Post by Grouve Management BV

How to deal with failure and stick with hard things: Below, Steve Kamb shares five key insights from his new book, How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks. Steve is the founder of Nerd Fitness, an approachable fitness company that helps busy humans level up their lives. Since 2009, he has published research-backed essays and a weekly newsletter that explores failure, self-compassion, and making change that sticks. What’s the Big Idea? Failure is part of doing anything worthwhile, and every setback teaches us something we can use moving forward. Success comes from accepting reality, staying afloat when life gets hard, and pursuing goals we genuinely want. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Steve himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book. 1. Failure is one possible outcome for anything worth doing. In 2023, I visited the touring Museum of Failure, packed with history’s most famous failures, flops, and frauds. Wandering around this museum was an absolute delight, as I got to see some truly baffling decisions. The Hula Chair worked more like a medieval torture device than a fitness product. King Gustav II of Sweden commissioned a comically expensive military warship that sank to the bottom of the harbor 50 minutes into its celebratory voyage. However, my favorite failure on display was probably Hooters Airlines. Yes, that Hooters. If you ever feel like a failure for not making wiser decisions, just imagine how many people had to agree with the following statement: “We got rich making chicken wings; how hard could it be to run a profitable airline?” The more failures I encountered, the more I came to understand failure differently. This museum didn’t only exist to poke fun at bad inventions. I mean, it did that too. I’m still laughing about Hooters Air. But it also showed the ways in which failure was one of many possible outcomes, and no company was immune to failed initiatives. In fact, most of the world’s most successful companies were on display too. Nintendo and the Virtual Boy, Microsoft and its Zune MP3 player, even Apple, whose Pippin videogame console was such a flop that I, proud nerd gamer, had never heard of it. Interestingly, there were many products on display that were simply casualties of poor timing: early chatbots, multifunctional cellphones, personal digital assistants, and the first digital camera back in the 1970s that Kodak never released for fear of it cannibalizing their sales of physical film! The vision was there, as was the ambition, and once technology finally caught up, the road had been paved for companies to achieve far greater success. “Rather than trying to prevent failure, we can instead decide to embrace it as a possibility and focus on recovering quickly after failure.” We need to reframe how we think about failure. Rather than… http://dlvr.it/TTc5Sx