Why Stories About Failure Are So Helpful

Failure.

It’s no longer a dirty word to utter or admit in entrepreneurial and corporate circles. In fact, many entrepreneurs and businesses are embracing sharing stories of failure because they understand the value of these stories.

Sharing what doesn’t work is just as valuable (maybe more) as sharing what does work.

In science, it is every researcher’s dream to test a hypothesis and find statistically significant results confirming that they were right. However, publishing research findings showing that there were no statistically significant results for those elements is equally important to the research community. It shows that those confounders aren’t relevant to your problem.

Failure in a Public Health Study

Case study: In 2005, Michael Watson and his public health colleagues conducted a randomized controlled trial where 3,400 some odd families with children under 5 were provided child safety equipment to prevent injuries.

They studied whether a child in the family had at least one injury that required medical attention and if they sought hospital admission for injuries over the course of a two year period. Their hypothesis was that providing safety equipment and medical advice to these families would reduce the number of injuries seen in the family. Afterall, safety equipment provides a protective effect, no? Seems logical.

However, they found NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE in the number of medically attended injuries between the families who had the safety equipment and those who didn’t. Basically, kids will be kids regardless of the safety equipment they have. You can satisfy your nerdy side with the full article here.

Was their study a failure or did it provide interesting results?

I’d argue that these non-significant results were very helpful in directing future researchers to various study designs when it comes to studying families and child injury prevention. Their study informed pediatricians and crafted the advice doctors gave their worried parental patients.

One can argue, quite successfully, that publishing non-significant results (or stories of failure) are extremely valuable in how we view our world and test our own hypotheses.

Failure is the new trend in business

“I’m still shocked at being considered an authority on robotics when I’m known for making robots that don’t work.” – Simone Giertz

Fail stories are finally being seen as something of worth in the business world and entrepreneurs are embracing their failures with open arms. Failory.com provides written interviews with start-up founders to dig into the reasons why their ideas failed. Entrepreneurs are sharing their F**kup stories on vlogs with Stefanie Koch on We Fucked Up, and the videos are entertaining to watch and reassuring to see.

Because learning what not to do is as valuable as learning what to do in business, young entrepreneurs are gobbling up failure stories for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Take a look at all of the books related to failure: The 10 Commandments for Business FailureSecret to Startup Failure: Fail fast. Fail cheap. Fail happy.How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

On Alie Ward’s Gizmology podcast, she chats with Simone Giertz from Shitty Robots (a super entertaining YouTube channel, by the way), about how her robot fail videos made her famous. Simone admits, “I’m still shocked at being considered an authority on robotics when I’m known for making robots that don’t work.”

Failure makes you human. Failure makes you relatable.

The Old Guard (looking at you, my lovely gray-haired/bearded experts in your field of choice) have kept their mistakes a secret—always wanting to be perceived as the all-knowing, wise, and knowledgeable specialists. But, when those all-knowing experts are always on the conference call, they stifle their colleagues’ desire to speak up and offer their ideas.

Former Florida State Epidemiologist, Richard Hopkins, is a tall, white-bearded man who would regale me with stories about his bassoon playing vacations in Bozeman, Montana. During a “long table discussion” (you know, those where all of the experts sit at a long table and rabble on at one another) he pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “I’m not going to answer any questions so, you’d better be ready to speak up. You know as much on this topic as I do.”

Other people’s fear of failing in front of an expert actually hinders growth and progress.

Being a young, relatively inexperienced female epidemiologist sitting at the table next to a veritable expert with over 30 years of experience, I took his permission to heart. I was grateful that he explicitly gave my ideas equal validity as his own despite the discrepancy of years of experience in the field.

Later, during one of the coffee breaks, he said, “I’ve found that whenever I offer up my opinions on a topic, it shuts everyone else down and a lot of good ideas go unsaid. We need more new ideas coming to the table, not less.”

In short, other people’s fear of failing in front of an expert actually hinders growth and progress.

This is why we need more experts to share more of their stories of failure with their colleagues and especially with people seeking to enter their field. In doing so, we will all understand that growth cannot happen without failing and that it is only through failure that we can improve.

Share your failures story with someone and you’ll find that sharing your mistakes makes you more human, more relatable, and more empathetic toward others. You’ll gain more admiration and respect in your field of expertise.

Failure shows persistence

Tim Ferriss sent his 4 Hour Workweek book to 25 publishers before someone finally accepted it. Dr. Seuss’s first book was rejected by 27 publishers before it was accepted. Walt Disney filed bankruptcy after starting several businesses and failing at them all. Continuously failing means that you improve the next time and the next until you reach greatness.

So, head out there and fail your heart out. You might just inspire someone.

Are you ready to learn from my mistakes? I share all of my failures with my clients so they can learn what not to do when it comes to self-publishing and crowdfunding their book.

Major Mistakes I Have Made as an Indie Author

Time to own up to my mistakes. Don’t you love learning from other people’s mistakes? Well, read on because I’ve made plenty.

When it comes to self-publishing, it is really easy to get far down the wrong path before you even know that you’re heading the wrong way.

It’s tough to accept that there will inevitably be some “learning experiences” but whenever we do something new, something beyond our comfort zones, we are going to make mistakes. 

Some will be more expensive or embarrassing than others.

Here are my top 3 mistakes I made as a self-published author:

1. Hiring out e-book formatting

For my first book, I hired out the e-book formatting to someone I found on Fiverr—a great website to find freelancers but it can be hit or miss.

I upgraded to her service for the .mobi and .ePub file types and waited 10 days for the files.

Everything worked out well, but during those 10 days when I was waiting, I found some teeny tiny changes I wanted to make to my manuscript.

I wanted to add a call to action for readers to leave a review at the end. Simple, right?

What I didn’t realize was that my teeny tiny change meant that I would have to purchase another “gig” on Fiverr. Basically, any time I wanted to update one thing, I was going to have to spend $100 to do so.

Now, maybe it was my experience with this particular freelancer or maybe it is standard practice, but I didn’t know because I had never tried formatting an e-book before.

What I did know was that I wanted to learn the process myself so that I wouldn’t have to pay for every little change I wanted to make to my e-book file.

I also didn’t want to have a manuscript riddled with dead links, or missing references to my subsequent books until I could amass enough changes to make a new revision worth the money.

Lesson learned: format your own e-book.

Which, not surprisingly, leads me to my next mistake…

2. Improperly formatting your own e-book

Having learned an expensive lesson with my first book, I learned a cheaper, but more time-intensive lesson and embarrassing lesson with my second book, serving as a cute reminder that the universe loves keeping things in equilibrium.

I may have saved a few bucks but I paid for it in ego.

I researched how to use Scrivener to format my e-book files to look and feel like my paperback version.

I really wanted e-book users to have as similar an experience to paperback readers, and I knew I could make that happen using the wonders of the technology at my fingertips.

I uploaded my manuscript into Scrivener and followed the online tutorial step-by-step.

Everything looked good on my end. Download file, upload file, wait, preview, make a small change, download, upload, wait, preview, etc.,

I probably downloaded and uploaded 50 versions to my Kindle app, double checked everything using the author tool, KindlePreviewer, and even asked my mom to check the files on her phone, tablets, and Kindle reading devices.

After checking what felt like more than enough times, it was thumbs up.

Time to hit publish.

Bam. I sent out the e-book files to everyone who had pre-ordered the book (300+ people) with instructions on how to get them onto their e-reading devices.

Woo hoo! Pop the bubbly. 

Two months later, I get an email from a fellow self-publisher friend who sent me screenshots of my Kindle manuscript on her Kindle Paper white device.

This must be wrong, I thought, this e-book is a mess! 

The formatting was, in a word, wonkadoo.

Fonts and text size randomly changed throughout a paragraph, and the spacing was inconsistent.

My e-book was a hot mess.

Completely unreadable.

OMG, I had sent that out to EVERYONE and was currently encouraging people to buy it and it looked like my daughter’s worst tangled hair day.

I was shocked my friend had made it as far as she did reading my e-book before she emailed me the screenshots.

What I didn’t know and what I hadn’t counted on was that the newest Kindle devices are not display options in the KindlePreviewer software. Come on, Kindle, what’s up with that?

That meant that readers with newer Kindle devices (like Kindle Paper white) were not seeing what I was seeing because KindlePreviewer was only showing me the most ancient Kindle device displays. What a surprise, right?

The readers with the latest Kindles were seeing all of the backend formatting that was jumbled when I imported my Word manuscript into Scrivener where I formatted the file.

Everything looked great on my end but it was a hot mess behind the scenes. I felt like I was walking down the street feeling like hot stuff with my dress tucked into my underwear.

Embarrassing.

I spent hours combing through every chapter to remove all of the improper formatting manually. Again, these were things I couldn’t see—everything still looked fine in Scrivener, but the screenshots showed otherwise.

After assuming there was an error on every line, I reformatted my +100k-word book by hand, waited a bit, crossed my fingers, and asked my friend to upload my latest file onto her Kindle device.

Once she gave me the go ahead, I republished on Kindle Direct Publishing.

In short, it was an embarrassing nightmare, but I learned that if you go to the “Look inside” feature on your Amazon sales page, you’ll see what the readers will see when they look at your e-book.

A few lessons learned here:

1. Test your e-book on every device imaginable—new and old.

2. If you’re formatting an e-book for the first time, you will most likely make mistakes. This will probably take hours of trial-and-error to correct.

3. Think like a reader and click on all of the things they might click on when navigating your Amazon sales page.

4. Profusely thank readers who point out embarrassing mistakes.

3. Not planning a series from the beginning

After spending months researching and pouring long nights and early mornings into my first book, it never occurred to me to publish more than one.

I emptied myself into my first book. I gave it my best stories, effort, and energy.

Publish another book?

That’s like asking a woman who has a one-month-old baby in her arms when she’s going to have another—the answer is “get out of my face.”

However, if you can get over your desire to slap someone across the face when they ask about “your next book,” think about the momentum you’re generating when you publish and market your book.

People read your book, and they want more from you—that’s the best compliment a reader can give a writer.

Because I thought I’d only have one attempt at this book publishing process, I made my first book way too long.  My second book was STILL too long for many readers.

Instead, I should’ve waited until I had amassed enough content for a three-book series and then gotten everything lined up and ready to release over time.

By thinking about a series on the front-end, I would’ve been able to plan out my covers so that they coordinated in design.

I would’ve been able to pace my readers so they wouldn’t be exhausted after book #1.

I could’ve given my readers more content every 9-12 months on a schedule, and the momentum from one book would flow directly into another.

Everything would’ve been easier from a marketing perspective.

Lesson learned: If you think there is even a remote possibility of a series, pause and plan out as much as you can in advance. You’ll save money on cover design, marketing, and you’ll be giving your readers exactly what they want—consistency.

But, in the end, none of these mistakes sunk my ship—I’m still sailing.

Self-publishing involves a lot of trial and error and without a doubt, you will make mistakes just like I did.

Actually, you’ll make different mistakes, and when you do, send me a message and I’m happy to laugh along with you in solidarity.

Do better when you know better and keep on chugging along.

 

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