The Art of Doing

The Self-Assured, the Self-Critic, the C-Student and Other Failure-Resistant Archetypes

Do you have what it takes to bounce back from failure? Your personality speaks volumes about how you’ll cope when setbacks happen.

 

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Your personality speaks volumes about how you’ll cope when setbacks happen. 

Do you have what it takes to bounce back from failure?

Cass Phillipps, has witnessed more flameouts than an American Idol. The San Francisco entrepreneur started FailCon, the first conference ever to ask successful founders, investors, designers and developers, “What’s gone wrong and how did you fix it?”

It was Phillipps’s own failure that inspired her to start the conference in 2009. When a startup she launched was flailing and she needed advice, she was frustrated by the smiley-faced “if you don’t have something self-promotional to say, don’t say anything at all” startup conferences she was attending. She didn’t need to know what to do in the face of success, but what action to take in the face of failure.

Since then at FailCon (which has now gone global), Phillipps has been witness to the confessionals of hundreds of self-professed failures, big fish (some of the biggest names in tech including PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and Zynga’s Mark Pincus), small fries, the famous, the infamous and everyone in between. She’s heard these failure testifiers stand up in front of a crowd and share their tales of tragedy and woe, for personal catharsis and the spread of useful knowledge of what to do and what not to do.

So who gets over failure best? Phillipps, who should know, offers Five Fail Survivor Archetypes: Continue reading “The Self-Assured, the Self-Critic, the C-Student and Other Failure-Resistant Archetypes”

Interview With Us for Upcoming Talk at SXSW ’14

An Interview about our upcoming talk at South by Southwest, Austin, Texas, Monday, March 10 at 9:30 AM

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Preview: The Power Of Failure: The Hidden Side Of Success

by Jacob Ehrnstein

Everyone wants to be successful. We all have our different versions of success, financial, emotional, or physical. And we all have our role models for whom we identify what success is. We try and emulate them to achieve that success.

But what if you had the opportunity to meet your role model of success and they uttered these words to you “Fail More”?

Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield the authors of “The Art Of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do” will speak on the topic of failure at their panel “The Power of Failure: The Hidden Side of Success.” They’re experts on the topic of failure now, though, not because of failures of their own. After interviewing super successful people they discovered one common trait these successful people shared: their willingness to fail.

I spoke with Camille and Josh about their upcoming panel in March and some ways to take your failures and help them propel you to your next success. Continue reading “Interview With Us for Upcoming Talk at SXSW ’14”

Art of Doing in the News: Entrepreneur Magazine

If great minds think alike, it stands to reason that great people, no matter their field, have similar habits.

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Some Traits You Need to Dominate Any Industry By Paula Andruss

If great minds think alike, it stands to reason that great people, no matter their field, have similar habits. In their book The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well, Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield found several common qualities shared by ubersuccessful individuals. Try adopting some of them in your quest for greatness. Continue reading “Art of Doing in the News: Entrepreneur Magazine”

Play for Good

What happens when brainy economists try to solve the world’s problems? More fun than you may think.

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Play for Good’s Spin for Good is a new kind of social gaming site that combines the passion of gaming with the motivation to do good.

Put together some brainy academics to solve the world’s biggest problems and you may think they’d come up with a blizzard of white papers filled with obscure hypotheses and foot-long equations that would give you flashbacks of tests you failed in high school.

But you’d be wrong.

Amee Kamdar and Janet Moehring, two young University of Chicago economists, were having Thai takeout in Moehring’s Lincoln Park apartment in Chicago, brainstorming how to start a business with a pro-social bent when the idea hit them. Continue reading “Play for Good”