What would a book about seizing your yay be if it didn’t acknowledge the uncomfortable but unavoidable topic of failure? And what type of successful person would you be if you hadn’t experienced at least one, if not many, serious setbacks to get there? Something I have come to understand is that while some situations are undoubtedly a ‘failure’ in the sense that they cause you to lose money or don’t achieve any of their objectives, overall you can reframe most failures in a way that allows you to make peace with the discomfort they cause and focus instead on the lessons you learned. Everything can be seen through a new yay-frame; you just have to learn to see these so-called ‘failures’ in a way that works to your advantage rather than your disadvantage.
Having a yay-type attitude isn’t necessarily something you’re born with, but it is something you can cultivate. Taking a step backwards can still be a step in the right direction in the sense that it teaches you about something that doesn’t work and provides you with an opportunity to do it better next time around. There are no foundations quite as strong as rock bottom; as I like to remind myself, the very best views often come after the hardest climb. It’s extremely handy for this chapter that almost every guest we’ve had on Seize the Yay so far has experienced an apparent failure-turned-transformative learning – I like to call this ‘failing forwards’.
At the time of writing, for example, Lisa Messenger has recently closed her once-wildly-successful print edition of Collective Hub magazine, which might initially have felt like a massive fail. The subsequent pivot from print to greener pastures (and her signature openness about it) is such that Lisa has already released a fabulous book documenting her learnings in detail: Risk & Resilience. Like all her books, it’s an insightful, honest and practical read. As the very first sentence so beautifully describes, ‘When you’re deep in the middle of a total and utter, mind-scrambling cluster-f*ck is when the best ideas materialise.’ Under what she describes as ‘the pressure of scaling too quickly, hiring too rapidly, over-promising without adequate resources, not employing right-hand people early enough and letting our egos take over’ (i.e. the ‘bigger is better’ mentality we too fell into with Matcha Maiden that we spoke about in chapter 7), Collective Hub nearly sank. At one point, it was losing A$150,000 a month and Lisa ended up sinking more than A$1 million of her personal funds into keeping the business afloat.
'The very best views often come after the hardest climb.'
Rather than seeing this as a sign to shut up shop and throw in the towel, Lisa chose to focus on the silver linings, which she then shared for the benefit of others. She even included honest figures and financials to show how she could bring the business back and make it even better and more efficient than before. Lisa is one of my favourite writers, especially on the topics of failure and resilience, and she often reminds me that the comeback is always stronger than the setback. One of the practical strategies Lisa details in Risk & Resilience is to start by addressing your issues head-on so you know exactly what you’re dealing with and then act quickly and scale down fast in order to salvage what you still can. Avoiding your issues is much easier in the short term but addressing the reality upfront as early as you are able to can liberate you from fear of the unknown and allow you to do something about it.
The next strategy Lisa suggests is to spend some time getting clear again on your core vision and coming back to what matters most. Finally, once you get clear on that, start to reframe the ending. In her case, this involved closing the print magazine but founding a new iteration of Collective Hub – just delivered differently. The new iteration pursues the same core values, but via new and different delivery methods, which of course includes her brand-new podcast as well as other digital resources and physical merchandise. Lisa’s tried-and-tested technique is to ‘fail fast’, forget the mistake but remember the lesson and get back to where you want to be as quickly as you can. Lisa and I often chat about how everything in life unfolds in iterations or chapters over time, so a failure of one iteration or version of your idea or business is just the key to the improvement of the next version of it.
Lisa is an inspiring reminder to me not to waste time and energy beating myself up about something that hasn’t worked so well, but instead focus on shifting quickly and effectively towards bettering the next thing. There are so many other examples out there of successful people who have had failures that either result in the improvement of what they do or, like Lisa, that involves cutting off parts of what they do and pivoting into something better (thereby failing forwards). In other cases, however, success has come from resisting failure completely and refusing to see it as fatal. One of my favourite examples of this resilience is J.K. Rowling, creator of the ubiquitous Harry Potter.
To know me is to know that I am a huge Harry Potter fan (and a very proud Gryffindor). Although I cannot fathom a single reason why, the Harry Potter series was initially rejected by 12 different publishers before the chairman of Bloomsbury gave his eight-year-old daughter the first chapter to read. Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, but advised J.K. that she was unlikely to make money in children’s books. Instead, she went from being a jobless, single mother living on unemployment benefits to the first female billionaire author in the world. I get shivers thinking about what might have happened if she had taken the 10th or 11th publisher’s rejection as fatal and abandoned the idea for Harry Potter without ever knowing what it could become – I know my childhood would have been very different.
To date, that book series has been translated into 73 languages, sold millions of copies and accrued over US$20 billion through movie deals and the like. Even so, J.K. has explained that, in her past, she was the biggest failure that she knew. In her Harvard commencement address, J.K. told the graduates that the only way they’d avoid failure in life is if they lived so carefully that they couldn’t fail – in which case, they may as well not have lived at all.
In Matcha Maiden’s case, there have been so many situations that would count as failures, but we’ve learned to use those to help propel us forward. We’ve experienced many rejections after pitches or meetings; sure, these haven’t been quite on the scale of J.K. Rowling’s as they didn’t have the potential to end Matcha Maiden altogether, but they definitely left us feeling defeated and uncertain about our ability to succeed. But more commonly, our failures have been less external rejections and more internal screw-ups on our part.
Quite a few of our failures have involved us either under- or over-preparing for a situation then being left with too little or too much of something – usually in a way that had big financial ramifications. One example of this that I still get reminded of regularly is the great cardboard box incident of 2018. The boxes are still sitting in our office smirking at me every day (or they would be if boxes could smirk). They were ordered during that period I talked about where Nic and I got sidetracked by the ‘bigger is better’ mentality. We became aggressively focused on economies of scale and preparing for drastic growth, and though we have sent out single bags of matcha in flat, postal satchels since we started Matcha Maiden, we decided (without doing any real research) that boxes would be more professional. They’d also allow us to create packs of one, two and three bags to help increase the cart value per customer. We hastily sourced some cardboard boxes that were an absolute bargain … if you ordered 10,000 at a time.
That’s the point of economies of scale: as you order bigger quantities, you can access heavily discounted pricing, so as you grow things become more cost-effective. But for that equation to actually work, you not only have to be sure you’re going to use 10,000 boxes, you also need to know that posting them out isn’t going to cost a fortune. Well, in our haste, we didn’t calculate how these boxes would impact our postage price. And, delightfully, the boxes cost almost 500 per cent more to post than our flat satchels. Since Matcha Maiden offers free shipping, we would be wearing this increase in price. Needless to say, we ended up using less than 5 per cent of those boxes; rather than being extremely cost effective at less than 50 cents each, those 500 boxes ended up costing us about A$10 each!
'Our failures have been less external rejections and more internal screw-ups on our part. Quite a few of these involved us either under- or over-preparing for a situation.'
In the grand scheme of things, this box incident might not sound extreme, but when you’re a growing a start-up, dropping thousands of dollars on something you don’t use could sink you financially. Cash flow is often so tight in the growth phase of a business that even small mistakes can affect your finances in a way that have a knock-on effect on your abilities to pay bills, pay staff, purchase stock or any other number of things for months or even years. This box debacle definitely felt like a failure for us, particularly as the flow-on effects lasted for months; we had to borrow from our personal funds to buy our next batch of matcha, and we were unable to pay that loan back for months until we finally re-established a profit. However, this taught us such valuable lessons about over-extending ourselves and making decisions too hastily before we grew even further and made the same mistake on a much bigger and, potentially more damaging, purchase.
Nic and I have also gone as far as releasing new products that ended up being a huge pain to sell and resulted in a considerable loss for our business (not to mention a major excess for us to consume ourselves). Some of these misses, such as products we launched far too hastily, were avoidable, but others surprised us because not only had we had done our market research, but these specific products had even been requested by our customers. But, in the end, they just didn’t work on a large scale, and sometimes our stockists were unable to sell even their first order. On reflection, we didn’t invest heavily enough in supportive education campaigns to tell our customers how these new products differed to regular matcha; we treated the views of a few customers as being representative of the whole market. We now know that you can get too far into your own business bubble that you hear only the voices of your existing community and customer base. We also learned that there’s a very fine balance between being constantly ahead of the curve, on one hand, and also waiting for the market to be ready for what you’ve developed, on the other. Finding this sweet spot is something we still grapple with today.
There are many other instances where we’ve failed, some more severe, some less, and many of these have understandably brought on feelings of shame, inadequacy or disappointment in us. Some have also caused conflict between Nic and I when we’ve been distracted by playing the blame game. But, after the dust has settled and we’ve had time to reflect, every one of these situations has taught us a lesson; they’ve helped us refine and improve our systems in a way that avoided much bigger, more serious consequences later on when we grew bigger.
Since moving into podcasting, presenting and other work that involves my personal profile, setbacks or failures have hit even harder as the product is no longer an inanimate bag of matcha, but me. Failure can feel personal, and on a bad day, it can lead you to question why you’re even doing what you’re doing. There have been many times that a mistake has overwhelmed me and made me consider throwing in the towel. But, as I’ve learned from Lisa and the other people around me, the best thing I can do when I face failure is get my perspective back as soon as I can, look for the silver linings and bounce back with any learnings to be gleaned so I can do better next time.
If you’re in a business partnership as Nic and I are (particularly with your actual partner), it is so important to acknowledge each other’s disappointment and emotion, but also to set aside time once things have calmed down to review what happened and identify what you can learn from it together. We definitely haven’t always been the best at dealing with setbacks or failure (separately or together), but over time we have realised that our greatest strength isn’t necessarily how we deal with the good times, but how we bounce back from the bad times. You have a choice at these moments to let a setback get the better of you or to push back harder next time. Just keep coming back to the yay-frame and remember that you control your emotions, not the other way around.
While Nic and I have developed quite strong strategies for bouncing back from business setbacks, my personal failures have been greater and tougher to recover from. People often ask if I’ve experienced any major moments of failure in my journey and though the learnings from our business failures have been immeasurable, they aren’t the ones I think of first. My major failure has been managing my own health and wellbeing through the transition from my working environments, despite that exact problem being what led to the start of our businesses in the first place. Having been driven by a bout of self-inflicted adrenal fatigue from overwork and ignoring the importance of pacing myself to start our business, I somehow ended up in this exact same place a few years into our business.
Towards the end of 2016, without realising, I had almost managed to turn our Matcha Maiden working environment into a corporate one. Because we were so passionate about the business I was smashing myself in much the same way as I had been at the law firm, and I was ignoring the signs of burnout yet again. Without meaning to, I had somehow crept back onto the productivity hamster wheel and re-merged my sense of self-worth with output and busyness.
I fell back into an unrelenting work cycle, never giving myself a break or practising the message of health and wellbeing that our business was preaching. When I finally went to the doctor, I was told I had relapsed into adrenal fatigue again, only this time the sporadic panic attacks that had surfaced after Africa had escalated into severe anxiety. This dual diagnosis felt like such a huge personal failure because this time around I’d had all the tools to avoid it but had completely neglected to exercise them.
It took me almost a year to fully recover from this health setback, which made it difficult to put any of the failing strategies I’d learned about into practice; I wasn’t able to ‘fail fast’ and put this behind me that quickly. At my worst, I was as unwell as I had been after our African trip – completely bedridden and lethargic, but this time with the added layer of severe anxiety. Faced with not only physical symptoms but also emotional ones, I felt completely out of my depth. My body might have failed me before, but my brain had never refused to cooperate.
It took drastic attention to restoring my physical and mental wellbeing for me to make even small steps of improvement, and unfortunately this meant I had a lot of time to let the feelings of failure engulf me. Years later, I was eventually able to see that while that trip taught me about my physical limits, this major setback taught me that I also had emotional and mental limits to work around. I had never actively looked after my brain separately to my body, and was therefore pushing it to all kinds of limits without realising. The end result was that I was forced to go back to zero to build things back up.
As well as returning to very clean nutrition, getting as much sleep and rest as possible and adopting all the same physical measures I had when I recovered after Africa, I also had to quickly become acquainted with what it takes to look after your mind. I started meditating every day and limited emotional and mental stimulation in order to give my brain a break and a chance to recover. Even if I tried, I could hardly work or use devices at all without becoming overwhelmed with anxiety. This gave me a pretty clear warning that I had overloaded myself and that my body was now forcing me away from the things I’d been overdoing. It wasn’t one particular thing, like social media or work emails, that triggered me, it was just generally the prospect of thinking or interacting that overwhelmed me. I now realise that my mind has a general overstimulation limit and, given that I didn’t know that existed, I had been living over that line my whole life — in the digital world and the real world.
And when I say I became ‘overwhelmed with anxiety’, I don’t just mean I felt stressed or as though it was all a bit much; I mean I was literally overcome physiologically and unable to do anything further. It’s so hard to explain that feeling if you haven’t experienced it, but I often use this analogy to help: it’s as though the police call you and tell you that something has happened to a loved one, but they have no information or details to give you so you have to wait for another call. Imagine how you would feel waiting for that next call – it’s not just emotional concern or worry, but completely physical-churning with all your insides knotted up and an impending sense of doom that something is about to happen, you just don’t know what. This was the feeling I was living with at that time, and it crippled my ability to function properly. It would get worse whenever I tried to write an email or use my brain; it would turn into a strange feeling of resistance or recoil, but even if I wasn’t doing anything, it would still consume me through the day as well as a strange foggy feeling. I felt disconnected from the rest of the world.
This made working incredibly difficult. Nic and my family were incredible at moving the business into a holding pattern and keeping it afloat at a bare minimum until I could return to work. I was also having regular crippling panic attacks, and they were far more physical than I ever realised: my hands would go numb and tingle, I’d experience tightness of breath and my heart would race to the point where I’d genuinely think I was having a heart attack. It was at this point that I first started seeing a psychologist on a weekly basis to get some help with rebuilding my mental resilience and learn how to manage my mental health.
Healing my mind was a much harder and painfully slower process than healing my body had been – for Nic, too, who was stuck between not knowing how to help and running our businesses and personal lives all by himself. It took weeks before I was able to start introducing a few emails or other forms of brain work and, for months after that, I’d take one step forward, two steps back: I’d work for a few minutes more than I could cope with and the next day, be stricken with paralysing anxiety again.
For someone who had learned to value themselves through the output of their brain and their ability to achieve things, I had never felt like such a failure; especially as I didn’t know how long this would last or if I’d ever come through it. It took over six months of weekly work with a psychologist and barely any heavy brain lifting or socialising before I started to feel a bit normal again and over a year to get back to a point where I didn’t relapse every few weeks.
For ages, I worried that I’d never be able to cope with a full life again, but what really helped me was my psychologist asking me to treat it like a physical injury. Physical rehab is intense and drastic while you heal, but once you’ve recovered, you need to take special care with that area in future but can generally return to normal. I had given myself an acute injury from overdoing everything, so I had to heal first and then go into maintenance mode. I love this analogy, because I think this is what leads us to underestimate the importance of mental health; we can’t see the impact of the injury like we can when we break a leg.
Since then and still now, my routine has changed drastically to make space for my mental wellbeing and keep my anxiety at bay. I still meditate daily (sometimes twice), have much healthier limits on social interaction and mental stimulation each day and week (I’ve dubbed my Sundays, ‘Sloth Sundays’), and I still see my psychologist regularly. Of course, there are still days when anxiety rears its monstrous head, and I still feel like a failure sometimes if I don’t get the balance right, but I have mostly been able to rebuild a full and yay-filled life around my mental health. Now, I try to speak as openly as I can with others about my experiences to reassure them that if they are experiencing something similar, they can find their way through it – even if not in the same way that I have.
Slow down to speed up
These kinds of personal setbacks are alarmingly common among those of us who opt for a high-powered, jam-packed lifestyle. Our A-type drive can make it hard for us to pace ourselves and slow down. Even the great Arianna Huffington once found herself lying face-down on the floor in a pool of blood after collapsing from pure sleep deprivation and exhaustion before realising the importance of looking after herself. My friend Melissa Ambrosini, author of Mastering Your Mean Girl, was hospitalised after burning the candle at all ends in the name of her goals. Adrenal fatigue, thyroid problems, hormone imbalances, depression, an eating disorder and cold sores all over her face, mouth and down her throat stopped her in her tracks, but led to the reinvention of herself and her career. Motivation and drive can be powerful, even volatile, forces when things are going well, let alone when shit hits the fan and things start to fall apart.
'A huge part of seizing your yay is not just physically resting, but emotionally resting, too.'
Hopefully, the more we all share our stories with each other, the more we can all appreciate how connected our minds and bodies are. A huge part of seizing your yay is not just physically resting, but emotionally resting, too. Pushing ourselves too far and too fast can have consequences that are equally as devastating and disheartening as financial and business-oriented setbacks – sometimes more so. If you are struggling to get back to what feels ‘normal’ for you, I encourage you to speak to your GP and ask for help – before things hit rock bottom, if you can.
Psychologists and other professionals don’t wave magic wands at you; I see it as them providing valuable and practical tools to help extract the mess in your mind, untangle it and put it back in more neatly. Even though I don’t have such an acute need for psychological support now, I still go back to therapy regularly as an investment in my mental endurance and it’s one of the best hours spent in my week. Take comfort that there are lots of resources these days to help you recover such as Beyond Blue and Lifeline or psychologists. It’s crucial that you use these in order to learn what you need to change in order to come back stronger and more equipped than ever for the next phase of your life.
An unattributed quote that I only found recently but have been in love with ever since is, ‘Not all storms come to disrupt your life, some come to clear your path.’ What a beautiful way to provide perspective and guidance to those who are in the middle of a shitstorm, be it professional or personal, wondering what on earth they did to deserve it and how they’ll emerge intact. Even though it might feel like your world has been turned on its head and everything is going wrong, this moment can provide you with a wonderful opportunity to build things back up in the way you actually want them to be. I have heard many great stories of people starting businesses or making drastic life changes to allow them to flourish after being made redundant from their jobs. There are cases where there haven’t necessarily been a failure or a situation that was going badly, but rather an unexpected storm that clears the way for something better.
Michael Ramsey always reminds me that if building dreams wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. You have to be ready for all the shit bits as well as the great bits because they are all part of the package. The best way to arm yourself for this roller-coaster ride is to learn how to pick yourself back up and move your focus from the setback to the comeback as quickly as you can. Sometimes, this might involve seeking outside help (as I have), which I am so glad is becoming less stigmatised and I can’t recommend highly enough. Other times, help might be closer to home. Remember the village you’ve been building, too; they’re around you for a reason. There’s no glory in being a lone wolf if reaching for help could get you there faster, better or healthier! Of course, give yourself the emotional breathing space to accept, reflect and ready yourself again (which could take a while depending on how drastic the fall), but then get back out there with a vengeance.
The comeback: how to put the pieces back together
The title of this chapter perfectly captures my attitude towards failure or setbacks these days. There are only two options: win or learn. Either things turn out wonderfully and exactly as you’d hoped (or better). Or, they don’t turn out as well as you’d hoped, but you learn an incredibly important lesson for how to do things better next time.
While there is so much literature out there that teaches and guides us on ways to succeed, it is rarely acknowledged that there is an art to failure. So how exactly do we glean those lessons from what happened? The wisdom gained from failure is incontrovertible, but how to uncover that wisdom is the thing that is often skated over. I don’t have all the answers; I’m simply going to share a few things that have helped me build more resilience in the face of setbacks and then helped me to move on as quickly as possible from them.
Like Lisa, when I experience a failure, the first thing I do is distinguish between what went right and what went wrong. There is definitely a very fine line between knowing when to call it quits and when to press on with some adjustments. It can be incredibly difficult to determine which route to take. Sadly, I think many people completely trash an idea when only a small part of it actually needs refining or changing. And sometimes, the actual idea or execution can be great, but bad timing or external factors out of your control lead to failure – meaning there’s no reason not to try exactly the same idea again in different circumstances. In most cases, the lesson will simply reshape your path; it’s just a matter of shaking off the hit to your pride and confidence to build up the courage to try again.
Like self-doubt, failure is a misleading killer of dreams because when something doesn’t work out, we often see it as a total failure rather than a hint to make a subtle adjustment. This is why I think successful people aren’t always the best in their field, they’re the people who are best at failing and recovering. There are certainly times when you have reached a point where the best way forward is to call it on an idea and shift your focus, like Sir Richard did with Virgin Brides, Virgin Cola, Virgin Vodka, Virgin Cars … the list goes on. And this doesn’t necessarily have to be because of failure but rather a lifestyle choice.
'Successful people aren’t always the best in their field, they’re the people who are best at failing and recovering.'
If your yay is no longer bringing you joy (I can think of several people who have recently closed their businesses because it no longer served them), then it’s time to reevaluate. If that thing is distracting you from the things that are going well and make you happy, it makes sense to cut your losses and put your energy where it will have the most impact. But that should be an absolute last-resort option when you’ve exhausted every possible way to improve, refine or adjust. You will either finally succeed or learn another invaluable lesson: failure is simply a bump in the road, not a stop sign.
If you’re going through hell, keep going
Some ‘hellish’ situations count as setbacks to be learned from, while others tear through your life and cannot be explained with my theory of yay. I generally believe everything in life happens for a reason, but it’s how we respond to the things that show up for us that determines how they play out in our life. The jigsaw pieces all make sense in the end, but of course, there are always going to be outliers – situations of grief and trauma that cannot be orientated within my understanding of the purpose of life. ‘You win or you learn’ doesn’t account for the seriousness of things such as cancer, accidents or family violence. There are a host of things that can’t simply be shaken off as lessons to be learned. If you are experiencing anything of the kind, there are many different resources and organisations you can go to for more professional and experienced support than I am able to offer here – I acknowledge that there are many situations this book has no answer for.
In those times of personal challenge, some people are hesitant to seek help because there can still be some stigma surrounding therapy and reaching out – though thankfully, this is less the case these days. Other people are hesitant because they think they can work through things themselves. I can’t speak for everyone, but I believe there are situations that warrant specialised help and that we can benefit enormously from enlisting the expertise of a professional. If you’re reading this and thinking that the decisions I managed to make and the personal revelations I had during this time sound unrealistic given what I was going through, bear in mind that these happened against the backdrop of a once-weekly appointment with my very experienced psychologist. Don’t let your pride make you suffer alone and possibly worsen your suffering for no reason.
If you’re still getting stuck wondering why things have happened to you, I can only say that you might not ever get an answer to that question. A quote I love, from the 2010 film adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is one that always helps me in times of inexplicable trial: ‘Hardships are often to prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.’ It helps me focus not on trying to figure out why I’m experiencing the difficulty, but also on my capacity to move through it and onwards into the future. It moves my attention to what lies ahead and reminds me that it could be extraordinary once I get there. You are always far stronger than you think you are, even if tough times might knock the wind out of you. Everything in life is temporary and every storm does eventually pass.