What if I Fail?
One form of procrastination is just kicking the can with fear that it won’t work and you’ll look daft or worse, like a failure.
I’ve written quite a lot about the FAQs and frequent concerns of Startup Club members, but this one is often a little bit more coded.
There’s a nagging feeling that sits deep in the gut - what if my idea doesn’t work?
I always feel like this question is way easier to answer than it is built up to be. What if it doesn’t work? You can go back to life without the unknowing. That nagging feeling of… what if?
A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are build for.
I remember one entrepreneur we worked with who just never launched. They kept finding new excuses to keep working on the idea and putting off launching. They blamed the technology, the customers, the business model. It was a good ship but it never took to sea.
It’s tragic when good ideas don’t hit the world and fulfil the exciting potential that they have. Even more so when this is down to a founder not pressing go out of fear that it will sink.
The thing about the what if it doesn’t work? question is that it is often tied to fixed mindset thinking. If it doesn’t work, it means I’m not an entrepreneur. It means I’m not the wonderfully, naturally talented person I always thought I was.
Of course it is rarely that binary.
What it means for an idea to be a success or failure means different things to different people. I remember attending a workshop once with someone who quite compellingly tried to convince us that the founder of Dollar Shave Club was a failure. For context, Michael Dubin sold Dollar Shave Club for $1bn.
Failure can mean people didn’t like your product, it could mean that you were unable to build the product or deliver the service, it could mean that you massively underdeliver. It could mean a lot of things.
But a lot of these things can be understood or mitigated before you ever enter the realms of success and failure.
You can engage with customers in smarter ways using tools like the Mom Test to understand if people would buy your product. You can create MVPs and prototypes to learn how feasible the idea is. You can research, properly, to anticipate blockers.
There’s more to success and failure than a single event.
What I’ve actually seen over, over, over and over is that people who go through a period of entrepreneurship get way better opportunities afterwards as a result. I could reel off stories of people who got their dream jobs, earned 3/4x what they were earning before they were entrepreneurs, moved to new cities across the world or joined other exciting businesses.
This is clearly not failure, even if that period of entrepreneurship or freelancing ended without hitting all of its goals or surviving.
The process of trying, or experimenting and getting out there can pay back over and over in unexpected ways. You can develop skills, mindsets, networks, and relationships that become invaluable, and mark you out in a competitive field.
There are ways that you can absolutely fail, if you bet the farm on success and lose everything then that’s undoubtedly hard to paint in a positive light.
And yet, that’s often what happens! Lots of people point to adverse events as being the making of them, not the breaking.
I’m not advocating for people to gamble the house and your livelihood on your startup idea, but that’s the point: more often than not you don’t need to.
We conflate all of these fears and insecurities and try to attach some significant and measurable loss so as to rationalise it all.
And I think this is what sits at the heart of it all. The main thing that I see when engaging with early-stage founders is people who are scared of losing face. It’s our reputational damage that we often fear more than the material losses.
And being completely honest, I get that. There’s a lot we don’t understand in our communities about how important these things are. Our standing within the community, reputation, identity, our ability to take pride in our decisions.
There’s a lot of fixed-mindedness in this, but this is also one of my big issues with the growth mindset movement. If you have nothing else, you have your name. It is worth something, it is worth a lot.
Most founders, freelancers, and entrepreneurs can get started with very little financial risk, and most entrepreneurs scale without having to risk their own personal security.
But facing our friends and family two years later and accepting that it wasn’t a good idea can hurt a little more than debt that can be repaid.