Startup Failure is just One Chapter in Founder Life

The hard thing about failure is putting it into perspective. [View this email in your browser]( • [Forward to a Friend]( Failure is Just One Chapter of Life TL;DR: "My startup career is over. My startup just imploded and everything I've ever worked for has gone into shambles. I thought my Founder career was going to be glorious, and now it's ruined forever. How can I possibly recover from this?" The hard thing about failure is putting it into perspective. I speak to Founders all the time who are going through the most brutal moments of their professional careers. For them, it feels like an eternity, and more importantly, it feels like a permanent tombstone for the rest of their career. For me, it's the millionth time I've seen the same story play out. A Founder gets fired up about building something amazing, it goes well for a while, then out of nowhere it tanks, and the Founder feels like it's the end of the world. Except I've been doing this for 30 years, and I've had plenty of these moments myself. What matters in these moments is getting some perspective on how fleeting they are, and more importantly, how they are only one small bit of a much larger story. Today’s Advice Sponsored by [The Juice]( We Can't Fail for Long When I'm at the blackjack table, I always have this idea in the back of my mind that I can go on winning forever because winning just provides more money to play. But I can only lose entirely once because once the money is gone, I can't sustain. Also, my wife makes me leave the table. The same goes for our startups. We can run a successful startup for decades, but if we have a fatally bad single year — we're done. What that means for Founders is that our failures actually don't have a particularly long life span. They tend to eat up any resources we'd have for keeping things alive in a relatively short period of time, so they end up containing themselves, albeit painfully, to a short time frame. It's a Chapter, Not a Book What's hard to imagine during a chapter of failure is how it measures in the grand scheme of our entire career, or "our book" as it were. At the time it feels like an eternity, and we quickly lose sight of the fact that it's a single moment in time. As Abe Lincoln often said, "This too, shall pass." The reason this perspective is so important is that at the time, we think that failure is something that is permanent. We think it projects across the entire rest of our career, as if all of our effort going forward is incidental, and all that mattered was what we've done. That's the flaw in our thinking. What we're about to close is a single chapter in our book. It's a shitty chapter, no doubt, but it's a single chapter all the same. There were chapters before this one, some good, some bad, and there will be many chapters after this one. We have to focus on starting the next chapter. Every Founder has Bad Chapters It's easy to forget that every Founder has bad chapters. You know who doesn't forget that? Those Founders. It's almost like you're not truly a Founder unless you've had a chapter in your history where you've come from nothing or lost everything. It would be really cool if we could just write stories without those chapters, yet personally, I've met very few who don't have one. Later on, we go and tell stories about how we came back from that awful chapter to build something amazing. It sounds like a great story, but the audience forgets that it's Founders like us that actually had to live through those chapters in order to be out there telling the story to begin with. As Founders, there is almost one certainty — we either have had a bad chapter or we will have one. It's what we do. If you're going through one right now, you have the condolences of me and the entire Founder family worldwide. But remember, like the rest of us, you'll go on to write much better chapters in the future. Time to turn the page, my friend. [Read More Here]( Get free marketing and sales intel in one place on The Juice platform Whether you're looking to land the next promotion or [solve a sales or marketing challenge at work]( The Juice can help. The ultimate industry insider hack, The Juice aggregates career-enhancing resources from top brands and thought leaders and organizes them in one place, so you don't have to keep filling out marketing forms for access (or dodging sales calls yourself). Start thinking like top B2B marketers and sales professionals with [The Juice](. In Case You Missed It [Many Startups Shut Down a Few Times Before Succeeding]( (podcast) It's time to know the truth about Startup shutdowns and why they don't mean absolute failure. [My Startup is Tanking, but am I Safe?]( As a Founder, when the business is struggling it can feel like that struggle is linked to your personal life and your personal safety — and you could suffer greatly as a result. [We Need a Strict Definition of Personal Success]( Every moment we spend pursuing an undefined goal is a complete waste of time — especially personal goals. Love this topic? Hate it? Let's chat on social media! Wil Schroter Founder & CEO @ Startups.com [Share]( [Share]( [Tweet]( [Tweet]( [Forward]( [Forward]( Copyright © 2022 Startups.com, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you joined Startups.com. Our mailing address is: Startups.com 1201 Dublin RoadColumbus, OH 43215 [Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](.