Episode 16: On Failing, Pivoting, and Letting Go

In this episode of Decoding the Unicorn: The Podcast, I'll discuss what a lot of creators are too afraid to say out loud: what happens when you put your heart into a project and it goes absolutely nowhere.

This episode is about giving yourself permission:

to try something new
to have a "box office flop"
to walk away without shame or hustle-fueled martyrdom

Whether you’ve launched something that fizzled or you’re quietly holding on to a project that no longer fits, this episode offers you a soft place to land—and a reminder that real creativity isn’t about success at all costs. 

#DecodingTheUnicorn #DagHammarskjöld #LetItGo #PivotWithGrace #OnlineCourseTruth #CreativeDiscernment #CreativeClarity #CreativeFreedom 

Transcript

 Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Permission to fail, hustle culture, type A personality, diplomacy, successful people, experimentation, comparison, Hollywood illusion, social media, beta testers, online courses, market research, audience validation, introverts, leadership.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn Podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 16 of decoding the unicorn the podcast. In today's episode, I want to talk about giving yourself permission to try something and fail, giving yourself permission to make a change experiment, see if it works out for you, and if it doesn't, that's okay very often in western world, hustle culture, and certainly for those of us like myself, that I would consider myself to be a recovering type A personality, sometimes the recovery is debatable. But, you know, I've made some progress. We have the tendency to think, if I'm not immediately good at something, I shouldn't try it, or if I attempt it once, it doesn't go the way that I want it to, at first blush, it's just not meant to be. I shouldn't try again. I never should have tried it in the first place. I'm a failure. Et cetera. I'm thinking of a speech that dag gave where he said some conflicts are not so much solved outright as they are outgrown. And that's a very savvy and mature way of looking at diplomacy. There were times that he had to deal with conflicts where people were not willing to compromise, people were willing to die on the hill, neither side was willing to make a change. And he realized, instead of fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and trying and trying and trying. Sometimes, letting a situation breathe is the smartest thing that we can do, allowing time and tide to roll along so that the players change. The vitriol cools down, and it's almost like the situation itself stops and takes a breath. We can do that too. In our own personal lives, we're able to say, if I try something new and it's not a smashing overnight success, that doesn't mean that I personally am a failure. In fact, successful people fail all the time. You've probably heard the phrase fail often and fail fast. You've probably also heard a number of successful entrepreneurs talk about how many ideas they've had that stunk, how many things they tried that didn't work before they found the thing that did, or before they found the niche that really made them happy. So we have to get out of this mentality that I'm not allowed to experiment. I'm not allowed to try something new, or to try something on, or to realize that I'm outgrowing a particular situation, and it's time to move forward, but I just want to stay stuck, because if I'm not an A plus student, if I'm not this, if I'm not that, if I'm not making money hand over fist immediately, then I just can't do it. It was a waste of time. How many opportunities do we pass by? Or do we let go of because we simply thought, well, it wasn't fast enough. It wasn't good enough. I'm comparing myself to somebody else, and it seems like they have more, and they got there faster, and I'm not far enough along. If any of this is resonating with you, stay tuned.

So what's new with you? Work sucks. My boss acts more like a tyrant than a manager, and my coworkers are just caught in the mix. 

Oh, I know more than half of them don't seem to know what they're doing. They just toss buzzwords around. It's a joke.

I feel like those 90s infomercials. There's got to be a better way. 

There is a better way. Every manager should be required to read Sara Causey's book, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld it's an amazing book about an even more amazing man. 

I usually don't read biographies I've tried in the past, but they're often so academic and boring. 

Nope, not a dry biography. You should check it out on Amazon. I think you'll like it.

I will. Thanks for the suggestion.

Decoding the Unicorn by Sara Causey, available on Amazon.

We all know that Hollywood and social media are carefully curated. People tend to make sure that their hair is fixed, their makeup is just so they're wearing a certain kind of outfit. And when it comes to really slick professional marketers, they just don't leave anything to chance, the color of the background, the type of clothing, the way that their hair is combed, whether or not they're wearing glasses, all of these things have been carefully selected to evoke a certain response from the viewer. The. Yeah, and yet we know this, but at the same time, we will compare ourselves to other people and wonder, well, how come I don't have a body like that, or how come my smile is not that perfect? How come I have bad hair days? And why am I dealing with acne? And why this? And why that? It's like we know that it's fake. We know that it's an illusion, yet some part of us wants the illusion to be real. I'm thinking now of Blanche DuBois in street car. I don't want realism. I want magic. The problem is, in reality, when we don't have teams, we're not celebrities, we don't have teams of people who can curate our wardrobe, and we don't have dietitians and personal chefs and plastic surgeons on call where it's like if there's one wrinkle we don't like, if there's one little bulge of fat that we feel self conscious about, we suddenly have every option at our disposal to get rid of it in a matter of days, maybe less than that. So it's ridiculous for us to compare ourselves to people that are in that situation, and yet we do, even if we're not conscious of it. So often we do, then we get scared to experiment. We feel like we need to stay small. If I can't be as successful as this singer or this actress or this academy award winning person, I guess I just won't even try. If I write a novel and it goes nowhere, my ego can't stand it, I'll be too scared to ever try again. Julia Cameron talks about this kind of thing in The Artist's Way. She describes this man who made a short documentary film about his father, and he took it to a trusted professor, and the professor just savaged it, just absolutely gutted the documentary. And the man who made it, and he thought, Well, my gosh, this person I trust has said it's garbage, so I guess I better just put it away. And he put it away, and he locked it in the basement, and the basement flooded. There was this whole terrible story where he thought he would never be able to see the film again, but actually he did. There was a company that had archived the film for him, like an extra copy of the film. They still, by some miracle had it, and he was able to retrieve the documentary and work on it again, and other people saw it and said, this is actually great. Why did that guy savage it? He doesn't know what he's talking about. So we look at other people, or we listen to other people's criticism, and then we think, I guess I better stuff myself in a box and stay really small because this one person that I trusted said that they didn't like my play, or they didn't like my novel, or they didn't like my interpretive dance, and so now I'm just crushed. I'll never try again. We also have a lot of pressure to project success in everything that we do, even though successful entrepreneurs will tell you you have to fail often and fail fast. A lot of people don't want to actually discuss the failures. They don't want to get into the technicalities of Yeah, I tried this, and it simply did not go well. Spoiler alert, it simply did not go well. But I'm willing to buck that trend. So last year in q4 I had this idea, and I really wanted to create a program for introverts and HSPs that were interested in management or leadership, because I know what it's like to be in that situation. I worked in corporate America for years, and for a long time I was passed over for promotions. I finally did become a branch manager, and that was a story in and of itself, but for a long time, I would be told, You're not social enough, you don't speak up enough. You'd have to play the game. You'd have to be a lot more political at work in order to be a manager. And I wanted to create a program based on my 15 years of experience in HR and staffing that spoke to introverts and HSPs that are more so looking to be intrapreneurs. They're not looking to be entrepreneurs, to start their own thing and try to run their own business because, believe me, that has challenges and headaches of its own. They want to plug it at a company and be able to really influence the culture. They want to be in an environment that's not loud aggressive jazz hands all the time, and to show that managing in that way is actually a better way of managing. I talk about this a lot in decoding the unicorn, because we can look at the way that dag as an introvert and an HSP was a people manager, and it's just outstanding in so many ways. He was ahead of his time. And I wanted to make a program, and I worked on it. I did courses, I did a workbook, I had some beta testers work on it and give me their feedback. Now, here's a little bit of of inside baseball. Here's some secret sauce, because, again, a lot of people are not willing to tell you this sort of thing, but I will, beta testers and beta readers tend to fall into two distinct camps. It is very difficult to find anybody in the middle. They either love what you're doing, they say they do and they act like Susie sunshine or their old school, Simon Cowell. Now I'm not talking about Simon Cowell in the modern era where he's like, I didn't like it. I loved it. And he's very soft, and he it's a new Simon and all of that. I'm talking about old savage Simon Cowell from back in the aughts, the original American Idol, where he would be like, when you sing, you sound haunted. That was awful. You need to fire your singing coach. Terrible, horrid. That's Simon Cowell. You get one of two people. Susie sunshine, I love it. It was the best thing I ever read. This was the most awesome product ever. Thank you. Or old school, Simon Cowell, it was awful. I hated it. I wouldn't pay a dime. And you're like, Oh, geez. What about people in the middle? What about somebody that's more like representative of more of the population. When we think of the bell curve, the people on the one side, the people on the other side, and then the whole like 80% of the population in the middle. Where are those people? But beta testers and beta readers have the tendency to be in one of those two camps. So I got the Susie sunshine people. This is great. I would buy this. We worked on the price point. Well, at what point do you feel like it adds value, but it's not cost prohibitive. Worked on all of that things with my all of those things with my beta testers. Launched the product, promoted it. I ran Google ads. I ran YouTube ads. So nobody can say, well, you just threw it out into the marketplace and didn't put any kind of spotlight on it. Oh, I did. Sold zero copies, zero. And I'm like, Wow, all right, and I felt bad about that, but at the same time, I'm like, Okay, wait a minute. I don't want to get into the fallacy of sunk costs. What that means is it's kind of like the person that's sitting at the slot machine in Las Vegas, and they think I've already put five grand into this slot machine. It's gonna pay out at some point, right, right? If I sit here long enough, I will eventually hit the jackpot. It will erase all my losses, and everything will be fine. They may sit there till kingdom come and they don't win any money out of that slot machine, and then the next person that comes and puts a quarter in it when wins the jackpot. In fact, we can't look at it as I've already dug a hole this deep, so I might as well keep digging and make the hole even deeper. I just did not want, and I did not feel that it was the right thing to do to spend 1000s of dollars trying to engineer or reverse engineer a sales funnel, because people that are in that line of work, oh my God, there's so much confusion and obfuscation. It's like an old episode of The Match Game, the blank on the blank and the blank on the blank, and you're sitting there like, what? What are you even talking about right now? Talking about right now? Well, it could be the sales funnel, it could be the landing page, it could be the sales copy, it could be the color scheme, it could be the ads. It could be the placement of the ads. It could be your budget. You're like, Oh, my God, this is just ridiculous. And I I knew deep down in my gut, I just don't want to spend 1000s of dollars trying to figure out why the funnel is not working.

In my heart, I realized like I'm a creator, I'm a writer, I'm an artist. I'm not interested in trying to be an online course creator. I'm not interested in trying to beg people to pay attention. I personally think that we need more introverts. We need more HSPs in leadership, in management, in politics, but I can't force anybody to do that. And I started to realize, like it may be, as they should say on Shark Tank, you may have come up with a solution to a problem that very few people have, very few people are aware that they have and it's just not of interest to them. And that's okay. It could be that there are other people out there solving this problem. They're doing it better. They have better marketing, and people are not interested in saddling up to take the ride with me, and that's okay, too. The whole just sell an online course. Somebody will pay for your knowledge. You've got some skill, you've got some, some something rattling around in your brain that somebody will pay for. There's something in there that has become a huge industry, and it's a lot like an MLM or a pyramid scheme. Team, I went to Google to just ask why selling online courses does not work now, when they give us their little AI overview, which I guess is pulled together by Gemini, not sure. Here's what we learn, selling online courses can be challenging, and many creators struggle to achieve significant sales. Common reasons for failure include insufficient market research, a lack of audience, building poor marketing strategies and neglecting student support. Essentially creating a great course isn't enough. You need to understand your audience, validate your idea, and then effectively promote your offering. Here's a more detailed look at why online courses might not sell. Number one, lack of market research and idea validation. The problem. Creating a course without understanding the market demand or validating the course, idea can lead to a product that doesn't resonate with potential learners. Solution before creating a course, conduct thorough market research to identify niche opportunities, understand the target audience's needs and analyze existing competition, validation before launching, get feedback on your course idea from potential students. This can involve soft launches, beta testing, or even offering a free or low cost introductory module. As I've told you, my experience with beta testers and beta readers. You get the two camps, Simon Cowell from the aughts, or Susie sunshine, and that's not helpful. If somebody rips you to shreds and says, this is awful, I hated it horrid. That's not super helpful. If it is horrid, I guess then maybe it is. But if you know that the idea has merit, and somebody is just being really hateful. This is awful. I hated it. Not helpful to you. But then neither is Susie sunshine. Oh, this is great. I would totally buy this. I would totally recommend it to my friends, and then when it's time for them to do that, ghost, we also have not building an audience first week marketing and sales strategies, poor course pricing, lack of student support and community building, not considering the human element. So that would be like if a course creator thinks a lot about the technical aspects, but they don't think about making it engaging and motivational. And then last, but in my mind, not least, focus on selling rather than teaching. Some creators treat online courses as purely a sales opportunity and neglect the educational aspect. But this happens over and over again, because the people telling you to create a course are selling you on the idea of creating a course. I did some further research, and I found that if you have a kind of unmanned, self paced course, which that's what I had put together, I didn't want to be responsible for shepherding somebody through. I wanted them to shepherd themselves through at their own pace and in their own timing. As an introvert, I didn't want to stand over them. And if I were an introverted student, I wouldn't want somebody standing over me either. I'd want to do the course whenever I had time to do it. The thing is, with courses like that, they tend to have a three to 15% completion rate, and that's it. So even if people had been purchasing the course, you would have had such a small percentage of people actually finishing the course and getting something out of it, that it's really rather sad. So again, I'm like, I just don't think that this is a direction that I want to go in. It's not compelling enough. It's not, I don't I don't feel strongly enough that this is a hill that I want to die on. I don't want to spend 1000s of dollars trying to figure out why this program is not working. I can just let it go. I love writing. I love creating. I've recently made the decision to start doing my own illustrations as well. So there's been a learning curve there, learning Photoshop for the first time and learning how to use a Microsoft Surface Pro and a stylus pen and all of these things that other people who've done it for years take for granted. I'm having to learn like a complete newbie, and I'm also learning about my style. What is my style as an illustrator? Not what I imagined that it would be, but what is it in reality? And I'm having so much fun with that, so much fun. And I'm like, I just don't feel that it makes sense for me to get pulled away to try and sell a course that it doesn't seem like anybody really wants. And that's okay. I can outgrow that idea and say, I tried it, it didn't go the way that I wanted it to and that's all right, I can integrate some lessons from it and move on down the road, maybe with a few bumps and bruises and a little bit of a sore ego, but it'll heal. I have other things in my life to feel proud of and to relish, and it feels good, as dag said, Some problems are not necessarily outright. Solve they're outgrown. Sometimes we get into a place and we realize this seemed like a good idea at the time, but I've outgrown it now. It just it's like a shoe that doesn't fit anymore, and I don't think I want to use it, and that's okay. Take good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

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