Episode VIII: Attacking the Fear of Failure
In human psychology, the unknown is daunting.
The things that we haven’t experienced yet typically provide one of two reactions: joy or resentment.
Failure is an unknown that many long to endure. I am here to discuss it and how to navigate those feelings of resentment that come with failure.
While I may be graduating from Princeton next week with a plethora of good things going for me, I have most certainly failed.
Let me tell you about my biggest failure.
In my junior year of college, I started a restaurant delivery service company called Vaega with one of my classmates. We received funding to deliver more food to more people at a cheaper rate and saw its need over the pandemic. My co-founder and I planned to build a team to build and launch the product but needed the data from piloting it to prove that there was a need for our business model.
The restaurant delivery service industry contains massive companies like Uber Eats, Doordash, Grubhub, and Postmates. This model could have made us different if executed properly, and I was excited beyond belief.
Instead of getting food from two different restaurants in two orders, you could get it in one and dropped off in multiple spots with Vaega. That was our original customer value proposition.
However, I saw parts of the model get integrated into the market before we could develop the product and team. In 2022, anyone can order food from multiple restaurants and split the payments with their friends through DoubleDash.
So, the niche into the market was gone. A major competitor had it in their model. With us only focusing on group orders in the earliest stages, Vaega looked like a catering business and missed its’ target demographic, college students.
That fear of failure was in the back of my mind for YEARS up until this point.
The biggest failure that I had up until Vaega was losing in sports, so losing all of the hard work I put in was new to me because I got another chance with football to win the ivy Title this year.
When failure hit and Vaega shut down, I was at first devastated.
However, after some time internally reflecting, I didn’t see it as a failure anymore. I saw it as a learning lesson.
Regardless of if you succeed or fail, you will always have takeaways from an experience.
I have three takeaways to reflect upon failure internally.
DO NOT USE EMOTIONS FIRST.
When failure hits, the first thing that will naturally happen is internalizing the failure. Internalization causes the mind to naturally cope with the event through reactive emotions.
The most common reactive emotions when internalizing are anxiety and depression. If the failure happens to someone who fears it, the result could be even worse: trauma.
Trauma is when you internalize the feeling to the point where you can never move past it.
Thus, by internalizing failures with emotions first, you unintentionally could cause the event to be a seemingly insurmountable mental pedestal.
If the emotions reach a point where trauma is a pedestal, I first recommend that you speak to a mental health specialist OR someone that you care about. Perspective is essential to who we are, and you are NOT alone (click for Episode I on Perspective).
An uncommon reaction is where emotions motivate someone to work harder. If this is your reactive emotion, then you will be inclined to do things at a higher level through hard work. This works excellently for some people (like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant) because they swore to never fail again and had another chance to win championships.
However, some people never have the opportunity to redeem themselves from their failures. I certainly didn’t get another chance with Vaega because there was no opportunity in the market.
I accepted that Vaega wasn’t successful because I STOPPED leading with my emotions.
Emotions are a chemical reaction to a thought.
If emotions are the only thing leading your reactions, then you will perpetually repeat the failure in your head and feel the same thing.
So, to obtain new emotion, you need a new thought. Thinking is necessary to emotionally process failure, but there is a fine line.
If you think about everything else but the event, you cannot emotionally process failure because you cannot address it.
But if you think about only the event itself, you will have an emotional reaction and be stuck.
So, what can you think about without emotionally reacting to the fact that it happened?
2) POINT OUT THE SMALL STEPS.
Now, pointing out the small steps requires you to be in a place of mental neutrality or better.
To further elaborate on why, all thoughts cause humans to extend a certain vibration, which leads to emotions.
Your consciousness exerts a certain vibration through an electromagnetic field (like light or a sound wave) from what you say and do.
The amount of times that the frequency occurs per minute gives you a measurable unit in Hertz.
Neutrality requires your body to give the energy of 250 Hertz or greater (or 4.16 times per second). It allows you to play Devil’s Advocate and highlight every decision you make before failure. This is the minimum amount of energy necessary to use this method of analysis (click on red for full chart).
Full Map of Consciousness.
When you look at each step, remember what you felt and why you did something. Let me explain to you what this decision process was like with Vaega.
I spent time fundraising to get the company going and doing market research on how to make the product fit my target audience, college students. I also spent time talking to restaurant delivery service drivers and restaurants to add value to their business with my model.
I spent extra time learning how to code in HTML and CSS, make logos, and use photoshop in an effort to appear more professional as a company.
I also spent extra time learning about how to make an optimization algorithm to quantify the planned pilot for tech developers in a future step.
Looking back at it, these steps (developing the tech and math behind it) were necessary to make the company a reality. However, time was not of the essence with a model like Vaega’s.
These would seem like logical steps to get to the end goal of making a company, but the time it took to learn those skills would compromise the development of my business model.
Why did I want the skills? To execute the model myself as fast as possible.
Here’s the problem: the model needed to happen in a short amount of time.
I made a model that relied on a feature, an optimization algorithm. I needed to prove that there was a need for the feature (it was economically and environmentally more efficient) to make the company work and had an instinct that someone else would think of it.
Notice how I didn’t mention the fact that I failed in every step of the analysis.
It happened. So be it.
But, as you can see, there were some changes I could have made in the process of getting to the end goal.
Focus on the steps that you took to get to the end goal instead of the fact that failure happened. Then, you can do this:
3) WRITE DOWN THE CORRECTIONS.
This is the biggest step to accepting failure. Once you recognize the steps you took and why you took them, find possible solutions to the same problem and write them down.
My problem was that the steps I took were too time-consuming and were led by ego.
How could I have sped them up?
I found three main solutions: outsourcing, further fundraising, and team development.
Was my not outsourcing things I didn’t know how to do partially because I selfishly wanted the satisfaction of making Vaega? Yes.
Could I have been more aggressive with raising pre-seed funding? Also, yes. We had funding, but it wasn’t enough to make the whole product or team.
We looked for equity-based hires and partners to build Vaega with more technical experience but could not find the right person. We tried, but I know that I could have done more if I had exerted less energy on learning skills.
So, I wrote the corrections down and am now sharing them with you today.
Would these have actually led to Vaega becoming an app? Probably not. Four months is not a long time to fully develop a company, and by the time I did land more funding than I already had, Doordash would have already added part of the model to their app.
But did I receive learning lessons moving forward? Absolutely.
All failures are learning lessons. It’s up to you how to learn from them moving forward. By leading without emotions first, recognizing the steps you took and writing down the corrections, you will know how to attack failure. Learn from me and gain some knowledge
