Redefining Failure: Embracing Growth Beyond Success Metrics with Jacob Taylor from The Connective

If you talk about successful entrepreneurs, name your favorite entrepreneur that didn't make it. Name one. We don't consider anything other than abject success to be success anymore. I mean, even look at the venture capital world too. Anything less than 100 times exit is considered failure. Welcome to the Inflection Podcast where we explore the pivotal moments that have shaped us into who we are today. I am your host, Anebi, and I can't wait to dive into these moments with you. Let's get it. Welcome to today's episode of the Inflection Podcast. It is a pleasure to have the man here with us today, Jake Taylor, who's built multiple startups, family owned business, currently works with the Connective A Smart City region initiative in the greater Phoenix area. Thanks for being on here with us today, Jake. Yeah, of course. I was trying to think of fun, witty ways to introduce you and one of the things we talked about that cracked me up is the higher they are, the greater the fall. Jake is 6:10 for context, and so I thought that was hilarious when you brought that up. But the context and the subtext for what we're talking about today is failure. Right? You're no stranger to that, as we all are. But it raises the question, what exactly is failure? We've built up this mythos in our minds of what success is. There is the notions of what success is out there culturally as we make gods, in your words, out of men. The the uber wealthy, uber successful entrepreneurial stories out there, the 1% that raise millions or billions of dollars in VC money and go on to build the Ubers and the Facebooks of the world. But what about the individuals day in, day out, working the trenches building companies might never get to the meteoric success we see with some of the examples out there, but nevertheless successful in their own context. So with that set up for this, let's talk through what exactly is failure and how has it been misconstrued with regard to entrepreneurship right now? Yeah, absolutely. This is really becoming a passionate subject for me, especially as you and I have engaged on LinkedIn and other sources. And just as I kind of dip my feet back into entrepreneurship again after quite a bit of a hiatus, which is probably something that we'll dip into, but you've already taken a stab at it. Failure is really defined by what we define as success. This is going to be a riveting conversation because everyone is going to have a very different definition. So I love the making gods out of men thing because if you talk about successful entrepreneurs, name your Favorite entrepreneur that didn't make it. Name one. That is true. It stumps me. No, absolutely right. We think of the musks, we think of the gates, we think of the jobs. And then if you really barrel down, I mean, do you know the Victoria's Secret founder's name? No. He bailed before he sold for, you know, a whole lot of money. We don't consider anything other than abject success to be success anymore. I mean, even look at the venture capital world, too. Anything less than 100 times exit is considered failure. You could quadruple your money in a year, and that's considered failure. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous, the parameters that we've put on ourselves. And as such, I think we've really become a jaded society when it comes to entrepreneurship. There's actually two kinds of failure that I want to talk about. One is in the entrepreneurial setting, and one is just every day. I mean, you could compare it to corporate, I guess, for example. And as I lose my train of thought, well, at least focus on the one that I've retained, which is the entrepreneurship. Failure is going to be defined by everyone a little bit different. And we have all these little mantras that we like to say. And this is where I want to go with this is the only real failure is actually giving up or something like that. That's what we say out loud. What we really believe is anything less than Steve Jobs isn't good enough. I think that's what really leads to the toxic positivity of entrepreneurship today. That's why it's so hard to become a founder, because anything shy of, again, these just, you know, astronomical goals is really considered mediocrity. So then it's. I feel like there's almost a view of failure as unsuccess, as two sides of a coin. It's binary. You're failing or you're succeeding. There is no, hey, I failed my way to success, or there is no, hey, I failed a lot, but really I found success through that. Yes. And there's that concept, right? Is it black and white? Is it failure? Is it success? Like, what exactly is that definition? Like, you rightfully say, like, it's going to depend on who is defining that. And we all need to define what success means. Like, when I hold my daughter, my toddler, right at home watching a nice movie, I'm not stressed. For me, that's success, right? I have a family, I have roof over my head, and there's food in the fridge. That is success that I'm not stressed out, freak about my next meal to eat. So there are multiple layers to define success and what that looks like. It doesn't mean you won't grind, doesn't mean you want hustle and you provide for your family and do a good job. And it's really interesting as we think about how then do we define success? Some of the great entrepreneurs I know who may not necessarily be as successful as the jobs and folks like that who are just doing the best they can, you're adding value. We're talking earlier about what does value even mean? And you brought up a point. It was an M word with value. Do you remember what that was? I don't at the moment. We'll find out. We'll circle back to that. You said something I thought was very. Was very interesting with regard to what exactly is success? And it just got me thinking more about some of the great entrepreneurs that I know and leaders who've helped shaped my viewpoint were not necessarily uber wealthy, but they had their thumb on. Yeah, well, let me lead that right into a personal example, because you said something that I think really defines you. Say fail towards success. What happens if you never do that? What if you run a marathon and stop at mile 25? Are you a failure? Or did you just run 25 miles more than most people do in an average day? This is really about framing. But what we've really done in the business world is we've defined these kind of arbitrary finish lines, and if you don't cross that line, it didn't really happen. So let's give an example. One of the startups that I did was B and C Design Studios. I was 22 years old out of Arizona State University, and I wanted to go into manufacturing, but when I met with Nintendo, they convinced me to go into game development. So. So we penned a contract and I started making games for Nintendo. I did not succeed. You know, I lost a crap ton of money. And technically the studio's still there. We still do games kind of at a hobby level, but it was not a commercial success. And there wasn't really any breakout hits either. If you want to look at critical success, does that make me a failure? What percentage of the world's population has published games for one of the largest video game publishers on the planet? At age 23, I consider that a win. But when I go out and I talk to people, I've applied to jobs and I effectively have no experience because they were not successful enough to not be considered failure. So again, it's basically Everything failure is up to 99% until it's not. That's deep. As I think more about that and I think it also really finds on the night sucks to go to jobs and apply and all of that doesn't count, you know, your experience because it's experience. The way I see even what we say is failure is it's all lessons. Right? All your L's are lessons. Yes, that's exactly right. Right. So you might see those L's as losses, but redefining that is seeing it as lessons. And it's so cliche when people say, oh, the only time you fail is when you give up. But there is some truth to that, right? As long as you're learning and applying. And even if it's an exercise in futility, again, in effort, there, Absolutely. But is it really an exercise in futility if you learn something from it and it always go, you know, I am very passionate about working with people who are career changing or explain what else to do. And for me, regardless of what your career has been across multiple years, there's a connecting thread through it all, whether literally whether you were a janitor or you worked as a barista or whatever, all of that connects. I was talking to a friend recently who caught her teeth managing a restaurant and now she's a top dog in product management. Yeah, but then all that experience of customer success and customer service and learning how to talk to people like all applies now. And so it's not. She didn't fail doing that for a while and oh, by the way, accidentally got into product. Like all of that helps her be a better product person. Now you could apply that to multiple other careers and pathways out there. That's exactly right. So let's lean into this. You're gonna have to help me stay on this train, right. Because I'm gonna derail anytime. But there's the failure that we preach and then there's the failure that we believe. And this is really important because we all agree, at least when we talk about it, that everything you just said is true. You know, the stumbles, the falling over, the lessons learned, the transferable skills, all of that in actuality is important. But I go back to that 99 to 1% example. We internalize it again, we tend to discount it until someone's crossed that arbitrary finish line. So I'm going to give kind of an example again. This is a personal friend of mine. Right now he's at about 65, 70k a year doing, you know, a little self started journey Great. You know, do most people in the world consider that a breakout success? Well, no, until you realize he lived in his car for 10 years until three years ago, then he had overnight success only happen, you know. You know, but still. Right. So comparatively, where you were before compared to where you are now is amazing. And we always say, you know, the joy is in the journey. You're right. Or that the journey is the gift. And then at the end of the day, we care about the end. So everything you just said, you know, they were, you said cut their teeth in restaurant management, something like that. Like they're doing that. They, you know, started as a busser, they moved into server, they moved into restaurant manager. We forget about the people that don't make it to corporate. We forget about the people that don't start their own chain. That is a lot of progress and personal growth. But it is my feeling that the majority of us look at that and say, well, what have you really accomplished? And I'm having trouble vocalizing this because there is just this weird disconnect with what we say out loud and who we kind of accept at the table, if you will. And I think that's really a good metaphor for this. If you were going to go and start a company, who's at your founders table. And the people that we look for, man, if someone doesn't have some serious wins on their belt, they're not coming. Nobody cares about what they've learned along the way until they have the W. Tell me I'm wrong. Absolutely. It's absolutely correct. And I think that's indicative to the culture, overarching culture we have built in corporate America or in the West, I think generally might not be applicable everywhere, but also raises the question of what is success here? Again, given that we're in the US Might be very different in another geographical, you know, socioeconomic context. Right. Like you give the example of the gentleman making what, 70, 75k a year? Right. I've striked out a way and you go to some other country and it's like, I'll take that dude, he's great. Yeah. Countries where they live on less than $1,000 a month or something like that, like. And so I think again, it raises the question of what success is. Might be very different depending on where you are geographically. Here's a really good conversation. And not to kind of dive in or cut you off, but you'll appreciate this one for me. And let's dive to a real personal level here for a bit as well. So for me you know, I grew up in the special generation, right. Everyone thought they're special. I thought I was awesome. And you had the kind of coming. Every single person in my class was the next Bill Gates and Elon Musk. And then you have that kind of coming to reality moment. But for me, I really struggled with this idea that, oh, you know what, you're not special. And I'm kind of hyper exaggerating this, like, this wasn't like this, you know, fall from grace or anything like that. But for a long time, if we want to talk about personal definitions of success, nothing short of those glorified examples were enough for me. So, for example, when I turned 30, I went through a bit of a spiral because I was never going to be the next Zuckerberg anymore. I had already aged out of that accomplishment. It was no longer attainable. The reality is we see people in their 50s, 60s, or 70s go on to accomplish incredible things. Or later, for that matter. I think the KFC guy, right, he started Arlen Sanders, 50 or so. Yeah, it was the name I wrote down earlier when I said, give me a moment so I can write something down. Same thing. You have 60 years of relatively abject failure. And we remember him because of the last year. I mean, can you name a single job he did before kfc? No, I think he was in the military. That's one. Hence the colonel, right? Yeah, but I am just kind of trying to drive that point forward. But he's one of my main inspirations, to be honest. And the other one, I actually can't remember if it was Domino's or Pizza Hut. I think it was Tom Manahan. But again, you know, his is a story of just repeated, repeated failure until all of a sudden, you know, very late in life, he had one of those. Took off. But going back to the personal anecdote, for me, anything short of that KFC moment wasn't good enough. You know, I was therapy, I was doing counseling, I was talking, you know, is life worth living if I'm just going to be like everyone else? Yeah. So if you talk about what is failure, failure to me was just mediocrity, period. That was my bar. Now don't be mediocre. Yeah, exactly. You know, if I end up my life just like, you know, quote unquote, everybody else. And again, have you quotations, because that is such an arbitrary, such an arbitrary thing to live by. I just couldn't do it right. Again, the special generation. But where I think you might be able to relate is we'll Go through a little bit of my personal journey here in a little bit as well. But now, you know, I'm 35, I have three kids, and I am completely content, completely content to go home and help them and see them raise and grow. My barometer for success has shifted as I age. And a lot of that's to do with my personal experience. A lot of that has to do with clarity. You know, exactly what I would be content with. Having a family has helped also shape that a bit. I don't know why. Having kids, other people that are dependent on you. And it's almost. I almost see it as a. Maybe not necessarily a dichotomy, but it's a tension between the don't be mediocre, hustle, grind, but also you have the family that is dependent on you, which takes time. Sure. Time as a currency or something that once it's lost, it's gone. I'd say it's one of the most expensive resources out there. So it's almost a. You don't want to mediocre, you want to hustle and accomplish great things. But there's also the. Can be at the expense, or at least should not be at the expense of family. And there's almost this tension, this push, pull. Right. There's a quote. It's no amount of success makes up for failure in the home for me. It's interesting because I really like that question. It didn't at first in my mind and gonna avoid being crude here to a degree, but any meth head or drug addict has kids. Anyone can make a kid. And that was my mantra for a long time. That was really destructive. I didn't take any pride in fatherhood. And then you realize that not everyone can raise a child that grows up to be the best that they can be. That's the shift for me. And that did help me kind of evaluate life differently. And my purpose changed dramatically. So. Yeah, no, absolutely. And that makes me think of other. So there's the success and grind, but also time. And how do you balance that? And I heard from a friend that there's no such thing as work life balance. Something always has to give. Well, you can try to balance it to the best of your ability, but I think the point there is like it can be 50, 50, perfectly balanced, right? Oh, yeah. And there are times where you have to hustle more, hopefully communicate that to family, and times where you have to rest and take down time. So it's. For me, it's very much a tension that I'm still figuring out. But once we had a daughter, it's helped center me a little bit more and now it's a tangible thing. And my wife, obviously, but that's something I often grapple with and I sit in that tension. You also said something that made me think of contentment. What the heck does that even mean? Because, you know, content, grateful for these things. But also my fear often is losing the fire, the spark of like pushing and not being, and very afraid of being mediocre. So I really, I, I really like resonate with that bullet and. But what does that mean? Is being content relaxing and just being like, oh, I'm cool, you know, I don't have to push for more for that other 1%? This is another abstract. So let's, let's dive into the personal again because this is just segueing super nice. So when I was really going through that, what is my failure, you asked, was it kids that helped me shift that in Partiality, yes, as I've mentioned. But what really hit it me is if you're online in on LinkedIn or whatever the case may be, everyone's saying, well, you should never sleep more than five hours a day or, you know, 12 day work week or whatever, you know, stupid nonsense that they give. I was falling into all those traps. In 2018, I came down with a brain tumor. Wow. So for me, the next two years of my life, by 2pm I felt like I got hit by a truck. I was not physically capable of the grind as we talk about it. So here I am again. I'm going to reuse the word abject. Abjectly unable to do what psychologically, I'm convinced is the only way to be happy. Can you picture that dichotomy, that paradox? Man, that's torture. It was. It absolutely was. It put me beyond the cancer treatment, chemotherapy and what else? Like also the mental of that. Exactly. And you know, mine was benign, you know, so I didn't have any malignant tumor, but it was still. I mean, the effects on your life are totally radical. I mean, it's the way it jacks you up for it, to use a very technical term. But the psychological damage that I did to myself, and so that's my answer to that question, is I had to come to terms with what is failure. Because here I am in a condition where by that definition I might as well just pull the trigger because I was never, ever, ever going to reach my definition of success. So I went through a somewhat extreme example of reevaluating my life. And determining what is contentment. For me, contentment is being able to wake up, be happy with what I'm doing, go home, be with family and pursue my ambitions. So now I'm kind of doing the nine to five. And some days it sucks, some days it's great. But at the end of the day I realize I'm in a position where I can largely do whatever it is I want. You know, that's maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but I get to be happy. And the reason I put it that way is look at how many people who chase success and aren't. It's not a small number. In fact, I'm willing to say it's most. Because we have this definition of success that is an uncatchable fox and we're going to chase it until we die. Good way to put it. So what is failure? I think it's never coming to terms with what is your own success. You're just dropping bombs here, man. Oh my gosh. That was bomb after bomb. Interesting. Never coming to terms with your definition of success. With your own success. With your own success, what you have accomplished. Yeah, my, my 70k buddy example, I mean that, that is a, that's a journey. That is something to be proud of. If you didn't again the marathon, you didn't cross the 25 point whatever mile mark, who cares? You did something extraordinary. If you can't learn to be happy with that, nothing will. That's failure. Wow. Yeah. It also makes me think when you use the term happy, I know what you're going for. But a mentor of mine shared something with us some months ago and it's, it goes. I think I'm going to butcher this because he sounded a lot more eloquent when he said it. So. And it was said everyone needs to learn to live with a certain degree of low grade disappointment that is necessary for life. Like you can't just bat a thousand in every single thing. There's going to be disappointment. Sorry, welcome to earth. And never coming to terms with that. Of that. Oh, I try to shoot for that, you know, that low grade disappointment. And it's low grade because obviously there's abject disappointment, the big ones, but we always have the low grade. Like that didn't work out, it's a bummer. But then you pick yourself back up and you go again. So that's the letting living with that. Right. And it's something I've often thought about since that conversation. The low grade disappointment not being like a sour party Pooper. But just accepting that it's a given. Yeah, I think that's what makes entrepreneurs and startup founder, which entrepreneurs, that's what makes them superheroes, is their ability to reconcile with those kind of difficulties. Because compared to the average individual, you will have to have a greater tolerance for disappointment than almost anyone else in at least modern western society. So again, going back all around the world is a totally different story. But to your exact point, I see so many people who with the most minor inconvenience or just distraught, they absolutely don't know how to handle it. And I think you and I and others like us view it very differently because those little inconveniences are part of the game, right? For me, happiness is not a life completely devoid of inconvenience. Like it's part of the game. In fact, my tolerance is much higher based on the last five years of my life, I have a very large tolerance for bad. So the way I'll put it, and this is a really good full circle moment, we're going back to the 99% versus the 1, right? What is failure again? If I can keep the train on board for just a few more seconds here. Nope, gone. We'll come back to that. We'll come back to that. I mean, he makes a case for that tolerance, right? That appetite being built in the crucible. There are no shortcuts now, I would say there are some shortcuts from learning from other people's failures. And oh, I did that. This will help you avoid that pain. So I think there's something to be said for that. So, yeah, you could, I guess, call that a shortcut, but you have to learn for yourself as well. Because yes, I could read all the textbooks and hear people tell me a bunch of stuff, but certain things you just have to go through in the trenches, right? You gotta build the moss, you gotta go through that crucible. Hopefully by taking in inputs, right. And synthesizing that from a variety of places you trust it saves you some of that grief. But then it's inevitable that you will go through some kind of trial as an entrepreneur or even just, even if you're not entrepreneur and be working in business, just building resilience, right? Whatever accomplishment. Yeah, so that was the thought. I'm glad you said that that way because as a society, I mean, to just show proof that we really like to view ourselves by our failures, not our successes. Look at what would be the proper term for this? People are remembered for the bad things they did. You know, you go to Prison, that's, that's you for the rest of your life. You could be the world's biggest philanthropist. You do some one thing wrong, that's you for the rest of eternity. That crosses over into many aspects of our lives. And I, I think that's how we view ourselves in the entrepreneurial world as. It doesn't matter how far I've come, I'm not X, right? Or I made this one mistake. So again, all of that personal growth, like you said, I can't bench 350, but man, I got to 345. That's still great. That's an loser. I know. What a moron or whatever the amount may be, but the moral is still there, right? Like you have to shift from a life of inconvenience. So if you were to reframe that completely and all you had was one underlying bad thing and you could see the other 99% of your life is great that that problem goes away entirely. Yeah, entirely. It doesn't exist anymore. If you have learned to reframe from the one thing holding me down to the 99 things propping me up. Absolutely. And this is increasingly becoming, as we talk through this and I think through it personally and even for communities I've built. So I am quite obsessed with building communities and making friends and connections. I mean, my mom reminds me that ever since I learned how to talk, right? We'd go places. So what, three years old or whatever my age was, we'd go places and I would bring someone and be like, hey mom, meet my new friend. And that has been the overarching theme of my life, just making connections, building communities, saying hi Jake, meet Jesse. And connecting that all through my life from my earliest memories, and it's translated right now to building communities in tech, in product, now in government, innovation, working with the likes of the Connection and you and folks like that. But one of the things I've been thinking a lot more about is what exactly when we think of a community, you think of something tangible, a goal, let's do x, let's do 10x better or whatever. But increasingly with community and products are built, I'm thinking more about value. What is the definition of value? So can we just focus on adding value one day at a time, right? Just keep adding value. There's no big goal you're building towards, right? To monetize or whatever, which, yeah, that part of it, maybe another philanthropist that way. But you just want to be a community and you know, make money along the way. But how can you Focus on. So instead of looking at this big, hairy, audacious goal that scares you, maybe it makes you, you have like the. Well, you can't move forward right now. It's just, can you just focus on day in, day out, adding value, asking people questions, how can I add value for you and you and you, and then just delivering that again and again. So that's something I'm thinking a lot more about with things that I built. In this case, communities. How can I just focus and obsess over value? In this case, being a currency to buy. This podcast is filled with so many air quotes today. To buy, you know, the delight, right. And attention of the customers. If I'm adding value for them and like I get value out of this, then they will come back and they're going to tell others about it. So it's not a shortcut. It's just, I think, abstracting away the complexities of thrown in there and just saying, can you just ask people genuinely questions about how to add value for them and then go forth and do that again and again and again. So that's a reframing for me. This is adding huge numbers. I want to grow this to like a thousand people, right. And then obsessing over that as a metric. But for me, it's like, how can I obsess over the little things I can do day in, day out? Well, let's riff on this one. This is good. I'll start by saying you really are a great community builder. Your only fans is nothing shy of impressive. I mean, it's incredible. No, but on a serious note, earlier you had made that comment about shortcuts and you said if you learn from someone else's mistakes, is that a shortcut? I actually disagree entirely. I think that's part of the journey, in fact, not doing that. So let's tie this very Cleanly to the 1% better every day conversation. Right? Or in reality, 0.0001% better or whatever. It maybe because no one's perfect in 100 days. Yeah. The more value you can extract from the journey of others, the more value you will add to yourself. I mean, this is where I really segue from a western to an Eastern philosophy. The cumulative experience of everyone that's gone before you is value. Are you willingly choosing to set it aside and only learn from hard knocks, or do you want to prop yourself up centuries worth of knowledge and advance forward from there? That is going to be value for anyone that you offer. So here's kind of the segue Too, which is, you know, that is growth mindset. Here's a really good example that I was talking about really recently as well, which is, I mean, talked about a fitness goal earlier. Right. And weightlifting. I used to go through and do like two or three times a week and really just kind of kill yourself. And I think we do that a lot with the grind where the corporate, you know, the late hours, whatever it is you're doing, we have these almost manic bursts. But what I did within the last year was what, about a half an hour every day, 15 minutes working on my French, 30 minutes exercising, you know, all of my personal goals. And it was really about consistency. This was partly inspired from you, actually, Nevaeh, you were talking about your podcast. So it's really just a battle in. If one phrase is exercise and futility, the antithesis is can I just be consistent? And that builds up over time. So if you focus on the big bursts, it's oftentimes you burn out and you don't go anywhere. You know, the entrepreneur's journey. With your count, you were talking about 42, 44, 45 members. You want to get to a thousand. If you have one a day, people are going to bat their eyelash until you look back and you have a thousand. That is true. We value the exceptions so much more than the rule in life. And slow and steady growth on this conversation, I think is paramount. Yeah, and it's in my opinion too oftentimes it's more sustainable to sustain that right over time. The quote I was trying to find over here is a Steve Jobs email he sent to himself about a year before his passing. He said something that got me thinking about that over the years. Collective centuries worth of information and lessons ahead of us. So here's what he said. I grow little of the food that I eat and of the little I do grow. I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I did not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language. I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws. I did not conceive or legislate and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music. I did not create myself when I needed medical attention. I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and I'm totally dependent on them for my life and well being and amazing. It just Made me think of again the collective of those gone before us. We can't just be. It's impossible to go through life without in one way, shape or form appreciating or relying on that for our day to day survival. This is probably switching the conversation up a little bit for maybe the original central theme. But man, if you want to talk about the propensity to failure, it goes down in numbers. I mean, I'm getting all sorts of weird places up in my head right now. But as humans, we like to be the alpha predator. We like to be run it alone. You know, we're just us, we're out there doing whatever solo founder. In reality we are really meant to be zebras, which collectively increases your chance of success, whatever success might be. But together, man, just like the quote that you just read. I know so many people that just arbitrarily choose what knowledge to move forward with and what knowledge not to like. You're right, some things are only learned by hard knocks. But some of those things we don't need to go through. Absolutely. Life is always better together. Right? As you and I both know from at a very personal level, marriage. But then friendship, communities, groups, societies, communities. I think I said communities twice because it's important. Yeah, emphasize. Thank you so much for saying that. And you know, I want to bring you together again on the community theme. Third time we're mentioning community. You know I'm building a LinkedIn guild and it's due to some of those things. Right. Like I've grown on LinkedIn over the years and you've had some success yourself. A post going viral post out to you on LinkedIn. But the point, like it's not rocket science and sometimes some of these things are purely accidental. You try a few things and it works. So I'm getting a community around that just focused on the tactical. You tried this, it worked. What are your lessons? Just removing the bs. Right. All the abstractions gurus like to add on that for the pixie dots, like hey, it's not rocket science. Yes, there are a few key things you might do to help, but really here it is. And freely sharing that again and along the subtext of value. Here's a thought before I lose it that I find really interesting. This is my own aha moment occurring right now when we talk about the herd mentality. I firmly believe that your chance of success increases the more you surround yourself with like minded and talented people. That goes immediately against the grain of what our current society views success. How can I be successful if everyone else around me is the same, success is only surviving alone. In our book, we have to be different than those around us. So what we've created is a literally a temporal paradox in which the way to succeed is together, but our definition of success is alone. That is a paradox. Yeah, I'm going to have to think on that for a bit. There's so many weird dichotomies and conflicting ideas we have and even things that may not make sense. So we succeed together. But the path of the entrepreneur is to go there alone and sling it out and get it done and leaving the herd to do your thing. There's also the way to truly stand out right from the sea of the collective out there is by differentiating yourself. And there's some truth to that of when others are zigging, you zag. That's right. There's just all of these things, and it's a mixed bag. Right. There are times where you have to do your own thing because they heard. If everyone's saying the same thing, then okay, I really appreciate it. So there's. It's a tension. There's a lot of this tension everywhere. And I'm like, it befuddles the mind. And again, it brings me back to having people in your corner, mentors and stuff that can help you decipher some of that, because there's a lot of conflicting advice out there and intentions to sit in. And how do you know, okay, be in the collective and work with the group. But there are times where you should go off alone. You should be the person who stands up and does it differently. And then now everyone is like, oh, that's the way to do it. And they come over to you again. So it's weird tension. I really like that. I actually really glad you took us down that path because I was starting to lean into that kind of better together type thing. But you're right. I think what really defines entrepreneurial success, this is deviating from the previous conversation of success versus failure, is knowing from which pool to draw. Right? So if you say that you're trying to build a bridge one piece of straw at a time, you're not going to cross the chasm on a few pieces of straw. Right? So to your earlier point about my stupid viral LinkedIn post, which was the most arbitrary, stupid thing I've ever done, we're gonna have to put a link to that post to come back around to it. Oh, man. It takes a lot of straw. So you said, how do you get to that point? How do you know the LinkedIn guru is saying, how do you do this? I don't think I have reached my own inflection point to make this really meta. Right. With the name of the podcast. I think I am still accumulating straw and I need to determine where the next piece comes from because eventually it will be thick and sturdy enough to cross that point. But it comes from very small daily actions. And that's my challenge to you, even redefining inflection point. Because my argument and thesis is it's a series of small inflection points, however subtle, right. You may not even notice them. It might be in retrospect, in hindsight, you look back like, oh, that was a little inflection point. Because we, again, culturally, I think we see inflection points as major turning points of you're going direction, it's like going that direction. And mathematically is the curvature right on a circle or a circular object the point of curve. But you know, before it's very obvious, it's subtle changes. And that's what I want to lean into is the daily, the daily small micro nano inflection points, right, that we have are taking the time to breathe, think and to notice them. Because once we start looking out for those little inflection points, the world is teeming with them. Our lives are teeming with them and in other people's lives and we can piggyback off that. So that's my challenge. It's like, it's not just the big inflection points, but like a series of small ones. It might amount to much over time, but it's very subtle at times. I love full circle moments and this is really a good one because one of the first things we said in this dialogue was failure is really just stopping, right? You fail and fail and fail until you succeed. It's on this conversation of inflection points, I mean, you're, you're hitting each point until you kind of take off right on, on the end of that curve. Success begets success. But at any point of those points that you're referring to, you stop. That momentum goes away, right? So in my life, you're right, I probably have had several really key moments that have started to fling me upwards. But if at any point I really do just fully stop, that goes bye bye, right? It goes away, or at least it's on hold, Right. I don't know that you return to state zero or anything like that. Yeah. So let's go Back to the LinkedIn post. I love the phrase Luck is opportunity meets preparation. Hopefully I got that right. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. How many times do I post today? I mean I'm. I'm futile and eventually one hits that strikes the right chord and what I really love about that one too is maybe we can lean into this a little bit. Is opportunity meets preparation. I didn't spend a lot of time preparing that. That was just an off the cuff thing, you know, I'm just, I'm like your podcast that you said, right? You're. It's about consistency, it's about doing, proving to myself that I can moving forward and eventually something just clicks, right? At least that was my, my experience in that particular instance, to speak anecdotally, but I think that's true everywhere too. Networking, right? We view it as transactional a lot of times, but it's really not. It's about not what can a nebby do for me, but who does a nebby know and who do they know and who do they know and who do they know that eventually crosses down, Right. The wider the net, the higher the probability of doing something. So again, back to the straw, back to the multiple points. Everything comes down to have you crafted a large enough net of various actions and activities to catch that success when it comes? Yeah, some folks call it, I think Sahil Blum was the first person, I don't know if this original to him that talked about this, but talked about increasing your luck surface area. Yes. Right. And the more you do not doesn't mean you stretch thing all the time. But like there's this idea of, you know, as you experiment on multiple things, you meet more people, you do all of that, right. It improves the likelihood of something good happening for you, whatever that is, or a series of good things, some big, some small happening because you are in a bunch more places. So you're widening that net like you said. And that's something I think about a lot more often after. I think I came across that about a year or two ago. The idea of the luxur face area being wider and wider and wider. I like that because when I started in my entrepreneurial journey 12 to 15 years ago, I was part of a Facebook group, Speaking communities for entrepreneurs. And the mantra was, you can't chase two foxes or no, as a fox, you can't chase two hares. You have to pick one or you'll never catch either. And like, yeah, okay, that's you know, platitudinal and cute, I guess. Or then you have the antithesis, if you look at it From a marketing perspective, push versus pull. You're the fisher. You're throwing your lures in the water. And enough lures, you'll catch a fish. Okay, great. I presented a new one. I'm the entrepreneurial farmer. I'm going to continue to water a whole variety of crops. I like that. And as I have aged, they have started to bloom. We're going to have so many quotes out of these podcasts. Entrepreneur, farm entrepreneur. Yeah, I like that. It's a slow game, too, though, right? You want to go back to all of the conversations we've had today? It is a very slow game, and it relies on slow daily activity towards assured success. Yeah. You don't know when that flywheel is going to hit on any one of those things. When does it germinate? When does it propagate? When does it seed? That's really good. Thanks for sharing that. And with that, this was fantastic. Like, what is one key thing, if nothing else, you want folks to carry away from this? I'll say something that we didn't really even talk about a whole lot. Because I pondered in preparation for this, I considered what would be my kind of goal for people, and it would be to look at those around you differently. I think that there are so many talented entrepreneurs who didn't make it. More air quotes who didn't get that unicorn that are still incredibly talented. Don't discount them because they didn't cross the finish line. They're still faster and stronger and smarter than most people you will ever meet. Absolutely. Did you have calloused hands? They've been in the trenches. Thank you so much for sharing that. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for making the time. Thanks for having me. This is cool. Of course.