Failure – The Art of Doing

How to Succeed at Failing: A SketchNote

When we interviewed superachievers for our book, we wanted to know how they had achieved their incredible success but in our conversations with them, something kept coming up that surprised us.

When we interviewed superachievers for our book, we wanted to know how they had achieved their incredible success but in our conversations with them, something kept coming up that surprised us. As we dug into the chronologies of these people’s lives and careers, we found that even more than their triumphs, it was failure that actually shaped their stories of success. What is failure? What’s the science behind it? Is there an art to it? Why do some people collapse in the face of it while others actually profit from it?

It’s become our latest obsession. Continue reading “How to Succeed at Failing: A SketchNote”

Art of Doing Talk at SXSW ’14: “The Power of Failure” Monday, March 10 Austin TX

We’ll be speaking at SXSW Interactive Conference, Austin TX, March 10th

What happened to Momofuku’s David Chang before he became a foodie god? What drove Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh to create one of the world’s greatest company cultures?

The high achievers we interviewed for our book failed more because they tried more. And because they tried more, they’ve been able to succeed at goals that they may have never imagined possible for themselves. In our talk at South by Southwest Interactive ’14 we’ll discuss some of the science and art of failure—everything from frivolous failures to 9/11—to find out how some people collapse in the face of failure while others use it as motivation.

Join us and/or spread the news. Follow us on Twitter to get reports from SXSW14. Continue reading “Art of Doing Talk at SXSW ’14: “The Power of Failure” Monday, March 10 Austin TX”

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.

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

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”

The Art of Doing is Going Back to SXSW, March 2014

We all love to read books on success. We even wrote one, “The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well.” What we found about the successful people that we interviewed—superachievers in the arts, business, media and tech—is that they failed and failed often. And those failures were key to their success.

You voted, we got in! Join us for our talk on “Failure: The Hidden Side of Success” at SXSW Interactive 2014 March 7th—11th Austin, TX

We all love to read books on success. We even wrote one. What we found about the successful people that we interviewed—superachievers in the arts, business, media and tech—is that they failed and failed often. And those failures were key to their success.

But embracing failure isn’t always easy.

From the fear of failure that stops you from even trying, to the collapse of will when you don’t achieve the immediate success you’d imagined, cognitive attitudes to failure can destroy your ability to pursue you goals. The good news? If, like highly successful people, you perceive your setbacks as opportunities for self-education and motivation instead of events that will permanently derail you, you may surprise yourself with how far you can go.

Read Forbes Story here about our Art of Doing book talk at SXSW ’13.

To check out how this photo was taken, go here.

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This is What FAILURE Looks Like

My Startup Has 30 Days to Live, a raw, uncensored look at a startup going down told by a guy who takes responsibility for everything that’s gone wrong.

A raw, uncensored look at a startup, going down, told by a guy who takes responsibility for everything that went wrong.

In the research for our book the superacheivers we spoke to told of us past failures. What set them apart was their honesty about how they had contributed to their own failures. Because they challenged their beliefs, they were able to reinvent themselves and find entirely new ways of approaching their work. (Which we wrote about here.)

On the Tumblr blog, My Startup Has 30 Days to Live by an anonymous author about an unknown company, we are witnesses to a moment of real-time failure. What strikes us is the author’s brutal honesty about what has gone wrong. He is in the throes of defeat so he doesn’t yet have any answers about how to reconfigure his strategies—but based on how important we found that self-assesment is to success we would guess that he has a good shot at eventually sorting out what went wrong and figuring out how to do it differently the next time.

Subtitled “In 30 Days My Startup Will Be Dead,” the fascinating blog post recounts the rise and fall of a startup. It begins as most startups do. Continue reading “This is What FAILURE Looks Like”