Did you fail or succeed?

Often It’s hard to tell the difference. Let me explain.

NOTE: Please read to the end. The road may wind, but it will get you there. Meandering is good and it’s worth the trip. Ok?

In 2020, March 15 to be specific, my husband (Tibi’s CEO) and our President Elaine wrote out three principles that would guide us in every big decision we were about to make. The world was an aflame, the stakes incredibly high, and we needed a way to zero in on what was most important to us. A measuring stick of sorts, which would better allow us to quickly bucket each task/consideration into: kill, keep, amend.

The principles flowed out easily. Life and death decisions have a way of cutting through clutter quickly. If my planes going down, my last text isn’t going to be to cancel my hair appointment. Frank, Elaine and I collectively agreed that: we could only work with people who share our mindset, we’d only make what we believed in and loved, and agency was paramount - meaning if we failed it was by our own hand and our mistake to fix and if we won, it was ours to reap the benefits.

What this meant was, each consideration in front of us had to pass this new litmus test. There wasn’t room for debate - because it wasn’t complicated. This wasn’t a 10 point checklist where priorities were ranked or modified by extenuating circumstances. It just simply “was” or “was not.”

At the time, I thought: damn, this is a good fix to “get us through” this nightmare.

The reality? It’s the fix that has gotten me through life and I wish I’d done this earlier. And it made me think……In high-school, I always sucked at math. To the tune of barely getting through Algebra 2, never taking calculus and getting a D in geometry. It wasn’t until college, when I was introduced to statistics, that everything clicked. It was the why behind the numbers. It wasn’t abstract, it made sense. Whether a cost/benefit or a probability analysis, what it did for me is, it gave me ground to stand on. It separated emotional perceptions/reactions from reality. This math plays out in real life. For example:

“Yes, this person in the red car just cut me off on the highway. Statistically speaking, they are unlikely to know me. I can rule out that this was personal. There’s a probability that they did it becuase they are: in a justifiable hurry (sick baby in the car? I was in that situation once) or just unhinged (road rage is real); or they were simply unaware and in deep thought (that’s me, often).

Going through this checklist gives me perspective, it calms me, and it helps me focus my reaction. In this case? I continue listening to my podcast and drive on. Why would I spend any more time of thought here? I have no scientific way right now to determine which answer is correct, but most importantly, there are none that I can affect. There is no cost benefit here to any exertion on my part, and in fact, only a zero sum loss if I were to give expend my precious brain time on this further. Good math.

Drilling down to first principles in our business helped ensure we were separating emotions from reality without becoming emotionless.

How could it not? After all, our very first principle was tethered to the notion that we will only work (hire, contract and sell to) people who inspire us, who are rabidly curious and love to engage in discourse, and who have - or at least desire to work towards - an ease about them.

And alas, we get to the title of the substack: did you fail or succeed?

If you judge your success or failures by absolutes: physical milestones ($3mm in income; $70mm in sales, 10,000 square feet home, etc….etc…..) then you may not realize when it hits: the success or the failure. Because these numbers change. They’re a moving target - that $3mm today was likely to have been $1.5mm 5 years ago; and when in highschool it may have been a solid $100k.

Success doesn’t come when you hit the numbers. It’s when you can live by your principles. I think.

A recent article that hit hard by Rob Henderson (Read here) included a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”:

In Montreal this week, a woman at our book club event told me she’s striking out on her own, leaving a long career in the oil and gas sector. She said her biggest fear was “failure.” I asked her what that meant. She couldn’t answer.

When we start businesses, seek out new careers or paths, we focus so hard on what will make us feel we have succeeded. The press, the $$$, the peer recognition. It’s rare that we write out what will make us feel we have failed. I think it’s usually because we view it through a financial lens. We run out of money. Done.

For me, I know. Had we soldiered on after 2020 without these principles clarified and intact, we would have failed. Even though, I bet, we would have been financially solvent and maybe even exceptionally so.