Lessons - Failure & Getting Out Of Your Own Head | Steve Hoffman, Chairman of Founders Space

Welcome to the lessons episodes of Success Story. These lessons episodes will be shorter clips from past guests, accomplished value community members, and myself. In each short episode we'll feature concise and insightful actionable conversations and tactics providing you with real-world strategies and tips to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. If you're seeking a no-nonsense approach to growth and progress, you've come to the right spot. Settle in, take notes, and enjoy. We close the deal. We got a lot of money. We produced the whole thing, but we got the right to take the technology and the platform out to other TV providers. So we took it out broadly. We got Viacom, we got Warner Brothers, we got NBC, we got Game Show Network, we got History Channel, we just like Turner Networks, they're all our customers. We were doing great. We got this amazing, one of our biggest competitors, which is a public company, came to us with a buy-out offer, all of it, but our venture capitalists were like, this isn't enough money, it's not enough money, you know, we're not going to do it. And then the .com bubble imploded. And when the .com bubble imploded, all our customers, every media company, they literally cut their interactive spend. So anything interactive, which is what we were doing, got slashed to zero. I don't know if you remember of the time, but there was this group called NBCI, which is NBC's interactive group. They had 250 employees, they were doing Weakest Link, their big Game Show at the time for them, and they basically got cut to like three employees. So they had no money to pay us. With all our money gone, and all our venture funding that we had raised was basically, we'd burned through it. You're expecting to do another big round and grow a business. Nobody wanted to invest right now, because we had no customers, and we were out of money, and things were like now, it was this big implosion, right? And our industry was particularly hard hit. So at that time, I cut a deal with our creditors. We didn't go bankrupt, but basically, because they were already, our creditors were in bankruptcy, we had borrowed a bunch of money to keep going. And they had lent to a bunch of venture companies, and so they were in bankruptcy. So basically, I cut a deal, we're a handed off our tech, and we basically quietly shuddered. Shuddered us. Now, I will tell you, this was a failure, right? It was a total failure. It hit me really hard, because up until that point, I had had nothing but success. And I thought that, you know, and I was sure this company would be successful, because we had done so well, and here I was, I had basically should have taken that buy-out offer that we had earlier, that would have made all the founders rich, and would have done incredibly well. But at the time, you know, time cited in 2020, but I blamed myself. So I went into a depression. I felt so awful, and I doubted whether I should ever be an entrepreneur again. I seriously doubted. Now, you wouldn't think of that, because I've done it my whole life. But at that point, I was just like, I was ready to, like, I basically, you know, I ended up moving to Canada, I ended up writing a book on game design. You know, I was just like, I wrote a lot of short stories, like science fiction, I even wrote a novel. I was just like, I don't know what to do. Like, you know, after the dot-com implosion, so I was just like, I shouldn't go back and be an entrepreneur, because I blew it. But then, gradually, I realized that the only thing preventing me from trying again was myself. I was basically telling myself that you had failed. You weren't, you shouldn't, you know, you had let down your employees, you had to lay them all off, you had let down everybody's dream. You shouldn't do this again, because you're a failure. And at a certain point, I realized that as long as I said that, it was going to remain true, right? I wasn't going to take a big risk, I wasn't going to do another company, because I feared having that happen again, because it was so, so painful. And that wasn't my last failure, I will tell you, but it was the pivotal one. Because it basically taught me that, no, I can go back out there, I can do it. Failing is fine, you know, I have my successes, I have my failures, or some things in the world, you can't know ahead of time, there's some things in the world, you can't control, like, you know, like we're going through right now with the coronavirus and the economy. You can't control, or the dot-com bubble bursting, you can't control those. But the one thing you can't control is your own attitude, and your own mental script, you say to yourself, how you view the world, I could control that. And over time, I became more and more resilient, through that failure, and subsequent things. You know, because, look, if you're doing a startup, anybody out there has done there, been an entrepreneur of any sort, there's always ups and downs. Even if you're working in a corporate job, like they're ups and downs, like not everything you do works out, and it doesn't matter where you are, life is full of ups and downs. And the point is, whenever I get overwhelmed now, whenever I am stressed out, I look back and say, look, you went through so many of these failures, like where things didn't work out, and all your dreams are shattered, and you thought you could never get over it, and now you don't even care. In fact, it makes a good story now, like it's a fun story to tell people, and you wouldn't even have that story. And I couldn't relate to entrepreneurs who are going through trouble. If I personally hadn't, you know, totally and utterly failed and let down everybody on my team, you know, and made decisions that I would later regret. If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't know what it's like to do that. And so, whenever things happen now that don't go right, I'm just like, oh, that's nothing. Like that could be bad, but I'll live through it. And at the end of the day, if you have that attitude, you actually make better decisions, you don't get stressed out, you don't get anxious, you're not like there's no negative feedback coming from yourself, right? And you're able to actually navigate, and most of these things, like literally, like every day, there's something that doesn't go perfectly, right? And most people's lives, you know, there's no perfect thing. Now whenever something even small thing, I'm like, will you even remember this thing that seems so important today? Like you're like so anxious about it, will you even remember that like five years from now? You won't. Will you even remember it a year from now? Probably not. Will you remember it six months from now? You know, the answer's usually no. So why are you worried? Like why are you stressed out? It doesn't even... How do you get out of your own? Because I worked with entrepreneurs before and like the biggest issue they have is getting out of their own head and understanding that it's that failure is part of the process. It shouldn't be, like a failure shouldn't always be welcome, like you want to succeed, but I mean like it's going to take a lot of, you know, a lot of shit that you have to go through before you are successful and if you are successful. So you know, you work with tons of entrepreneurs. How do you, how do you sort of enlighten them to this? Oh, so I, well, some of its storytelling and some of it is you're never out of your head, right? So you're always trapped in your head. You can change your, what your head does, so you can literally reprogram your head like you would reprogram any, any code to actually put things like I reprogram so that when I hear myself saying negative things about myself or getting stressed out, usually you're getting stressed out. You're not, you're getting stressed out because you're telling yourself to be stressed out. You're saying this is so important. I can't, oh my god, I'm so angry, I'm so upset. If you listen to what you're saying to yourself, you can hear yourself programming yourself in a negative way. You're actually telling yourself how to feel. So if you literally just step back and say, I don't actually have to feel this way, I could feel fine about this because I know in the future, I'm not even going to care about it. And I know that getting stressed out won't change the situation. It's not going to make me make a better decision. In fact, it just depletes the energy that I actually could use to actually figure out how to solve this problem or if it's unsolvable to move on to something else that I could make a difference on. So that's the key I tell entrepreneurs. Is that the biggest, do you find that that's like the biggest issue they have? Like an entrepreneur, like a first time entrepreneur. You find that that mental, I don't know, hurdles that they have to get over. It's different with every entrepreneur. So some entrepreneurs are just amazingly resilient and they always are able to do this. You look at some of them like Elon Musk is doing crazy stuff, right? And half of it doesn't work. He has rocket ships blowing up, Tesla almost went bankrupt several times. And every day, there's a new disaster or something on his production line. But he just keeps going. So some people naturally have it built in. Other people like me weren't as blessed like we were actually programmed differently from childhood. We're much more anxiety prone, let's say, or much more prone to depression or not reacting in the right way. So many people are, which many people are. That's a lot of people I think have a ton of anxiety. I was programmed with a lot of passion, but also not as strong, not as resilient as many other entrepreneurs are. And so that was my weakness. So I had to work on it. There's other people, you know, everybody has different weaknesses and different strengths. And you just have to recognize, you know, what you're not good at and really folks. So mine was a conscious effort to get over that. It was a conscious effort to position, to give myself the tools necessary so that when I faced adversity, I didn't crumble in front of it like I did the first time. Like when that company, like it just hit me way too hard. It didn't have to do that. Like I did that myself. And I think the one thing I can say to entrepreneurs is the more you go through it, the more you realize that you can go through it, right? And so the more you put yourself out there, but if you can prep yourself in advance so you don't have to suffer as much, you should start doing that now. You should start it on the little things and then graduate to the bigger things. Like those little things that make you upset or unhappy or whatever. You should focus on, you know, listen to what you're saying in your head. Listen to, and that will get you not out of your head, but into a different mental state where you can be more objective about what's happening. Oh, I'm making myself feel this way. We're all, we don't just feel like we'll have our initial reaction, right? Of anxiety or stress. Not initial reaction, you know, I can't control it, but maybe a Buddhist monk could. But I'm not a Buddhist monk, but I can't control it. But what I can control is what comes after that initial reaction. And that is my response to the negativity. So I might feel stressed out, but then I can step back and all of a sudden start to push myself back into a better frame of mind.