“Failure is an event, never a person.”

— William D. Brown

What makes me qualified?

One of the reasons I give this book a slight margin of success is that I'm doing things slightly different. But mostly I'm following the same pattern of failure. So there’s always that.

In July of 2015 on one of my one hour commutes I conducted a nonverbal evaluation of my life.  I asked myself this question:  “What am I good at?” 

I wrote down the following list after I got home. Safety tip: You shouldn’t text or word process when driving. 

·           Coming up with book ideas

o     Visualizing books into movies

§   Recast the movie

o     Structure of fiction

o    Kernels of truth: Change your schema

o    Book Outlines- giving you room to be creative

o    New genre: LDS paranormal fiction

o    How movies/books should have ended

·           Product management

o    Working with a difficult boss

o    Align your work with personality types

o     Delivering value to customers

o     Public speaking

·           User research

o    How to create a persona

o    How to understand user impact

o    Balance between user and business goals

·           Training design

o    Join-up training philosophy –horse sense.

o     Concept design

o     Problem based learning

o     UX and ISD

o     Technology in learning

·           Failure at writing –off target, not a best-selling author.

·           Humor

·           Insight

·           American idol: what they should do with the show and what songs contestants should sing

·           Find a conspiracy in anything

·           A walking IMBD – I have a lot of useless trivia in my head

·           Diabetes

o    Parenting kids with disabilities –best day ever idea

o    How to inspire intrinsic motivation – actually I’m a failure at that, but it is a goal

Then I wrote this.

Write a book –overall scope: Make a small book like the Art of Being Unmistakable by Srinivas Rao. 

Idea	Scope	What the reader will get out of it?
Coming up with book ideas	Outlines of current and future books My method My intent –I can’t finish all of these.	Prompts creative thought Will inspire others to finish my work.
Failure at writing	Insight into big ideas with small appeal A study in failure	Viewed as an honest tableau that in the end may be inspiring and worth the read.
A study in failure: Why this book will not be a best seller.	-de-motivator approach -compare and contrast	What is really most important in life? Value of failure?
LDS paranormal	LDS guide to BattleStar Galactica	?

It became clear as I wrote this list that I know a lot about failure.  Maybe your list looks like mine as well.  Perhaps your list is shorter or longer than mine? 

We often see failure and success in extremes. We can all think of an examples of a complete failures either within our own lives or others.  I think of a stereotypical drug addict living in a crack house.  They have failed at life.  We can also think of a successful person. They seem to have it all. I think of different people based upon genre.  There are mega successes in sports, business, life, politics, money etc.  Successful people are a diverse category and there are reasons and justification for each strata. 

But the reality is that there are shades of success and failure.  It is never as simple as most self-help books might suggest.   There are no pithy lists or aphorisms that truly address how you can learn to overcome failures in your life.

Most of us, including me, live in the twilight between complete success and complete failure.  At least how I define failure and success.

Maybe we should define these terms? Or not. That is kind of boring. Let me ramble on first and come back to that, maybe. 

Many years ago a company I was working for hired a motivation speaker to come in and, I guess, make us more motivated?  The gentleman hired to speak to us talked about authenticity, which was his gimmick or trademark.  During the course of his session he told of his failures, that he was an alcoholic and lost everything. I don’t think he ended up “living in a van down by the river”, like the character in that Saturday Night Live skit. I listened to him and I guess it made an impression on me because I can still almost smell the lack of alcohol on his sober breath as he spoke to us. 

Later, I made a connection to that experience when I heard a radio host make the comment (question):  “Why should we listen to those who have failed in their lives about how to overcome and be successful?”

Following that logic let’s take two people, Bob and John.  Bob, a wayward soul that has messed up in his personal life for many years is now the CEO of a large company.  John, on the other hand, spent is off time in church and never made a fateful decision in his life, but took the straight and narrow path. John is also the CEO of a large company.

Who can give you the best advice about overcoming odds and being a success? 

I think that is the wrong question.  I think either one could. It really depends upon John’s or Bob’s ability to give a good speech and have a good level of introspection.  Maybe we as a society like to listen the underdog more than the straight shooter because it gives us permission to make and live with bad decisions and then hope we can overcome them like they did.

I would bet that no person, Bob or John is devoid of failure in their lives.  I think we tend to listen to others talk about failure only in the context of success.  I bet no one asked Abram Lincoln how to win elections after the lost his first.

This is one of the main points of his writing effort. I’m not at the pinnacle of success, I’m in wallows of failure. Most people who read motivational books are more like me than like the person writing the book.  

“Wallows of failure!”  Okay that is hyperbole. 

I’ve been thinking about persistence and perspective in relationship to failure.  It seems to me that in each state in your life: in failure or success, many people persist in that state and many have strong perspectives about their given state. Perhaps the successful say that they have a plan, that they have a system to keep them in the game.  And conversely they who fail stay in their failed state because they have been beaten down and their choices are limited and they blame “the system” for their failures.  So perspective must be a critical factor in escaping the depths of failure.

“Depths of failure.”  Really?

What are those factors that push us above those depths and wallows? What keeps us in our factions (failures or successes)?  If I knew that, I’d do it, and then I’d write a book and tell you how to do it.  But this book is written from my perspective and my attempt to move from perceived failure and persist in a state of success.

I could give you steps, formulas and attributes but these are just external things. The reality is that the path before you and me is not marked, quantified, or diagrammed.    

Let’s examine the path of my failures and see if there were signs that I missed and turns that I should have taken that would have led me to success.