Failure Is a Good Option  ## Metadata - Author: [[Daily Tech News Show]] - Full Title: Failure Is a Good Option - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/1d8f623a-d89b-4b54-9fdd-2de92482b10b ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Embrace Failure** - View failure as a learning experience, not a setback. - Embrace pivots, even if they arise from failure, as opportunities for growth. Transcript: Gary Shapiro Explain a little more for folks by what you mean by that. Tom Merritt Well, what I love about the United States and our culture is there's no culture that exists that's even close, maybe Israel and Canada, where you actually, your failure is a learning Experience. But if you think about your own life, and I've raised this with lots of people, no one's pushed back on it. So I'm going to keep saying it's true. You learn from your failures. You don't learn from your successes. Successes produce false confidence, arrogance, and a lot of mistakes in judgment where you just like, think, well, I've made this good decision before, I'll make a good decision in The future. Failure is when you in a relationship, in a job, in a business, you are very successful. When I interview people for jobs, one of the things I like to hear about is if they've tried something and failed, especially a small business, because that is a school of hard knocks. And if you look at our most successful people, and I talk about this in the book, many of them have failed many times. I mean, I know there's a lot of bad things and good things about Donald Trump as president, but if you look at it, he has failed numerous times. I mean, he's gone and declared bankruptcy. He's done things. And in a certain way, whether you hate him or you love him, he does get some things done in a way that, you know, obviously people find it disagreeable. And it's also, you know, you do require a certain amount of independent thinking to succeed. ([Time 0:23:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1f0c58f7-b52c-4676-9afb-4343ff1464f4)) - **Traits of Innovators** - Successful innovators like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump share a focus and drive. - This allows them to get things done, even if their methods are unconventional. Transcript: Tom Merritt And I would look at Steve Jobs. I would look at Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and I'd categorize them together. Is it in a sense they're superhuman. They don't seem to have the same empathy gene that others may have, and they really don't care about what people think about what they say, or Steve Jobs didn't care. But they're very focused on getting the job at hand done and coming up with a way of doing it. And that's what I think is part of what I've seen in entrepreneurs and success, is you have to be really, really focused. And I've met so many of them in the course of my career, whether it was Bill Gates or Michael Dell or Steve Jobs or others. And even the way they respond to me when I ask them to do something, you know, I like a lot of them. There's many more names I can name, but they often say no to me, but they do it quickly because they're so focused on what they want to do, not what I want them to do. And I respect that. Yeah, I think I ([Time 0:24:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b4a1a55e-9b9c-4995-8b94-92321d62d0ff)) - **Examples of Failure and Pivoting** - Steve Jobs experienced failures with products like the Lisa before achieving success. - Many entrepreneurs, including Michael Dell and Brian Roberts, have also faced setbacks. Transcript: Gary Shapiro Jobs is a really interesting example of that, because people think of him as a complete success, but he failed tremendously with certain product lines like the Lisa and even leaving Apple and going off into the wilderness. Do you have any other examples besides Steve Jobs off the top of your head of of that that failure pivot that ended up being useful well the failure pivot is true just about for almost any Tom Merritt Entrepreneur or innovator i mean there's so many different ones whether it was the inventor of the ring the camera which was you know was rejected by so many or or there's a what if you Look at it's difficult to come up with and not name someone who's failed. You should go admit it. And, you know, I've read a number of Trump's books and he certainly has had a whole ton of failures, but he's always swung for the fences, too. So, but, you know, look, Michael Dell went public. Then he went private. Then he went public. Then I mean, he's done a lot of different things. There's people who've also inherited, like Brian Roberts of Comcast, NBC. And, you know, not everything they did was success. I don't know if your audience is old enough to remember the NBC Olympics, where they sold different colored things. And it was a dismal failure. But you know what? So what? ([Time 0:25:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/74c05edb-4c1b-4aae-a2e5-ce3ef2c6e3ff)) - **Risk and Growth** - Avoiding risks hinders progress and adaptability in a changing world. - Continuous growth requires trying new things and learning from failures. Transcript: Tom Merritt You learn from you feel like if you don't risk things in life you're not going to get very, very far and you probably won't succeed because the world changes around you, whether or not You change. And that's especially true in the business environment. It's also true in your personal environment and your relationships. And you just can't keep doing things the way you've always done them. You always have to invest in, try new things, and grow. I mean, you have an obligation to do that to succeed because the world is going to change. As humans, we think the status quo is always worth protecting. Certainly, that is not only a political philosophy, it's a personal philosophy. But as we go through life and we grow up and people get sick and they die and things change around us, or there's fires in L.A., there's extreme weather, new politicians there's new rules There's new technology we have to change to start winning in a way it's not being strong it's not being fast it's adapting to change the quickest which determines success and that's What the book is about is how you make those business and personal decisions now the biggest decisions in life i think because i don't want to get the wrong message here the biggest decisions, Especially for young people that they fret over, are really not there. ([Time 0:26:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d3372876-017e-42fe-9894-faf90724c41a)) - **Prioritizing Decisions** - Focus on major life decisions, like committing crimes, unsafe behavior, marriage, and having children. - Career and education choices are less critical early on; focus on self-discovery. Transcript: Tom Merritt Like even what college you go to or what your first job is, not that important because you don't even know yourself yet. The big decisions younger people should look at is, you know, do you commit a major crime? Do you do something fundamentally unsafe, drink and drive? Do you marry someone? Do you have children? Those are four big decisions, which are not irrevocable, but they have long-lasting implications. And the rest of the decisions, it's just, you got to get to know yourself and learn. Every job you take, you learn something that's valuable about yourself. And that's why we tell our employees, we want them to do something outside of the office besides just work, because just working all the time is not what we want from our employees. We want them to be broadly diversified and to be able to innovate. And innovation is putting different ideas together for a better result. And that's something that we try to do as an organization. ([Time 0:27:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/37941c33-9a97-46ad-b9bb-8f614884d941)) - **Fighting for Innovation** - Gary Shapiro, at 26, chaired the Home Recording Rights Coalition, fighting for VCR legality. - This victory established the "Magna Carta of the innovation world," impacting technology like the internet. Transcript: Gary Shapiro Well, uh, before I let you go, uh, just a big thank you for, uh, helping defend our rights to home recording, uh, all those years ago. I don't know if a lot of people realize how involved you were in that. Tom Merritt Yeah. I was the chairman of the home recording rights collection at the age of 26. It was really a strange bit of luck, but I was, I managing people, believe it or not, like David Rubenstein, who now head of the Carlyle Group, and Ron Brown, who head of the Democratic Party, and who was lawyers. I just fell into this. I was an outside junior lawyer, and the client was never around. They made me the vice chairman, so I ran the group. And the issue was the legality of the VCR, which is the first technology that allowed you to change things in time, time shift and rent videos and determine what you watched when you wanted To watch it. And Hollywood fought us tooth and nail. They were the biggest lobby in Washington. We're the little guys, the weird ones who thought, you know, we're like the little dog fighting the big dog. We didn't realize how small we were. And we won. We won every step of the way, even arguing twice before the Supreme Court. Supreme Court, just by one vote, five to four established what we call the Magna Carta of the innovation world, which said a product is legal if it has significant legal uses. And that's that actually paved the way for so many things that we use today. Not only the copying machine, but the Internet itself, which some people tried to shut down as the world's largest copying device and other technologies, camcorders, cameras. So many things we use today just naturally because there's a tension between the intellectual property owners and the innovators. Of course, the intellectual property owners that own the content and the copyright are different than the patent owners and a lot of the technology. But we've managed to succeed and convince our government more than any other government that you have to favor innovation in everything you do. And that's why there's like this proposal before Congress that almost passed last Congress and could possibly pass again, is to mandate the ancient technology that we began over 100 Years ago the am radio that would be mandated and required to be put in every car this dying radio broadcast industry is leaning so heavily on congress that it's an embarrassment and It actually you know we're concerned because it also paves away for future mandates of ancient technology yeah it's like the last railway car that you put on, the caboose. It had to be on trains for years or having to have elevator operators or things like that. ([Time 0:28:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8d0f8350-2bee-4b0a-a934-f5760bff4032))