Weird title to this post, right? But I read something the other day that created one of those lightbulb moments.
I’ve been around this freelancing block a few decades, so if it can impact me (the eternal skeptic), I’m thinking it might do others some good, too.
It was a motivational snippet that had popped up on Pinterest, and it was a simple message:
Fail forward.
What the actual hell does that mean?
It means this:
Every failure has a lesson. Learning that lesson is how you progress.
That’s right, freelancer. Every time you fail at something, you have a great opportunity to learn a valuable lesson. In business, there’s a lot of combining of risks and opportunities. The smart business people look at their risks and think “How can we use this to our advantage?”
Let’s look at our current pandemic situation. People are losing jobs and money. So where’s the opportunity? Well, financial firms will be looking to bring value to their stakeholders. Stores will have massive price cuts to keep money coming in (and maybe bring in new customers). Insurance companies are giving premium refunds. Everyone has an opinion — and an article, it seems — on how to navigate COVID-19 from the perspective of their offerings. All around us, organizations are already trying to capitalize on the very thing that’s causing them to lose money and customers.
So why can’t you? I argue that you already have.
Remember that gawd-awful client you had? What did you do when you realized that alliance was a failure?
I suspect you took that lesson forward. I suspect if it was a client who paid you horribly and treated you about the same, you said something like “I’m never going to work with someone like that again!”
In my own past, I’ve had more lessons than I care to remember, but a few stand out:
- Writing eight items, fighting for payment, settling for half
- Lesson: new clients pay upfront
- Having a client accuse me of ineptitude because he couldn’t accept my edits
- Lesson: take full control of my work process
- Getting a flurry of calls after expressly telling a client I wasn’t available that weekend
- Lesson: immediately drop clients who don’t respect boundaries
- Working for far too little doing a job that took far too much time
- Lesson: push back on payment when the scope of work is more than either had expected
Writers, here’s a truth:
[bctt tweet=”Failure isn’t the opposite of Success: It’s part of Success. #freelancing” username=”LoriWidmer”]
I’m willing to bet a few of you reading this right now are still afraid to try because of that “F” word.
Don’t be. Failing to try is failure. Trying and failing is part of the journey.
But it means changing your attitude about failure. It also means changing your reaction to failure.
- Accept it.
- Don’t dwell on it.
- Look at why you failed.
- Learn your lesson.
- Find a way forward that includes changing something so that same failure doesn’t repeat.
If it weren’t for the failures in my life, I wouldn’t be here in this moment. I wouldn’t have these stories to tell. I wouldn’t be this resilient. I wouldn’t have a strong freelance writing business going. And this blog wouldn’t have teachable moments.
Embrace failure. It’s what steels you for the tough stuff, and what helps you grow.
Writers, what are some failures that have propelled your writing business forward?
What are some of your more epic failures? What did you learn from them?