I was recently asked to speak at the beginning of a major bank’s new moon-shot project.

It is a project that has the potential to transform the banking industry, and there were many high level executives present, all with high hopes for the program.

The team doing the actual work was given a long leash and, of course, the project would be running, using an agile work model with daily and weekly stand-ups and demos for upper management every week.

When I was asked to speak at the event, the friend asking pitched it like above, and then added that he would like for me to talk about failing since it was

  1. very present in my life at the moment.
  2. because I seemed so good at failing.

This was a moment in life when I had to think that it is ONLY funny because it is true.

 

Failing forward

 

I have been failing a lot in my life; for the first 11 years of being an entrepreneur I failed to ever make any substantial amount of money/happiness/dent in the universe. All I did was make my partner and myself miserable and unhappy.

That ended and I started building a new business. Some of it became something that made some money, but most of it failed to give me any money/happiness/dents – unless you count the dents to my self-esteem or self-worth.

A little more than year ago I “discovered” the TimeBlock method, and by discovering, I actually mean that I did some changes to how I ran my consultancy, based mainly on our manifesto and the belief that we need more transparency to keep the customers close to us.

After some weeks, I thought to myself that this is “the thing” I have been looking for; this will make me successful, happy, denting.

And (drum roll)

I failed again.

I did become happier working with the method and helping people, but I failed at making a lot of money from the method, and still I did not feel like a successful businessperson.

I felt like, to reach my goals, I had to build something that made a lot of money and that people praised, and my decisions started sliding into a bad territory where they were made based on the chance of making money.

That is my way of failing: when I go for the money and for the fame.

Now I have reaffirmed my resolve to help people, to help other businesses be better at communicating and doing their business; and I hope that, somewhere in that, there is room for me to be better at doing my business.

And it makes me happy, to once again return to helping others, reaching out and saying “how can I help you?” because deep down that is what makes me tick, what makes me happy and drives me to be a better version of myself.

 

So let me end this by asking you: “How can I help you?”