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I love experiments.
They have allowed me to create an uncommon life by testing, failing, getting back up, and eventually succeeding.
America is our greatest experiment.
Our country of possibilities is unique in that it does not punish failure.
This seemingly small fact is the cornerstone of building something great.
A few examples of failure-to-success systems in America.
Venture capital.
The entire model assumes 8 of 10 bets fail. Investors don’t punish a failed founder; they often fund them again because they’ve paid tuition. “Failed founder” is a resume line in Silicon Valley.
At-will employment.
Easy to quit, easy to hire, easy to try something and come back. Low switching costs mean low experimentation costs.
No permanent class stigma.
Reinvention is celebrated and nobody asks what your father did.
Bankruptcy law (Chapter 7/11)
You can fail, wipe the slate, and start again. In much of Europe and Asia, business failure follows you for life — socially and legally. Here it’s a reset button. Henry Ford went bankrupt twice before Ford Motor Company.
Some famous examples of failures that changed our lives:
- Walt Disney: fired from a newspaper for “lacking imagination,” his first studio (Laugh-O-Gram) went bankrupt.
- Colonel Sanders: failed at dozens of jobs, started franchising KFC at 65, living off Social Security.
- Steve Jobs: fired from his own company, came back and built the most valuable company on earth.
- Milton Hershey: two candy companies failed before Hershey’s.
- James Dyson: 5,126 failed prototypes (British, but the product won in America).
- Sara Blakely: her dad asked “what did you fail at this week?” at dinner. Sold fax machines door-to-door, turned $5K into a billion-dollar company, Spanx. (We ask each other that same question every week in our Mastermind.)
In our Reseller Mastermind, failure is part of the playbook. Mistakes are Tuition and we lift each other up to be sure those small failures we learn from don’t stop our progress.
That’s the difference between the people who make it and the people who quit. It’s not talent; it’s having somewhere to fail safely, experiment, and get back up to build something better.
~ Shannon Jean
