AP 0482: How Do I Bounce Back from Failure?

AskPat 482 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 482 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. We have a great question today from Rocky, but before we get to Rocky's question I want to thank today's sponsor, which ZipRecruiter.com, a fan favorite here on the SPI podcast as a sponsor. I want to thank these guys because they're awesome.

They help make recruiting super, super, super convenient because, you know, when you're trying to add more people into your business, whether you're a solo entrepreneur trying to expand or you have a team already and you're looking to fill a position or add new people to your team, it's just difficult to find the right people, and it takes a while because there's a lot of different job sites out there. Well, ZipRecruiter takes care of all of that for you. One description on ZipRecruiter.com of what you're looking for, and they send it out to you over a hundred different job sites. Just cuts down the stress, and they also filter and find all of the top candidates for you too, so go ahead and check it out. It's free for you to use. ZipRecruiter.com/pat. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com/pat. All right, here's today's question from Rocky.

Rocky: Hey, Pat. This is Rocky. This is really exciting. I want to ask you this question. How do you bounce back? I know that whenever I launch something and I think it's, “Oh, this is amazing. Hundreds of people, thousands of people are going to be really excited about,” the one or two pieces of negative feedback always gets me. I want to know how you deal with that. I know that you always put yourself out there and, you know, that not everyone will like it, but I want to know what's your secret, how do you just bounce back? Thanks. Love your show.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Rocky. What's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it, and I'm sorry to hear about some of the struggles that you've had. I am sorry, and I'm not also. I don't want to sound harsh, but it's just part of the process of becoming an entrepreneur, and I hope me saying it in this way just lets you know that this is something that everybody goes through, Rocky. I go through this all the time. You put yourself out there as an entrepreneur and you will experience failure. If you watch Shark Tank, you will notice that people fail all the time, but people bounce back too.

They bounce back by realizing that they are passionate about what they're doing, that they know that what they're doing is actually helping people, and the few negative comments, they don't matter. The truth is, if you are creating something and it's amazing and it's bold and it's life-changing; it's not going to change everybody's life. Unless you are getting people who are disagreeing with you or who are not happy with the way you're doing things, then maybe you're not going big enough because the haters, as they say, are a sign that you're doing something right.

I have my own batch of haters. Everybody has their own batch of haters, and if you don't, then I worry because maybe you're not going big enough, and so Rocky, I just want to encourage you to keep moving forward because you do have something to offer. The other thing is, I love this game, this game of entrepreneurship, because you won't get things right the first time, but figuring out what the right solution is, is so much fun. It's so fun to kind of figure it out, and that's the cool thing about doing online business in this way. It's not going to cost you too much to fail, actually. The only real failure is if you hear those negative comments, you get that negative feedback, and you just give up. No, you use that as inspiration.

The other thing is—and this goes back to a video that I watched a long time ago that was really helpful for me when I was going through a period where I was not working for about three weeks because of what a single person did and said about what I was doing—I watched this video from Derek. It basically said, “Every second you waste with a hater or thinking about those negative comments is a second you're taking away from the people who actually need you.” I was doing my audience a disservice by just getting down in the dumps about this person who was doing these bad things. Just really, really crazy what this guy was doing. He was leaving negative comments, paragraphs of negative comments about why I was fake, why I was doing all this kind of stuff, and how I was just a con artist, and posting that on every single blog post and every single podcast episode I had ever been featured in, in the comment section.

I started getting emails some of my friends who had featured me on their show or mentioned me in their blog post. It was like, “Who's this guy?” It was the same thing that was copy and pasted across … it must have been nearly a hundred different websites. I eventually reached out to this guys because I was like, “How could you do this to me? And this is totally unreal.” He eventually said, “Well, I knew you were popular, and so I thought this would help bring traffic to my website.” Yeah. Totally … I can't even … I wouldn't be able to go sleep if I was doing things in that way, but anyway, I bounced back from that. I've gone through a number of different failures too. I've spent over $15,000 trying to build WordPress plugins back in 2010, which were completely failures.

I never saw the light of day with any of those plugins. You just bounce back and learn from your mistakes because now I have a WordPress plugin. It's a podcast player, and it was a solution that was built for me and some of the issues that I was having, and it's at SmartPodcastPlayer.com. I have taken things much slower. I have made sure to get feedback and validation for the things I was doing before I actually spent a whole bunch of money on them, which is probably the other thing that you could do too, Rocky. There's a lot of things you can do to validate that idea or actually get a little bit more of a support system in place before you move forward, not just in terms of people and colleagues and things like that, but also people who will end up being customers for those things or readers or subscribers or viewers, and to get some direct feedback from a small group of people can be so useful.

Again, it's feedback, not anything negative. Again, if people are just completely disrespectful to you, then they're not even worth wasting any time on. They're not anybody who adds any value. They're not anybody who would ever become a customer anyway, so don't even worry about them. Focus on those who will use your stuff, who do need your help, and just have fun with it because that's what it's all about. It's about making mistakes so you don't make them again next time, so you make mistakes, and every mistake, every failure is one step closer to that success. As Babe Ruth said, “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” You also don't need a home run. You could still score by hitting singles and doubles and triples.

Anyway, Rocky, I hope that gives you some encouragement. Thank you so much for calling, and I really appreciate it. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For anybody else out there who has a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just hit up AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. I also want to thank ZipRecruiter.com for making it really easy for everybody out there to hire more people for their team. Like I said earlier, it just makes it really easy and convenient because hiring people is stressful. You got to find the right people. You got to put a job description on every single job website out there.

Well, ZipRecruiter does the for you. You just place your job description on ziprecruiter.com, and then they send it out to over a hundred different job sites for you. Plus, they filter and find and give you the best top candidates. How could you lose with something like this? You can't, so go ahead and check it out for free at ZipRecruiter.com/pat. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com/pat. Thanks so much. I appreciate it, and here's a quote, very relevant to today's episode, by Thomas Edison. He said, “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” Take care, and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat. Bye.