How To Try Again

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Daily Creative. My name is Todd Henry. A couple of years ago, I was walking around our neighborhood. I have a ritual where I. In the middle of the day, often, if I've had an especially stressful morning, where I've been doing a lot of creating in the morning or a lot of intense client work, I will take a little break in the middle of the day. I'll have lunch and I'll walk around the neighborhood, just about three miles or so, just to clear my head. And often I won't even listen to anything.

Todd Henry [00:00:26]:

I'll just kind of walk and let my thoughts go where they will, and I'll follow my thoughts and try to collect my thoughts and figure out what's on my mind. Anyway, I was walking along and I looked over on the side of the road where I was walking on the sidewalk, and I saw a butterfly laying with its wings wide open on the grass. And as I observed the butterfly, I just tried to really be present in the moment. And I was just kind of watching the butterfly and it wasn't moving. And I quickly realized that the butterfly was. Was dead. It was actually laying there completely wide open, laying there right on the grass, right beside the sidewalk. And I just kept walking.

Todd Henry [00:01:04]:

And in that moment, I felt something inside of me say, you need to bury the butterfly. That's a. What a weird thought. Bury the butterfly. Why would I do that? That's so strange. Why would I go back and bury the butterfly? But I have learned over time that when something feels like it's coming from deep inside and it feels a weight of authority, that I need to pay attention to it. And so I did. So I went back and I.

Todd Henry [00:01:30]:

I apologize to the person whoever's property this was that I did this on. But I dug a little hole in the property and I lifted the butterfly and I put it in the ground and I covered it up and I continued on my walk. And as. As I was walking and kind of reflecting on the burying of the butterfly, another thought came to my head, and it was this. That sometimes we don't give our dreams the decency of a good burial. What I mean by that is sometimes when things don't go as we plan, we carry the residue of those failures or those disappointments into the next season of our life. We never really fully have closure on how and why things didn't go the way we planned. Whether it's a career move, an aspiration, a failed business, a failed relationship, whatever it is, we often carry the residue of those failures into the Next season of our life.

Todd Henry [00:02:29]:

And what I really feel like I was, the lesson I was learning from that moment was sometimes we need to be bold enough to just bury the butterfly. Sometimes good, beautiful things need to be buried. We need to put them behind us. When I was in my early twenties, I now call them my misguided twenties for the sake of my kids, who I don't know that I would want to follow in my footsteps. But I was an aspiring singer songwriter. And the way I like to describe it to my friends who are in the business is I was as successful as you can be without being successful, Meaning it felt like I was always on the verge of a breakthrough, always on the verge of something great happening. I got to play a lot of big shows and open for a lot of really famous acts and play in front of thousands of people many, many times. And then also, you know, I would play tiny little clubs and really like smoky bars because back then it was Smoky.

Todd Henry [00:03:19]:

This is 30 plus years ago. And, you know, so I was chasing after something and really spent many, many years chasing after it and then realized at one point, okay, this is not probably going to go the way I want it to. Seth Godin talks about the dynamic of the diplomat, the culdesac. He said, don't quit in the dip because things get hard. But if you're in a culdesac where it feels like you're just going round and round and round and round, sometimes you need to quit so you can move on to a different street. And I, I was definitely in a culdesac. I was definitely going round and round and round. So I needed to.

Todd Henry [00:03:54]:

To quit, to leave this dream behind and move on to something else. The pro something else. The problem was that that dream had become such a part of my identity, part of the way I saw myself in the world. And so as I moved stage, where I was leading creatives as a creative director and was leading creatives, I carried a lot of the residue and the disappointment of that early dream that I had into the next season. I did not give that dream the dignity of a decent burial. Instead, instead of marking the moment and moving to the next phase, I let that residue carry with me. And there was a lot of almost like prying it out of my hands over the course of several years and a lot of resentment and bitterness about the way things turned out. And I think that this often happens to us in our lives.

Todd Henry [00:04:45]:

So here's my encouragement to you, my lesson from this story, from my own life, and something I have learned over time whether it's through disappointing, you know, client engagements, disappointing events, disappointing book books that I've written, disappointing anything, anything that doesn't go the way that I planned for it to go. I have now learned that sometimes you have to let good things die and be buried so something better can be born. Give your disappointments, your dreams, the beautiful dreams that you have that don't work out the way you want, give them the dignity of a decent burial. Bury the butterfly so that you can move on with hope to what comes next. That's kind of what we're going to talk about today with our guest. Steve Kam is the founder of Nerd Fitness, but he's also the author of a new book called how to Try Again. We're going to talk about what happens in our life and in our work when things don't go as planned and what we can do next. This is Daily Creative.

Todd Henry [00:05:46]:

Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Steve Kamb [00:05:58]:

Everybody writes books about how to succeed more, how to be more disciplined, how to craft the perfect morning, how to time block your schedule for maximum efficiency and optimization.

Todd Henry [00:06:11]:

That's Steve Kam, author of the book how to Try Again.

Steve Kamb [00:06:14]:

What about a book when all of that goes wrong? Or what about a book where, like, for the moment after you have failed at whatever goal or habit or routine you're trying to build? I was going to write a book to help people after they have failed at a goal or resolution and help them get back on track after life kicks their butt. And then while writing the book, life kicked my butt and I had to essentially not go back to the drawing board, but expand the scope of this book and really turn it into a book about what to do when life doesn't go according to plan. And then before you try again, what are we going to do? Do we feel like failures? Are we struggling? What is our internal voice telling us? How do we navigate this moment when things are not going the way that we thought they should and are not lining up the way that we really want them to? And that's where this book ultimately came in and kind of ended up being the book I needed to read myself as I was writing it.

Todd Henry [00:07:15]:

I want to explore something you just mentioned because I think this is a key element of this whole thing. Before we could even dive into frameworks or talking about how we approach this, the statement we feel like a failure that sort of gets to identity, it gets to the way that we perceive ourselves. Not the way we feel about ourselves, but the way we perceive ourselves. It's almost like a name tag that we wear. I remember reading something from Martin Seligman once who he said, the three things we do when we have an experience is we make it permanent, pervasive, and personal. And I think all three of those things get to this concept of identity that we wear failure as a name tag, which makes it really difficult then to even envision doing something new. How do we recover from that? How do we recover from feeling like a failure when we have failed?

Steve Kamb [00:08:03]:

It's so tough. Failure has been a part of the human condition for as long as we have existed as a species. Back in the day, failure might have meant death or ostracization from the community. So failure triggers that portion of our lizard brain, saying, this could be the end of our identity. That could be the end of ourselves as we know it. So we really embrace when we fail. Feels like we are failures. A few interesting things I stumbled across.

Steve Kamb [00:08:31]:

1. If you go back to the early 1800s, Noah Webster actually defined failure as something that happened. It was a breaking of something or something that broke. It was like something that broke. Something that happened. It was an event, something failed, a foreclosure, whatever it may, it was something that happened. Thirty years later, Webster had passed away, his dictionary had continued. But when another definition of failure started to take popularity here in the states, and that was like a moral fault or a moral failing, failure became something who we were in some of those definitions.

Steve Kamb [00:09:08]:

And this is in the individualist, rugged version of America back in those 1800s, where if you weren't making progress or if you couldn't follow through on things, you were a failure. And I think that's persisted ever since. So now when we fail, we make it part of our identity, and it knocks us off our feet. We bury it with shame. We carry the guilt, all of it. So what did I do? One I spoke with, literally, a professor of failure, and this is amazing. Her name is Theresa McPhail. She noticed that a bunch of her students in college were not properly equipped to handle their first struggle.

Steve Kamb [00:09:45]:

Their first. Their first failing grade, their first. This is their first time maybe out from the underneath the wing of their parents, and they didn't know how to handle it. So she created this class about failure where they would go through failing things together and learn that it wasn't the end of the world. I then went to what's called the museum of Failure. And it's this Traveling Museum by Dr. Samuel West. And it's got some of the biggest companies, biggest failures, flops, some of the biggest frauds in history.

Steve Kamb [00:10:14]:

And as I'm walking through this museum, I'm realizing like, how much failure is one possible outcome of anything worth doing. Apple was in the Failure Museum. Microsoft is in the Failure Museum. Even my beloved Nintendo was in the Failure Museum. And my perspective on failure started to change. And then it really, the final exhibit is this kaleidoscope of post it notes. And as you're walking out of the museum, they encourage you to grab a post it note in a Sharpie and write one of your personal failures and put it up on the wall. And I'm looking at this wall, multicolored, it is stunning.

Steve Kamb [00:10:52]:

And there's thousands of post it notes on this wall. And I'm zooming in and it says something like some people will say, three failed marriages and two failed businesses. I tried to cut my bangs myself. They ranged from the hilarious to the deeply personal. And I have not forgot that moment since I went to that museum all those years ago. I found it really uplifting and not in the way that you might think of things could be worse. At least my business didn't fail, or at least I didn't go through what that person went through, but instead it was much more like a, oh, oh, I get it, okay, we're not failures. We are humans who failed at something.

Steve Kamb [00:11:32]:

And not only that, but our failures aren't that unique. They're not things that we should be hiding or ashamed of. They're things we should be talking about with other people and sharing them. And I ended up. It took me about 14 drafts of my book, but I finally worked up the courage to put my personal failings on in the book itself. But not only that, but put them on the second page of the book and ultimately told people, here's the book I thought I was going to write. Here's what happened while I wrote it. Let's get through this together.

Steve Kamb [00:12:04]:

Because life doesn't go the way that we want it to. And how we're going to get through this is by reevaluating and redefining failure. And then how what our relationship is with failure itself, that's the only way we're going to survive and get to whatever's on the other side of it.

Todd Henry [00:12:19]:

What I love about your approach, Steve, is that you are very methodical, you're very research driven, that you very much like Nerd fitness, right? The reason why Nerd fitness was so successful is that it was like fitness for nerds, right? It was like people who like information, they want the details, they want to know why it works. And you've done the same thing here. And you introduce a foundational framework in the book to help any of us who are trying to. I didn't want to use the word recover from failure because it's not necessarily a recovery. Right. It's more of we want to try something again, which can be difficult because we feel the sting of wasted time, wasted resources, wasted ambition. And now we want to try something new. And it's a framework that you call pact.

Todd Henry [00:13:01]:

Could you walk us through that framework and tell us why this is so effective?

Steve Kamb [00:13:06]:

So what do we do after a failure? We find ourselves going through this loop of I'm all in, I give up, I beat myself up, I go all in, I give up, and I beat myself up. What do we do instead? So the framework I came up with is called pact. You want to make a pact with yourself. And comically, in nerdy terms, making a pact is something that warlocks do in Dungeons and Dragons, which I was unaware of until I came up with this term. And then somebody was like, oh yeah, like Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, yeah, I guess you're right. Even when I'm not trying to be nerdy, it just works its way in through my subconscious. So what's the framework? Pause, accept, change, try.

Steve Kamb [00:13:44]:

Honestly, I think the pause step is maybe the most important. I think a lot of people, they just like, all right, at first you don't succeed, try again. I don't know, maybe. But if you're trying at the wrong thing, or you're so burned out that you can't even follow through on this, it's not a motivation problem, it's a direction problem, or it's a resources problem. Maybe you're asking too much of yourself. So before you just dive right back in or you keep and continue the self loathing pause, take a breath, ask yourself, is this actually the thing that I want? And do I have the time and the energy and the effort to work towards it? And if the answer to those things is no, okay, let's declare expectation, bankruptcy. Let's just tread water for a while until we can figure out what to do next. So then we have accept, which is looking compassionately but with clear eyes at your actual situation.

Steve Kamb [00:14:39]:

If you have kids at home, if you're taking care of an ailing parent, if you have some chronic illness, all of these things might affect what you're able to accomplish, how you're able to accomplish it, who you should be taking advice from. So all of that needs to be factored in, and that's acceptance. We then have change and then try. So I'll group those together. Change, ultimately is if you want to get a different result, we have to do something differently. The way I think through this is like being a curious detective and then a scientist. So as a curious detective, we get to look at every one of our past attempts that we've tried to follow through on a journaling habit or a meditation habit or running a 5k and treat it like a detective crime scene. Oh, interesting.

Steve Kamb [00:15:27]:

I noticed that I gave up after two weeks when my kid got sick and work was stressful. Got it. I tried to do too much during that period. I need to try something different this next time. So we think about past us without judgment so we don't beat ourselves up. And then we look ahead and say, what are we going to try next? And we think about trying from the perspective of science. Joyful, curious experimentation. Hey, here's something I think might work for me.

Steve Kamb [00:15:58]:

Oh, if I. I've tried keeping a digital journal on my phone. That doesn't work. What if I bought a beautiful journal with a fun pen and I leave it right next to my coffee machine each morning? Oh, okay, that sounds interesting. Let's try that for 30 days. And whether or not it works is. I don't say irrelevant. But that's not the point.

Steve Kamb [00:16:17]:

The point is to give yourself an experiment to follow through on, try it out, and then see. One, did it give you the result that you were expecting or hypothesized? And two, does it work for you? I think so many people try to follow celebrities and other people's morning routines and they forget to ask, will this work for me in my situation? So when before somebody, after failure, pause, accept, change something, and then try again

Todd Henry [00:16:47]:

differently, I think that pause part is really. You mentioned that's so important. And it is important because I think many of us, myself included, this has happened many times. We have failed, but we haven't accepted that we failed. So we keep moving, we keep going, we keep trying, we keep thinking. If I only pivot one more time, if I only maneuver in a certain way, or if I put more resources here or there or whatever, that things are going to be different. And sometimes we need to also just recognize, I have failed. This is.

Todd Henry [00:17:19]:

This has failed. I need to figure something else out, and I need to move in a different direction. I need to figure out why it didn't work and move in a different direction. But I think that's, again, some of that. We talked about identity as it relates to failure.

Steve Kamb [00:17:32]:

Right.

Todd Henry [00:17:32]:

We wear failure like an identity, but for some of us, I think the work itself or the particular mode of our work becomes an identity where it's. I had. I think we talked about this.

Steve Kamb [00:17:41]:

I.

Todd Henry [00:17:41]:

My first two books did super well. My third book, by all measures, was like a disaster. I think probably the best book I've written, but it also was like a disaster from a sales side.

Steve Kamb [00:17:52]:

That's how it works, isn't it?

Todd Henry [00:17:53]:

I know it's crazy, and I've come to peace with it because the right people read it. But at the time, I was like, I just need to keep trying. I need to keep pushing. I need to whatever. And at some point I realized this is just not a product market fit. It's just never going to be okay. Then my fourth book was fine. Was again, like, so well.

Todd Henry [00:18:08]:

But it's. But I think for me, I think it was hard for me to let go of that because I thought, okay, this is. It's an identity thing. Right. I am a person whose books sell well. This didn't sell well. So that clearly there's something wrong here. I need to figure this out.

Todd Henry [00:18:22]:

Okay. No, it's. It was just a failure. What's your advice to people who maybe need to need a cold splash of water in their face to realize, oh, no, okay, it's failed. Let's pause and then let's figure out where we're going to go from?

Steve Kamb [00:18:35]:

Sure. I think everybody, if this is somebody like you, you're in great company. I am somebody who has workaholic tendencies. I'd say I'm. There's a term called an insecure overachiever. I certainly would say I'm a recovering insecure overachiever. And for most of my life, things just worked when I put my head down and worked harder. And then a lot of my life stopped working all at the same time.

Steve Kamb [00:19:00]:

And working harder on it was not going to create the results. There's this amazing CS Lewis quote that says something like, once you realize you're on the wrong road, the next correct step is back towards where you came. Which means the most progressive person, AKA the person who is going to make the most progress from that position, will be the person that turns backwards. And that's where I think there's actually that in between step is the pause of asking yourself, am I on the right path? Or, hey, maybe this is a failed venture. And of Course, there's maybe a little bit more work could do it, but I imagine we probably know deep down inside if we're willing to do the work, the journaling, maybe through therapy, talking with our friends and looking at that situation with clear eyes, hey, this is a failed venture. But failure in that original definition of Webster's Dictionary, which is, this is a thing that happened. There's this funny Internet meme about, I think it's like Windows tasks. And it was said something like, tasks, task failed successfully.

Steve Kamb [00:20:04]:

And I think it was like a miss. Some words got switched up somewhere. But what a beautiful set of words. It was like, task failed successfully. Congratulations, Todd. Your third book was a successfully failed task. You wrote the heck out of it. It didn't sell the way that you had your.

Steve Kamb [00:20:19]:

Your expectations set for. Okay. Are you the only person that has ever written a book that didn't sell the way that you had expected it to? Nope. Welcome to the club. That's majority of authors. It still sucks. And I wish that didn't happen to you. And also that happened.

Steve Kamb [00:20:38]:

What do we do next? Like I said, we can pause. I think there is some comfort too in just keep doing the thing that we know what to do, that we know how to do. Because that's so much easier than pausing and accepting and looking at our situation and saying, not only is this not working, but I've been working on the wrong thing or working on it with the wrong strategy for a long time. Could be the timing. It could be so many things out of your control.

Todd Henry [00:21:03]:

Sure.

Steve Kamb [00:21:03]:

But at some point, hey, I can either keep going down this path, doing things the way that I used to do them, because it's comforting, even though I know it's not going to give me results. Or I can be compassionately honest with myself and say, that task was failed successfully. I can now let it go. I can, like I said earlier, declare expectation, bankruptcy and say, that is what it is. And I can now divert my energy, effort and resources to swimming towards the right thing that I want to be swimming towards. Or the next, maybe swimming towards this next thing. And then at some point we can look back with the clear eyes like a detective on that third book and say, okay, what could I have done differently? Maybe there's some things, but maybe not. It's easy to say, oh, every failure is a blessing, and you just have to wait.

Steve Kamb [00:21:48]:

I don't know, Maybe sometimes failures just suck. And I want people to feel like, here's your hug. I'm sorry this happened. Let's pick through the wreckage and see what we can find. And then let's apply that towards the next thing, because we get to stand on the shoulders of every past failure, and that's the material that we can use to figure out what to do next.

Todd Henry [00:22:12]:

Steve Kam's new book, how to Try Again, is available now wherever books are sold. If you are trying sufficiently difficult things, if you're doing anything worth doing, failure is not only a possibility, it's likely several times along the path. So we have to get comfortable with the fact that we're going to fail. But the question is, what do we do when we fail? How do we try again? How do we pick up the pieces, learn from it, and then move forward? But most importantly, as Steve told us, how do we first learn how to pause and accept what has happened before? We simply move forward, like so many ambitious people do. My encouragement to you right now is if you feel like you're carrying the residue of the past into the present, into what you're doing right now, consider places where maybe you need to bury the butterfly. Where do you need to pause and recognize what has happened and give your old dreams the dignity of a decent burial before moving forward as a creative pro? You're going to have a graveyard of failed projects if you're trying hard things. And that's perfectly okay, because as we learn from those things that we have failed at, we become better adapted to the new challenges in front of us. Hey, thanks so much for listening.

Todd Henry [00:23:32]:

If you'd like the full interview with Steve or any of our guests, you can get them absolutely free@dailycreativeplus.com just go there, enter your name and email address, and we'll send you a private feed where you can listen to all of our interviews absolutely free. My name is Todd Henry. If you want information about my books or my speaking event, you can find them@toddhenry.com until next time, may you be brave, focused and brilliant. We'll see you then.