications, and a few dozen customers and clients.

I loaded the launch emails into ActiveCampaign and waited for sales to roll in.

Almost immediately I knew something was wrong.

A pit built in my stomach as I opened ActiveCampaign to be faced with a marketer’s worst nightmare.

After 1-hour we had a 3% open rate.

A few choice words echoed through my apartment as the reality of the situation sank in.

An “issue” that I knew could not be fixed easily.

2-Months earlier our emails received 40+% open rates. And after months and years, I couldn’t believe this happened…

…On the day we expected to be celebrating and popping a bottle of champagne, our emails were all landing in Spam.

I cringed as I typed the message to notify my partner.

I felt a deep sense of responsibility as the integrator even though I’ve now learned ActiveCampaign has a reputation for poor deliverability and shared IP addresses getting blacklisted.

Failure.

Another failure.

Another fucking failure.

The voice slowly repeated in my head.

Back to the drawing board.

The temptation to mask the failure.

Shortly after, I ran an idea about this topic by someone I admire.

My mentor advised me it would be better to write about this story after we’d fixed the issue and then could tell the success story.

Write about it after it’s no longer a failure.

While I greatly admire this person and completely understand the origin of the advice this was something that didn’t sit well with me.

Failure needs a spotlight, too.

As entrepreneurs, we cannot only speak of failure in the context of it becoming a success because that is not real life.

Not every failure has a comeback story.

Or a direct or immediate comeback story. I am a believe in existentialism and finding meaning in what we do so by definition anything can have a comeback story but in the traditional sense of how these are used in marketing, not every failure has a story that becomes a million dollar case study.

The lack of transparency around failure, I believe, is contributing to the reason people struggle so deeply with it. When it’s only spoken about after someone comes out the other end and wins, it becomes an expectation.

What happens if we don’t bounce back? Or struggle to? Or takes years?

We need to remove the shame around this.

There are social, cultural, and monetary pressures to only share wins.

Fear of judgment, comparison, and looking less than encourages us to mask or hide our losses or as previously mentioned, only speak of them in certain contexts.

This is why I am sharing a loss, without a win.

The hidden lessons of sharing.

I believe we have the power to find meaning.

In “Man’s Search For Meaning”, Viktor Frankl wrote:

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

He believed through choice and perspective we have the ability to make meaning from any situation we experience.

This might not look like the stereotypical success story spewed on Social Media.

The rags to riches stories that make headlines.

But much like me sharing my experience of failure in hopes of normalizing these experiences and creating reliability amongst others, meaning can be made.

It’s just not clickbait ;-)

My partner and I have a plan.

We manually reached out to past customers to send them the launch emails. We ran some paid ads to our email list on Facebook, which didn’t work. And now we’ve consulted with an email deliverability expert to work on addressing the issue.

Could this turn into a success story? I hope so.

But there is a reason why I am sharing it now, because I cannot control what happens, and I don’t think it sets a good example to only speak of failure in the context of making money.

And hiding the failures that didn’t.

Failure needs a spotlight too.

Failure is normal.

Business (and life) are filled with ups and downs.

Sharing the good and the bad experiences can build connections and help others feel less alone in their journey.

I felt alone throughout my journey.

Failure after failure as I watched my friends and colleagues grow faster and make more money than me which left me feeling alone, isolated, and like I’d never figure it out.

I don’t want anyone else to feel this way.

The story that almost stayed hidden.

Today,

Even if I have the Instagram-worthy win?

I do my best to share openly and authentically about my journey. The wins, and the losses, without masking how I feel.

When I had a post go viral? I wrote about how I couldn’t have predicted it, I don’t feel I can replicate it, and my plan is simply to continue to be consistent.

(You can read that post here.)

Even many comments mentioned how they were surprised I wasn’t selling the 5-step framework to go viral and were pleasantly surprised to see my transparency.

If you find yourself struggling, I encourage you to evaluate your relationship with failure, understand it’s part of the journey, and do your best to find your own individual meaning.

And most of all, I want you to know you’re not alone.

Landon

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