Failure vs. Opportunity
Walloomsac Inn, Bennington, VT (Photo courtesy of author)
The photo above is the subject of another article I wrote on LinkedIn this week. Yes, it’s abandoned and ruined but what about its potential?
My career trajectory is not a traditional one: after college, I worked administrative jobs for six years on both the East Coast and the West Coast. I dabbled in HR, recruiting, operations, customer service, planning — you name it, and I probably did it. I unclogged toilets, screened interview candidates, supervised registration processes, ordered catering for meetings, scheduled rooms, and more. After experiencing both tech startups and higher education as work environments, I decided to go back to graduate school. Eight years later, I had a master’s degree and had finished everything for my PhD except the dissertation itself. And that’s when I opened a boutique retail store. These are not natural go-togethers, as my mother would say!
And they’re not easy to explain on a resume or in an interview. For a long time, I despaired of trying to give a coherent narrative of my abilities and my background. I don’t fit in a 30-second elevator pitch. And a lot of those stages felt like different incarnations of myself that didn’t have much to do with each other.
About 3 years ago, I was having lunch with a friend and mentioned this. She reacted strongly and said she disagreed. From her perspective, my journey made perfect sense: I had spent six years in traditional office environments gaining experience and skills; my graduate work honed my writing and teaching; and my entrepreneurship put all of those skills to use. She saw all of my experiences as contributing to where I was in that exact moment. Her perspective was transformational to me.
Her timing was also life-saving: it was a few months after I had closed my store, and I was mourning those prior 4 years as failure. How could I look at my store closing as anything but failure? By definition, I had tried something and failed at it.
After my conversation with her, though, I began thinking in a new way about the whole experience. My store was delightful, and we had over 2500 customers in those 4 years. I had employed almost a dozen people at a living wage. I had built relationships with hundreds of small, independent vendors and introduced them to my customers, making a connection between makers and consumers that still resonates. Even the closing itself gave me experience and empathy that’s relevant for coaching other entrepreneurs.
Next time you’re feeling down or lost or defeated, try to step back enough to see what you have gained from failure. And if that seems too daunting or impossible at the moment, please reach out! Engaging someone else’s perspective can be the difference between giving up and starting something new.