Today I interviewed Barry Moltz about entrepreneurship and how to bounce back after having a business failure. He believes that you can’t always learn from failures. That sometimes failures just suck! On a side note, I respect every single author who has written a book. It’s quite the process and I’ll be blogging about it at some point. Enjoy the interview.
Barry has founded and run small businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years. He just released his latest book called “Bounce! Failure, Resiliency and the Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success.” Barry is a nationally recognized expert on entrepreneurship who has given over 100 speeches to audiences ranging from 20 to 20,000. He was appointed by the Illinois Governor in 2005 to serve on the board of the Institute for Entrepreneurship Education (IIEE). He has taught entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor at IIT( Illinois Institute of Technology). He was elected to the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame in 2004.
Barry, I believe failure and mistakes help build character, determination and help you learn. How does your view differ?
I believe that we can learn from mistakes, but not always. Sometimes there is nothing to learn from failure- it just stinks. Sometime lessons get learned years down the line. I think if we always look to learn from failure sometimes it keeps us stuck in a place that prevents us from taking an action (A new Bounce!) in order to get another chance of success. We need to learn what we can, cheer the darkness for 24 hours but then move on!
Why did you call your book “Bounce” and how does it connect with your entrepreneurship theme?
- Let go of what you were taught was the secret path to succeed in business.
- Let go of the idea that something to learn comes from failure or that you can always duplicate your success.
- Let go of the shame of losing and the enlarged ego that comes with a big win.
If we let go of whatever the last result was — we can actually Bounce! We can learn what — if any thing — from the last success or failure and get ready by bouncing to the next decision that we have to make.
Any success or failure is just a part of the entire business lifecycle. Individually, a particular result or outcome actually means nothing. No event will guarantee the same result in the future. By learning to bounce through this repetitive process of “success and failure, failure and success”, you will develop a resiliency that will lead to the true business confidence that ultimately determines which ones of us succeed.
More importantly, it allows each of us to have passion and enthusiasm regardless of where we are in the cycle. It allows us to get ready our next great success!
From book to book and speech to speech, how have you built your personal brand over time and what failures have you made?
Good questions. My brand is about telling people what business is truly like. All the fun, excitement, exhilaration….and the depression, foibles and tough times. I talk a lot about how you have to be crazy to be in your own business. But its this craziness and unpredictability that makes it exciting. In my first 10 years at IBM when I had a lot of success I never thought I would fail. But when I left to start my own businesses it was heaped about me- I went out of business and I was kicked out of a business before finally selling my business in 1999 during the Internet bubble.
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When someone fails in business how can they “Bounce” back?
Learn what ever you can but then bounce– take an action so you can have another chance at success. Incidentally, I don’t call it bouncing back- sometimes when we bounce, we do not come back but take an action that bounces us to an entirely new place.
How does one go about accepting failure?
Whether we want to admit it our not. Failure happens to all of us who are doing exciting things. We need to look at failure as just part of the business cycle even if there is nothing to learn. The most important part is to let go of failure and take an action so you can move on
How can you use humility to “right size” your ego?
Realize that life turns on a dime. Things change rapidly. Celebrate your success when they happen. Share the credit. Mourn the failures but don’t be so hard on yourself that it is all your fault. This will keep you balanced.
Explain, in your words, how to develop your own brand for success?
First, we need to set patient, interim goals. I remember when I asked my Zen master, when I first began mediating, how long I should mediate for—15 minutes, half hour, or an hour each day? He said that I should try it for a minute for each day for the next few months. If I was successful, I should go to two… minutes (i.e. not hours). This is where I learned that when striving for new. goals, what is important in the climb is not even to get a foothold, but to get a toehold.
If you can make some progress toward your goal, you have a better chance of achieving it in the long run. After downsizing our dreams and getting that toehold, we next figure out what will make us happily successful. Most of us will immediately say that it is to make a lot of money. Money is an important measure of success. It is how we keep score. But if we never get to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, will our life trip be for nothing?
