There are only a few people in the world who can say that they have made a success out of failing. Sunil Gupta is one of those people, the only person to ever be invited twice to fail. Con the author of Backable and a serial entrepreneur. We sat down and talked about the importance of failing and the lessons we can learn. This is a bit of optimism. So here's what I wanted to talk to you about. You teach innovation, which is a whole another topic where the innovation can be taught, but that we will table that one for all intensive purposes. You teach innovation, and I know heart of what goes with innovation is failure and that you have to fail to innovate because it's an iterative process. We have raised a generation of kids, it seems, that are afraid of failing. If there's a group of people coming up through school who are working very hard, afraid of failure, afraid of looking bad all the things, and I think that's probably you could say that for a lot of young kids. But it's a very high performing young generation. We have for the past probably twenty year so thirty years, and then they hit the real world and I've experienced this firsthand, and for the first time in their lives, things aren't going according to plan, their parents can't really fix it. So riddle me this, how do you teach failure and the importance of failure to people who are now young adults who may have not worked that muscle. Well, I think it begins by being open about your own failures. And it was interesting for me to get a call from Harvard Med School saying, hey, would you like to teach this subject? Because I wasn't smart enough to get into Harvard and I wasn't smart enough to get in the medical school. And one of the things that sort of drew them to me was this article that was published years ago on failure. And I'll tell you the story. I get a phone call. This is after two of my startups have failed, after you know, I've gone through ups and downs in my career, more downs than ups, and I get asked to keynote this conference called fail Con, which stands for Failure Conference. And it's this kick me while I'm down moment, because I get this phone call saying, hey, we're organizing this conference on failure and we would love for you to be the keynote speaker, and so I do, and I didn't know that there was a reporter from The New York Times in the audience and fast forward to a full length article on failure with my face as the cover of this article, and you know it is. It is an article also that goes very viral. You could have googled failure at that time and my face would have been one of the top first results. Ended up happening actually was I had a conversation with a friend of mine who I grew up with outside of Detroit. We used to go to temple together, and he reminded me of a story that we were told as kids, and it was a story that the Buddha told his disciples, which is that every time someone feels pain, there are two arrows that are fired. One arrow is the arrow that punctures your skin, and the other arrow is the arrow where you ascribe meaning to the pain. So how are you going to find some meaning out of this? Was what he challenged me to do. And the way that I tried to do that is by emailing basically everybody that I admired, and I would email them the article proactively, and I would say in the email listen. As you can see from this article, I don't know what I'm doing, but would you be rather and grab coffee, grab a phone call? And the response rate to that email was insanely high. But more importantly, the conversations were honest, because it wasn't like the classic networking hey help me succeed conversation. It was like, here's my string of failures. I'm putting it out in the open, and as it turns out, they would share their string of failures. And so I think it begins with that cracking this nut that I think we always knew was true, which is that the version of the people that we admire today is not the version that they started out as. There were mistakes, there were setbacks, there were failures, and I think as long as we can put those into domain over and over again, we start to realize that we can do it too. I would argue, though, that you had one massive, huge advantage over the rest of the world, which is your mother. Your mother couldn't be overprotective. She taught your resilience because of her experience. I mean, Mom's story is incredible. It's what drove me to write my book. It's what I think. It still fuels me every day as a father, as an entrepreneur. Mom grew up in a refugee camp on the border of Pakistan and India, no running water, no electricity, but she did something really amazing. She taught herself how to read. And the first book that she read from cover to cover was the biography of Henry Ford. And after reading this biography, she tells herself and everybody around her, I want to be an engineer with Ford Motor Company. This is her vision. It's unlikely, if not impossible, But her parents get behind the dream. They get behind the vision. They save every penny or rupie they had. She gets on a boat, gets to the United States, ends up getting a scholarship to Oklahoma State University of all places, graduates as the only female in her engineering class. The next day, drives to Detroit, Michigan to apply for her dream job. Finds her way somehow into a room with a hiring manager at Ford Motor Company. And this hiring manager looks at her resume, and he looks at her application and he says, wait, wait a second, are you applying for the job of an engineer? And she says yeah, and he says, well, I'm sorry. You know, we actually don't have any female engineers working here right now, because this was the nineteen sixties and Ford Motor Company, by the way, is in its heyday, like it's doing very well. They have thousands upon thousands of engineers on staff, but not a single one of them is a woman. And so in this moment, you know, my mom is deflated. She picks up her resume, she picks up her purse, and she begins to walk out of the room. And then, almost like in this last ditch moment, she turns around. She looks this guy in the eye, and she tells him her story about all the struggle, about all the sacrifice that it took for her to get to this country, to get to Detroit, to get to this very room, and then she says to him, look, things are changing, and if you don't have any female engineers on staff, then do yourself a favor and hire me. Now, this guy is so moved in this meeting that he decides to leave and go fight with his colleagues, go fight with everybody around him to make this happen. And in nineteen sixty seven, she becomes Ford Motor company's first female engineer. Amazing. So that dream in that story served your mother. But you grew up in the United States of a mother who was an engineer at Ford Murder Company. Yeah, and so you didn't grow up without running water, etc. So you didn't have to teach yourself how to read. And yet your mother somehow taught you perseverance and grit and how to endure failure. Can you tell me some of the specific things that she did. Tell me one story of something specific she did that you know, she drilled into you. She parented you differently than the other kids in your school. Look, there is one There is one thing, and it's a decision simon that I think my mom made. And the decision that she made or pretty early on, is that we were you know, I was born in a town called Livonia, and we were we had outgrown the house when I was born, and we we wanted to make a move and there was a decision that they had made. And the decision was do we move to a place do we move to a town where there are a lot of Indian people? Because there was such a town. Most of the Indian folks that we knew were kind of creating and sort of like the Bloomfield Hills Farmington sort of area. But there was a new town called Nova, which didn't have very many Indian people at all. In fact, we didn't know any and my mom was the one that pushed for us to go to Nova, for us to go to the all white community. And there were a lot of times when Sunday my brother and I would would ask her, like, why the hell did you do this? Like we're getting picked on all the time in school, we're getting bullied all the time. And our answer was, look, you got to learn how to deal with that now, Like you got to learn how to figure this out, because if you don't, then you know, you're going to grow up always wanting to sort of comfort yourself with people who look just like you, and that's just not the way that the world works. So I think that's an example of the way that I think she liked a parent, which is I think, in some ways just like throw us in the deep end. Yeah, though it makes sense, you know, take your kids to a place where they're going to be uncomfortable and teach them to endure discomfort because that the real world. That bit of parenting is horrific for a modern parent to choose to take your kid to a place where they're more likely to get bullied so that the kid can learn to endure difficulty. I don't know if a modern parent can do that, would do that. You know the stories of Richard Branson, his mom dropping him off three miles away from home and saying see you when you get home so he can learn to find his way home. Well, look what that did. It made him one of the great problem solvers, one of the great entrepreneurs. But you know, this is the question which is in our very sincere desire to protect our children, have we accidentally over indexed into the overcddle? And now the thought of throwing our kids in the deep end is just not on. There is no more deep end. The whole pool is shallow end. I think there's a lot of truth to that. Are you as intense as your mom and how you're raising your kids to deal with struggle and discomfort or do you find yourself sort of like sliding into the modern philosophies of parenting. I find myself sliding into the modern philosophies of parenting, no doubt about that. I do think that My job in a lot of ways is to be this conduit for her energy. How do I have that sort of come through? I don't quite know how to do that. Every morning I play this little game with my daughters. I ask them two questions. I ask them what is the meaning of life? And they say, to find your gift? And then I say, well, what is the purpose of life? And they say, to give it away? Meaning of life is to find your gift purposes to give it away. It's my favorite quote from Picasso, And sometimes I wonder whether I'm doing enough to give them the grit that it would take to do that right. It's nice to have sort of a punchline, it's nice to have a phrase, but in my sort of showing them what it would take to sort of get to that point. Have you noticed a difference in the first cadre of students you had to the current cadre in the way they approach risk. I think that there have been more stories out there now than there were even five years ago of people who have hit it big out the gate, and I don't know whether that's a good thing or not. Like I think five years ago it was still Facebook, it was still Snapchat, but there weren't like this long tail of stories of people who just like hit hit hit, and that I think has sort of given people in some ways more confidence, but I think in other ways it has made it look easy. Right, And again it comes back to those stories of failure. I used to have this slide that I would put up during my lectures which would show the paths of people like Richard Branson, the paths of people like Elon Musk that they had actually they had actually failed multiple times before they actually got their first hit. I don't necessarily have as many of those stories right now for some of the younger entrepreneurs, and I'm not saying that we should have more of those, like good for them or for having quick success, but I think it also might set sort of a bit of a bad precedent that like, hey, it's easy, and so I think my job in some ways is to is to retain optimism right as you do, but at the same time, you know, let them know that, hey, like if it doesn't happen right away, that's just a stepping stone to the next thing. Yeah, I hear you, and I agree with you. And the problem is talk is cheap right, Like we can sit here and say, you know, failures are really important part. But the problem is is there's now this unrealistic expectation and there's still millions and millions and millions of businesses that are started and exist small businesses. The vast majority will fail in the first three years. And the ones that we celebrate and put the cover in magazines and we know the names of the companies and sometimes the CEOs celebrity CEOs is they did become twenty something year old billionaires. And now everyone who starts a startup thinks, you know, I'm five years away from being a billionaire, right. And one of the things I think they completely miss is that in every case they became billionaires by accident. They were driven by something else, and the money came afterwards. It was an unintended byproduct. Even if they lose sight of what they were doing in the first place and became money obsessed later, the trajectory was very different. And so it raises this is an interesting question, which is a generation that's growing up with unrealistic expectations of what it takes to succeed, and even more in realistic expectations of what success even means, you know, if you can make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, like you were blown the doors off compared to the vast majority of Americans, whether you own your own small business or not, millions is rough and billions is damn near impossible. I have not met a company. I have not met a founder yet who set out to become a unicorn that became a unicorn, right right, Like that was the exactly right, exactly right, this idea of what actually sort of makes you tick, like what actually makes you come alive. And I know again that's we're getting back to catchphrases here. But bear with me for a moment, because I think back to the first time that it'll be the name of our episode. It'll be catchphrases or a bear with me for a moment. Yeah, But I remember having left Groupon and I had then a group on Early and groupon became you know, quote unquote a unicorn, although it had had massive ups and downs, and I remember leaving and knowing that I wanted to go start a company. What I did was this is classic almost business school analysis. I had this spreadsheet, I had columns. I had column A was the ideas and in column C was a competition market size, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I remember going to a mentor of mine and asking her like, hey, what do you think, Like, what do you think of this? These ideas? Which which stand out to you? And she looks at the list and then she looks at me and she's like, let me ask you a question, which of these ideas actually makes you come alive? And I look back at the list and I realized, like, none of them really made me come alive. But so, Neil, these were your tickets to fame and start them and unicornness exactly the story that she told me, which I continue to love. You've probably heard this one before, which is it when Martin Luther King was really stepping into his leadership role. I always forget how young he was. He's in his twenties. And he went to go see a mentor of his guy named Howard Thurman, and you know, he was trying to he's trying to sort of figure out what steps he should make, whether he should do this. And Howard Thurman said like, don't just ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive? Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive, and e commerce did not make me come alive. And that's and that's when I made this hard shift into into health because for me, like you know, I grew up in a household where my dad really struggled with his health. He hit his first triple bypass surgery when he was in his forties and we had to go through that journey with him. That to me was the thing emotionally that sort of made me come alive. How do we take some of the things that work for him and make it available for more people. You hear this a lot. Somebody was struggling a therapist to help them. They refound happiness and they devoted their life to being a therapist so they can do the same for others. You know, when when somebody helps us, we know what that feels like, and we want to do that for someone else. And here you are, You lived in a household of emotional struggle watching your father go through these medical challenges, and you realize medicines for me because I've seen what the doctors have done for my father, and that makes a lot of sense to me. I can't get off this because I'm trying to understand it. You know that is at randomness that you had a father who struggled with his heart, and so you realize the value of medicine, and you and your brother go into medicine. If we keep our kids hidden and covered in cotton wool, then it reduces the likelihood of those opportunities to be exposed to something that could profoundly set them on a path of purpose. I wasn't expecting this conversation to go so deep so quickly, but I mean, where you take me, Simon, is a concept that I learned as a kid, which is which is darma. The best interpretation of darma in the English language is that which sustains this thing inside you that you don't have to continue sort of relighting over and over again, because it's just there. You know, with the healthcare startup that I ended up doing, it did fine, it didn't knock it out of the park. We ended up selling the company. I had mixed feelings about selling it because again, not fantastic outcome, not not unicorn by any stretch of the imagination. And I'm at a healthcare conference a few months later, and like, there's this founder up on stage and he's got he's got the company with all the rage, right, like he's getting the articles. Everybody's tuned into what he has to say. And I'm just in the audience. I'm not even speaking at this conference. I'm just sitting in the audience. He doesn't even know I'm there, and we have never met. But during Q and A, somebody asks him, like, what motivated you to start this company? Well, tell me, tell me about some of the things that inspired you. And he said, you know, one of the companies that I really looked at carefully that inspired me was a company called Rise That was my company. And I guess that the lesson that that that taught me was that like, even if you don't reach your intended destination, you still touch and teach people along the way, right, you still end up having this impact. And the question is are you truly here like for the impact and that in that one area? Right? Is that is that truly the thing that you want to sort of move need on? When I ask people like what do they care about? They care about impact. I want to have impact on the world, right, But I think we have to go more specific than that. What exactly is that thing that whether or not your name is on the impact. Is it just the same to you or is it is it? Are they both wins? Because the answer that is yes, then I get I think you're getting closer to your to your dharma. The way you describe dharma. I hear inspiration, this flame that's lit inside you that doesn't go out. But I think we're adding another layer to this, because I mean, let's be honest, this is pretty multi layer, which is the definition of success does include credit. I think to give up credit is selfless, and with fear of failure comes a weird selfishness because let's be honest, it's about me, my failure versus my success. I wonder if we can teach young people to endure failure when they learn cooperation and teamwork first, because now it's now no longer my failure. It's about us. It's about us. Yeah, and it's not about me getting credit. It's about us having an impact, not me making an impact. Because I think that's also a twisted concept because when somebody says I want to make an impact, well, newsflash, you're probably not going to do anything by yourself. Yeah, I want to join a team that we can make an impact. I want to be a part of something that makes an impact is not only more accurate, it's also more attainable versus going from job to job to job to job. And you and I have both seen this saying I'm not making an impact. I'm not making an impact. You're missing the point. You have the word I in there when we think about creativity, and in a bay we've been told that it's sort of this two step formula. You come up with a great idea and then you execute on it really well. But I think what you're pointing out is this is this hidden step in between where it's not just you. You've brought in other people. It's early colleagues, early team members, early investors, early partners that are as much part of this whole thing as you are, and they feel that level of ownership so that by the time that you actually reach execution stage, like, it's a group of people who felt like it was your idea, it wasn't just the person who came up with it in the first place. I know of one of those unicorns where when the company went gangbusters and the founders became billionaires, one of them, at least one of them. I only know this story from one made a long list and sent a bunch of people that had influenced him or somehow believed in him for his entire life. He sent them a bunch of stock. I love it basically to say thank you. Though you're not an investor, I wouldn't be where I am today it weren't for you in some way, shape or form, whether you were a friend or a teacher or whatever it was. And I think that humility and recognizing that I didn't do this alone is the thing that's missing. And so I'm going to go back to your class now, which is in your wonderful, amazing, incredible class that you teach innovation. How do you teach teamwork? I think we teach teamwork through the idea of dependence, right, like knowing that you cannot actually do this by yourself. And part of that is trying to get people who have different skill sets together and knowing that there's going to be tension there, right because when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and knowing that your hammer might not actually be the right way to do this is such an important part of I think the practicalities of starting anything, And so we have students who are coming together, but once coming from the point of view of a med student who's been shadowing doctors and inside ther you have that person pair with an attorney who sees risk everywhere he looks, and now they're trying to sort of figure out, like, how do we actually create this new process for deep brain stimulation with a new type of product, and realizing that neither of them have the answers. So I think that I think that you teach it just bye. I think putting people together and realizing that they are dependent on one another. I tried that when I used to teach, and it didn't go as smoothly. Where we put for the final project for my class, and it was a graduate level class, we made teams and they didn't get to choose the teams. We made the teams, and we told them that the team grade will be your grade, and we had them prepare for something. We told them what the final project was, and in the day of final presentations, we change one of the parameters so they had to think on their feet and work as a team. Two things happened. One the number of complaints I got it's not fair that we get this grade because I did most of the work, or it's not fair that we get this grade where you know, blah blah blah wasn't helping. That's unfair. And just to take a quick aside, the university would explain to us how we're supposed to build teams. You don't take all your best students and put one on each and you take all your worst students and put one on each team. You don't evenly distribute the teams. I took all my best students and put them on one team, and sort of like and then like all my worst students and put them on one team, and then sort of evenly distributed the others. And when I'm calling out the names of the students, you can hear them go, come on, like I'm rigging the game. And I every year I taught, not a single year did the team of of my best students come in first? Is that right? Never? Not a one? Because I think this is James Sureki's work. The team of geniuses care about themselves more. They only care about their grades. That's what motivates them. Where the more average kids. Because they're more average, they have to work together and they make better teams, and they actually outperform because they actually look out for each other and work together really, really well. And we got very few complaints from those teams, and they were spectacular. It was always the teams of a type high performers that were always the most difficult pain in the ass, and they never came in first. You know, the Marine Corps does what you talk about. Where When I had the opportunity to visit Paris Island when I was writing Leaders Eat Last, which is Marine bootcamp, one of the two places that marines make marines. For the first two weeks, the drill instructor told me that these young recruits all they're trying to do is work hard and make put the spotlight on themselves to prove that they are strong enough to be Marines, that they deserve to be here. Look at me, I can do this. And then after about two weeks, weird things start to happen because they start putting them in situations to your point that they have to work together, that you physically are incapable of doing these things alone, that you're going to have to start relying on your team. And one of the interesting observations is if you're one of the weak ones, the group automatically rejects you. If you're one of the strong ones who thinks you don't need the team, the group automatically rejects you, just by like the anthropology of it, where the cohesive unit will reject the outsiders until they learn the lesson that you'll be fine if you contribute to the group. So the weaker ones learn that if you contribute to the group, the group who will look after you don't worry, and the strong ones learn to put their egos aside and contribute to the group. And then slowly but surely they're brought back into the fray. And I saw it play out at the end when they go through something called the crucible, the competition where they have to get through these crazy obstacles quickly. And I saw one of the young recruits fall back, struggling and watch two of their colleagues turn around. They know they're being timed, turn around, go backwards, grab them by the webbing and drag them. And that's the thing they taught them. They taught them that the teamwork and leaving no marine behind is more important than coming in first. Wow. And so the point is the Marine Corps does this. And granted the stakes are higher, and when it's life and death, you know, the lessons are easier to learn. But these young people who are civilians when they came off the street, who were very selfishly driven when they got there, learned the value of teamwork. And so the question is is can't we teach that in our high schools, and our middle schools, and our business schools, especially in our business schools, in our medical schools, you know, like the god complex amongst surgeons, for example, to put that aside maybe and recognize that you keep a patient alive because of the whole room of people, not just because of you and your genius. You know, one of the things that I think that we tend to do when we walk into a room, especially for a presentation or a pitch or you know, big meeting, is we tend to tell the story of me, right, the story of my resume, story of my idea, the story of my vision. But I think the backable people, these people that I've been now studying for the past few years and bringing their stories into my classroom, is they tell the story of us. How does my story and your story come together to tell our story. How is backable different than self promotion because I think it's about bringing people in, It's about how do we do this together. One of the most important concepts in the book is this idea of flipping outsiders into insiders, having other people feel ownership over the idea that you've created. You know. It comes back to some of the principles I know, you know Simon, like the Ikea effect that we place up to five times the amount of value on something that we help build, then something that we simply buy off the shelf right because we made it ourselves. The other story that I really love is in the nineteen forties, Betty Crocker introduces instant cake mix, right, and they think instant cake mix is just going to be this huge, mega bestseller, and then they're really surprised when they find out that nobody is buying this instant cake mix. Can't figure out why, and so they hire this psychologist named Ernest Dicta to go out into the field and start interviewing customers and Dyke it comes back to the executives at Betty Crocker and he says, I think that you had made the process of making a cake too easy too simple, because you've basically removed the customer from the creative process. And so Dyke's recommendation is, why don't you remove one ingredient and just see what happens? And so they do. They remove the egg. So now is a customer have to go out and you have to buy an egg and you have to crack and mix it in, and sales completely take off because now when the kit comes out of the oven, people actually feel like they have a sense of ownership over it. Yeah. I have a slightly different interpretation on the on the Betty Crocker story, which is they have to do work. Whenever I sort of want to quote unquote invite people in to use you, to use your terminology, I don't make it easy. I did some work with a company where we're inviting a bunch of people to come join a class with me. And you know, the temptation is to make it on an app click click click, you know, are you available for the date? It's can you do it? What are your qualifications? Check check check instant gratification. And we made them write essays and we actually read the essays and we made them and so that the people who phoned it in we could tell, and they got rejected immediately. And the people who didn't feel like writing an essay didn't apply. And the people who took the time to actually write a proper essay to say why they wanted to be in the course, those are the ones who got in. We made them do a little extra work. Now we don't have to make it very difficult. But I'm a great believer in putting in a few barriers. So for example, I co host a leadership summit every year, and I do it from Thursday to Saturday every year because I don't want it to be a business trip, which is the weekdays, and I don't want to be a boondoggle, which is the weekend. So I screw your week and your weekend. So you have to really want to be there. A destination wedding, right, it's like a destination wedding exactly? Do you really love me? And so I think the idea of requiring people to do some work this is a perfect full circle of where we started over. Coddling, though instinctively, is the right attitude for a parent, which I agree. You know, we want to protect our kids as best we can and give them the best opportunities, et cetera. Every parent wants that, But the question is, are we denying them the joy of work? Are we denying them the importance of effort? And this goes not only to struggle, like how are you going to solve this problem? Like you fell off the bicycle, you have to get back up? But I think it's sometimes something not necessarily negative, but asking people to do a little more. You got to do a little work to feel the joy of what you've produced. In other words, impact doesn't come free. You can't just go buy a pair of Tom's shoes and feel like you've done good in the world. Like, it doesn't work that way. And I think that's the parenting thing. We don't have to make all of the kids refugees on, you know, and teach themselves how to read. You dropped off three miles from home. That's not what we're talking about here. But if there's an opportunity for a kid to put in a little extra effort to get the thing they want, Like if you save half, we'll match the other half and then you can have the thing you want. I think there's a there there, And it gets me wondering perhaps the innovation class that you teach should also be taught to new parents, because that innovation thinking and learning about risk and effort is maybe more than starting a business. It's starting a child in a very different path. Every once in a while, when I'm writing a business book about how to get other people to take a chance on you in business, right, all of a sudden, I started to see these principles that just like this is life, Like this is this is exactly how I need to be a better parent to my kids. You know. Like, for example, one of the things I found amongst backable people is that they really tended to surround themselves at the circle, like there were always a trusted circle of people around them that they could go to with ideas, they could go to for career advice, and they really nurtured those relationships. Backable people did a really good job with that more often than not. And you know, around the time that I was writing this book, I ended up going to the Kingdom of Bhutan, which Bhutan has always been fascinating to me because they measure progress in the country based on what they call gross National Happiness, so you know GDP and economic growth they matter a lot, but they all feed up into this sort of larger metric around the happiness of their people. And when I was there, I had a chance to spend time with this research team. And this research team has been you know, they've been collecting this data now for decades. And I asked them, like, when you're out there and you're talking to people, is there a single question that you can ask that can give you a pretty good sense of somebody's happiness? And they said, yeah, actually, as a matter of fact, there is. And the question is if you were in real trouble right now, who could you call and know with one hundred percent certainty that person would be there for you? And they believe people who have an answer to that question are much more likely to be happy. But there was a twist, and the twist was whose list are you on who can call you and know with one hundred certainty you are going to be there for them? And they actually feel like if you have an answer to that, you have an higher likelihood of being happy. So, in other words, it's not a line, it's a circle, right, And it's this idea of a circle that I think we can continue to come back to over and over and over again. So yeah, I mean, these principles that we teach for these sort of sometimes overly broad generic topics like innovation, teach me how to act in life. And on that note, it's so nice to meet you, really interesting, wonderful. If you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.

There are only a few people in the world who can say that they have made a success out of failing. Sunil Gupta is one of those people, the only person to ever be invited twice to fail. Con the author of Backable and a serial entrepreneur. We sat down and talked about the importance of failing and the lessons we can learn. This is a bit of optimism. So here's what I wanted to talk to you about. You teach innovation, which is a whole another topic where the innovation can be taught, but that we will table that one for all intensive purposes. You teach innovation, and I know heart of what goes with innovation is failure and that you have to fail to innovate because it's an iterative process. We have raised a generation of kids, it seems, that are afraid of failing. If there's a group of people coming up through school who are working very hard, afraid of failure, afraid of looking bad all the things, and I think that's probably you could say that for a lot of young kids. But it's a very high performing young generation. We have for the past probably twenty year so thirty years, and then they hit the real world and I've experienced this firsthand, and for the first time in their lives, things aren't going according to plan, their parents can't really fix it. So riddle me this, how do you teach failure and the importance of failure to people who are now young adults who may have not worked that muscle. Well, I think it begins by being open about your own failures. And it was interesting for me to get a call from Harvard Med School saying, hey, would you like to teach this subject? Because I wasn't smart enough to get into Harvard and I wasn't smart enough to get in the medical school. And one of the things that sort of drew them to me was this article that was published years ago on failure. And I'll tell you the story. I get a phone call. This is after two of my startups have failed, after you know, I've gone through ups and downs in my career, more downs than ups, and I get asked to keynote this conference called fail Con, which stands for Failure Conference. And it's this kick me while I'm down moment, because I get this phone call saying, hey, we're organizing this conference on failure and we would love for you to be the keynote speaker, and so I do, and I didn't know that there was a reporter from The New York Times in the audience and fast forward to a full length article on failure with my face as the cover of this article, and you know it is. It is an article also that goes very viral. You could have googled failure at that time and my face would have been one of the top first results. Ended up happening actually was I had a conversation with a friend of mine who I grew up with outside of Detroit. We used to go to temple together, and he reminded me of a story that we were told as kids, and it was a story that the Buddha told his disciples, which is that every time someone feels pain, there are two arrows that are fired. One arrow is the arrow that punctures your skin, and the other arrow is the arrow where you ascribe meaning to the pain. So how are you going to find some meaning out of this? Was what he challenged me to do. And the way that I tried to do that is by emailing basically everybody that I admired, and I would email them the article proactively, and I would say in the email listen. As you can see from this article, I don't know what I'm doing, but would you be rather and grab coffee, grab a phone call? And the response rate to that email was insanely high. But more importantly, the conversations were honest, because it wasn't like the classic networking hey help me succeed conversation. It was like, here's my string of failures. I'm putting it out in the open, and as it turns out, they would share their string of failures. And so I think it begins with that cracking this nut that I think we always knew was true, which is that the version of the people that we admire today is not the version that they started out as. There were mistakes, there were setbacks, there were failures, and I think as long as we can put those into domain over and over again, we start to realize that we can do it too. I would argue, though, that you had one massive, huge advantage over the rest of the world, which is your mother. Your mother couldn't be overprotective. She taught your resilience because of her experience. I mean, Mom's story is incredible. It's what drove me to write my book. It's what I think. It still fuels me every day as a father, as an entrepreneur. Mom grew up in a refugee camp on the border of Pakistan and India, no running water, no electricity, but she did something really amazing. She taught herself how to read. And the first book that she read from cover to cover was the biography of Henry Ford. And after reading this biography, she tells herself and everybody around her, I want to be an engineer with Ford Motor Company. This is her vision. It's unlikely, if not impossible, But her parents get behind the dream. They get behind the vision. They save every penny or rupie they had. She gets on a boat, gets to the United States, ends up getting a scholarship to Oklahoma State University of all places, graduates as the only female in her engineering class. The next day, drives to Detroit, Michigan to apply for her dream job. Finds her way somehow into a room with a hiring manager at Ford Motor Company. And this hiring manager looks at her resume, and he looks at her application and he says, wait, wait a second, are you applying for the job of an engineer? And she says yeah, and he says, well, I'm sorry. You know, we actually don't have any female engineers working here right now, because this was the nineteen sixties and Ford Motor Company, by the way, is in its heyday, like it's doing very well. They have thousands upon thousands of engineers on staff, but not a single one of them is a woman. And so in this moment, you know, my mom is deflated. She picks up her resume, she picks up her purse, and she begins to walk out of the room. And then, almost like in this last ditch moment, she turns around. She looks this guy in the eye, and she tells him her story about all the struggle, about all the sacrifice that it took for her to get to this country, to get to Detroit, to get to this very room, and then she says to him, look, things are changing, and if you don't have any female engineers on staff, then do yourself a favor and hire me. Now, this guy is so moved in this meeting that he decides to leave and go fight with his colleagues, go fight with everybody around him to make this happen. And in nineteen sixty seven, she becomes Ford Motor company's first female engineer. Amazing. So that dream in that story served your mother. But you grew up in the United States of a mother who was an engineer at Ford Murder Company. Yeah, and so you didn't grow up without running water, etc. So you didn't have to teach yourself how to read. And yet your mother somehow taught you perseverance and grit and how to endure failure. Can you tell me some of the specific things that she did. Tell me one story of something specific she did that you know, she drilled into you. She parented you differently than the other kids in your school. Look, there is one There is one thing, and it's a decision simon that I think my mom made. And the decision that she made or pretty early on, is that we were you know, I was born in a town called Livonia, and we were we had outgrown the house when I was born, and we we wanted to make a move and there was a decision that they had made. And the decision was do we move to a place do we move to a town where there are a lot of Indian people? Because there was such a town. Most of the Indian folks that we knew were kind of creating and sort of like the Bloomfield Hills Farmington sort of area. But there was a new town called Nova, which didn't have very many Indian people at all. In fact, we didn't know any and my mom was the one that pushed for us to go to Nova, for us to go to the all white community. And there were a lot of times when Sunday my brother and I would would ask her, like, why the hell did you do this? Like we're getting picked on all the time in school, we're getting bullied all the time. And our answer was, look, you got to learn how to deal with that now, Like you got to learn how to figure this out, because if you don't, then you know, you're going to grow up always wanting to sort of comfort yourself with people who look just like you, and that's just not the way that the world works. So I think that's an example of the way that I think she liked a parent, which is I think, in some ways just like throw us in the deep end. Yeah, though it makes sense, you know, take your kids to a place where they're going to be uncomfortable and teach them to endure discomfort because that the real world. That bit of parenting is horrific for a modern parent to choose to take your kid to a place where they're more likely to get bullied so that the kid can learn to endure difficulty. I don't know if a modern parent can do that, would do that. You know the stories of Richard Branson, his mom dropping him off three miles away from home and saying see you when you get home so he can learn to find his way home. Well, look what that did. It made him one of the great problem solvers, one of the great entrepreneurs. But you know, this is the question which is in our very sincere desire to protect our children, have we accidentally over indexed into the overcddle? And now the thought of throwing our kids in the deep end is just not on. There is no more deep end. The whole pool is shallow end. I think there's a lot of truth to that. Are you as intense as your mom and how you're raising your kids to deal with struggle and discomfort or do you find yourself sort of like sliding into the modern philosophies of parenting. I find myself sliding into the modern philosophies of parenting, no doubt about that. I do think that My job in a lot of ways is to be this conduit for her energy. How do I have that sort of come through? I don't quite know how to do that. Every morning I play this little game with my daughters. I ask them two questions. I ask them what is the meaning of life? And they say, to find your gift? And then I say, well, what is the purpose of life? And they say, to give it away? Meaning of life is to find your gift purposes to give it away. It's my favorite quote from Picasso, And sometimes I wonder whether I'm doing enough to give them the grit that it would take to do that right. It's nice to have sort of a punchline, it's nice to have a phrase, but in my sort of showing them what it would take to sort of get to that point. Have you noticed a difference in the first cadre of students you had to the current cadre in the way they approach risk. I think that there have been more stories out there now than there were even five years ago of people who have hit it big out the gate, and I don't know whether that's a good thing or not. Like I think five years ago it was still Facebook, it was still Snapchat, but there weren't like this long tail of stories of people who just like hit hit hit, and that I think has sort of given people in some ways more confidence, but I think in other ways it has made it look easy. Right, And again it comes back to those stories of failure. I used to have this slide that I would put up during my lectures which would show the paths of people like Richard Branson, the paths of people like Elon Musk that they had actually they had actually failed multiple times before they actually got their first hit. I don't necessarily have as many of those stories right now for some of the younger entrepreneurs, and I'm not saying that we should have more of those, like good for them or for having quick success, but I think it also might set sort of a bit of a bad precedent that like, hey, it's easy, and so I think my job in some ways is to is to retain optimism right as you do, but at the same time, you know, let them know that, hey, like if it doesn't happen right away, that's just a stepping stone to the next thing. Yeah, I hear you, and I agree with you. And the problem is talk is cheap right, Like we can sit here and say, you know, failures are really important part. But the problem is is there's now this unrealistic expectation and there's still millions and millions and millions of businesses that are started and exist small businesses. The vast majority will fail in the first three years. And the ones that we celebrate and put the cover in magazines and we know the names of the companies and sometimes the CEOs celebrity CEOs is they did become twenty something year old billionaires. And now everyone who starts a startup thinks, you know, I'm five years away from being a billionaire, right. And one of the things I think they completely miss is that in every case they became billionaires by accident. They were driven by something else, and the money came afterwards. It was an unintended byproduct. Even if they lose sight of what they were doing in the first place and became money obsessed later, the trajectory was very different. And so it raises this is an interesting question, which is a generation that's growing up with unrealistic expectations of what it takes to succeed, and even more in realistic expectations of what success even means, you know, if you can make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, like you were blown the doors off compared to the vast majority of Americans, whether you own your own small business or not, millions is rough and billions is damn near impossible. I have not met a company. I have not met a founder yet who set out to become a unicorn that became a unicorn, right right, Like that was the exactly right, exactly right, this idea of what actually sort of makes you tick, like what actually makes you come alive. And I know again that's we're getting back to catchphrases here. But bear with me for a moment, because I think back to the first time that it'll be the name of our episode. It'll be catchphrases or a bear with me for a moment. Yeah, But I remember having left Groupon and I had then a group on Early and groupon became you know, quote unquote a unicorn, although it had had massive ups and downs, and I remember leaving and knowing that I wanted to go start a company. What I did was this is classic almost business school analysis. I had this spreadsheet, I had columns. I had column A was the ideas and in column C was a competition market size, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I remember going to a mentor of mine and asking her like, hey, what do you think, Like, what do you think of this? These ideas? Which which stand out to you? And she looks at the list and then she looks at me and she's like, let me ask you a question, which of these ideas actually makes you come alive? And I look back at the list and I realized, like, none of them really made me come alive. But so, Neil, these were your tickets to fame and start them and unicornness exactly the story that she told me, which I continue to love. You've probably heard this one before, which is it when Martin Luther King was really stepping into his leadership role. I always forget how young he was. He's in his twenties. And he went to go see a mentor of his guy named Howard Thurman, and you know, he was trying to he's trying to sort of figure out what steps he should make, whether he should do this. And Howard Thurman said like, don't just ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive? Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive, and e commerce did not make me come alive. And that's and that's when I made this hard shift into into health because for me, like you know, I grew up in a household where my dad really struggled with his health. He hit his first triple bypass surgery when he was in his forties and we had to go through that journey with him. That to me was the thing emotionally that sort of made me come alive. How do we take some of the things that work for him and make it available for more people. You hear this a lot. Somebody was struggling a therapist to help them. They refound happiness and they devoted their life to being a therapist so they can do the same for others. You know, when when somebody helps us, we know what that feels like, and we want to do that for someone else. And here you are, You lived in a household of emotional struggle watching your father go through these medical challenges, and you realize medicines for me because I've seen what the doctors have done for my father, and that makes a lot of sense to me. I can't get off this because I'm trying to understand it. You know that is at randomness that you had a father who struggled with his heart, and so you realize the value of medicine, and you and your brother go into medicine. If we keep our kids hidden and covered in cotton wool, then it reduces the likelihood of those opportunities to be exposed to something that could profoundly set them on a path of purpose. I wasn't expecting this conversation to go so deep so quickly, but I mean, where you take me, Simon, is a concept that I learned as a kid, which is which is darma. The best interpretation of darma in the English language is that which sustains this thing inside you that you don't have to continue sort of relighting over and over again, because it's just there. You know, with the healthcare startup that I ended up doing, it did fine, it didn't knock it out of the park. We ended up selling the company. I had mixed feelings about selling it because again, not fantastic outcome, not not unicorn by any stretch of the imagination. And I'm at a healthcare conference a few months later, and like, there's this founder up on stage and he's got he's got the company with all the rage, right, like he's getting the articles. Everybody's tuned into what he has to say. And I'm just in the audience. I'm not even speaking at this conference. I'm just sitting in the audience. He doesn't even know I'm there, and we have never met. But during Q and A, somebody asks him, like, what motivated you to start this company? Well, tell me, tell me about some of the things that inspired you. And he said, you know, one of the companies that I really looked at carefully that inspired me was a company called Rise That was my company. And I guess that the lesson that that that taught me was that like, even if you don't reach your intended destination, you still touch and teach people along the way, right, you still end up having this impact. And the question is are you truly here like for the impact and that in that one area? Right? Is that is that truly the thing that you want to sort of move need on? When I ask people like what do they care about? They care about impact. I want to have impact on the world, right, But I think we have to go more specific than that. What exactly is that thing that whether or not your name is on the impact. Is it just the same to you or is it is it? Are they both wins? Because the answer that is yes, then I get I think you're getting closer to your to your dharma. The way you describe dharma. I hear inspiration, this flame that's lit inside you that doesn't go out. But I think we're adding another layer to this, because I mean, let's be honest, this is pretty multi layer, which is the definition of success does include credit. I think to give up credit is selfless, and with fear of failure comes a weird selfishness because let's be honest, it's about me, my failure versus my success. I wonder if we can teach young people to endure failure when they learn cooperation and teamwork first, because now it's now no longer my failure. It's about us. It's about us. Yeah, and it's not about me getting credit. It's about us having an impact, not me making an impact. Because I think that's also a twisted concept because when somebody says I want to make an impact, well, newsflash, you're probably not going to do anything by yourself. Yeah, I want to join a team that we can make an impact. I want to be a part of something that makes an impact is not only more accurate, it's also more attainable versus going from job to job to job to job. And you and I have both seen this saying I'm not making an impact. I'm not making an impact. You're missing the point. You have the word I in there when we think about creativity, and in a bay we've been told that it's sort of this two step formula. You come up with a great idea and then you execute on it really well. But I think what you're pointing out is this is this hidden step in between where it's not just you. You've brought in other people. It's early colleagues, early team members, early investors, early partners that are as much part of this whole thing as you are, and they feel that level of ownership so that by the time that you actually reach execution stage, like, it's a group of people who felt like it was your idea, it wasn't just the person who came up with it in the first place. I know of one of those unicorns where when the company went gangbusters and the founders became billionaires, one of them, at least one of them. I only know this story from one made a long list and sent a bunch of people that had influenced him or somehow believed in him for his entire life. He sent them a bunch of stock. I love it basically to say thank you. Though you're not an investor, I wouldn't be where I am today it weren't for you in some way, shape or form, whether you were a friend or a teacher or whatever it was. And I think that humility and recognizing that I didn't do this alone is the thing that's missing. And so I'm going to go back to your class now, which is in your wonderful, amazing, incredible class that you teach innovation. How do you teach teamwork? I think we teach teamwork through the idea of dependence, right, like knowing that you cannot actually do this by yourself. And part of that is trying to get people who have different skill sets together and knowing that there's going to be tension there, right because when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and knowing that your hammer might not actually be the right way to do this is such an important part of I think the practicalities of starting anything, And so we have students who are coming together, but once coming from the point of view of a med student who's been shadowing doctors and inside ther you have that person pair with an attorney who sees risk everywhere he looks, and now they're trying to sort of figure out, like, how do we actually create this new process for deep brain stimulation with a new type of product, and realizing that neither of them have the answers. So I think that I think that you teach it just bye. I think putting people together and realizing that they are dependent on one another. I tried that when I used to teach, and it didn't go as smoothly. Where we put for the final project for my class, and it was a graduate level class, we made teams and they didn't get to choose the teams. We made the teams, and we told them that the team grade will be your grade, and we had them prepare for something. We told them what the final project was, and in the day of final presentations, we change one of the parameters so they had to think on their feet and work as a team. Two things happened. One the number of complaints I got it's not fair that we get this grade because I did most of the work, or it's not fair that we get this grade where you know, blah blah blah wasn't helping. That's unfair. And just to take a quick aside, the university would explain to us how we're supposed to build teams. You don't take all your best students and put one on each and you take all your worst students and put one on each team. You don't evenly distribute the teams. I took all my best students and put them on one team, and sort of like and then like all my worst students and put them on one team, and then sort of evenly distributed the others. And when I'm calling out the names of the students, you can hear them go, come on, like I'm rigging the game. And I every year I taught, not a single year did the team of of my best students come in first? Is that right? Never? Not a one? Because I think this is James Sureki's work. The team of geniuses care about themselves more. They only care about their grades. That's what motivates them. Where the more average kids. Because they're more average, they have to work together and they make better teams, and they actually outperform because they actually look out for each other and work together really, really well. And we got very few complaints from those teams, and they were spectacular. It was always the teams of a type high performers that were always the most difficult pain in the ass, and they never came in first. You know, the Marine Corps does what you talk about. Where When I had the opportunity to visit Paris Island when I was writing Leaders Eat Last, which is Marine bootcamp, one of the two places that marines make marines. For the first two weeks, the drill instructor told me that these young recruits all they're trying to do is work hard and make put the spotlight on themselves to prove that they are strong enough to be Marines, that they deserve to be here. Look at me, I can do this. And then after about two weeks, weird things start to happen because they start putting them in situations to your point that they have to work together, that you physically are incapable of doing these things alone, that you're going to have to start relying on your team. And one of the interesting observations is if you're one of the weak ones, the group automatically rejects you. If you're one of the strong ones who thinks you don't need the team, the group automatically rejects you, just by like the anthropology of it, where the cohesive unit will reject the outsiders until they learn the lesson that you'll be fine if you contribute to the group. So the weaker ones learn that if you contribute to the group, the group who will look after you don't worry, and the strong ones learn to put their egos aside and contribute to the group. And then slowly but surely they're brought back into the fray. And I saw it play out at the end when they go through something called the crucible, the competition where they have to get through these crazy obstacles quickly. And I saw one of the young recruits fall back, struggling and watch two of their colleagues turn around. They know they're being timed, turn around, go backwards, grab them by the webbing and drag them. And that's the thing they taught them. They taught them that the teamwork and leaving no marine behind is more important than coming in first. Wow. And so the point is the Marine Corps does this. And granted the stakes are higher, and when it's life and death, you know, the lessons are easier to learn. But these young people who are civilians when they came off the street, who were very selfishly driven when they got there, learned the value of teamwork. And so the question is is can't we teach that in our high schools, and our middle schools, and our business schools, especially in our business schools, in our medical schools, you know, like the god complex amongst surgeons, for example, to put that aside maybe and recognize that you keep a patient alive because of the whole room of people, not just because of you and your genius. You know, one of the things that I think that we tend to do when we walk into a room, especially for a presentation or a pitch or you know, big meeting, is we tend to tell the story of me, right, the story of my resume, story of my idea, the story of my vision. But I think the backable people, these people that I've been now studying for the past few years and bringing their stories into my classroom, is they tell the story of us. How does my story and your story come together to tell our story. How is backable different than self promotion because I think it's about bringing people in, It's about how do we do this together. One of the most important concepts in the book is this idea of flipping outsiders into insiders, having other people feel ownership over the idea that you've created. You know. It comes back to some of the principles I know, you know Simon, like the Ikea effect that we place up to five times the amount of value on something that we help build, then something that we simply buy off the shelf right because we made it ourselves. The other story that I really love is in the nineteen forties, Betty Crocker introduces instant cake mix, right, and they think instant cake mix is just going to be this huge, mega bestseller, and then they're really surprised when they find out that nobody is buying this instant cake mix. Can't figure out why, and so they hire this psychologist named Ernest Dicta to go out into the field and start interviewing customers and Dyke it comes back to the executives at Betty Crocker and he says, I think that you had made the process of making a cake too easy too simple, because you've basically removed the customer from the creative process. And so Dyke's recommendation is, why don't you remove one ingredient and just see what happens? And so they do. They remove the egg. So now is a customer have to go out and you have to buy an egg and you have to crack and mix it in, and sales completely take off because now when the kit comes out of the oven, people actually feel like they have a sense of ownership over it. Yeah. I have a slightly different interpretation on the on the Betty Crocker story, which is they have to do work. Whenever I sort of want to quote unquote invite people in to use you, to use your terminology, I don't make it easy. I did some work with a company where we're inviting a bunch of people to come join a class with me. And you know, the temptation is to make it on an app click click click, you know, are you available for the date? It's can you do it? What are your qualifications? Check check check instant gratification. And we made them write essays and we actually read the essays and we made them and so that the people who phoned it in we could tell, and they got rejected immediately. And the people who didn't feel like writing an essay didn't apply. And the people who took the time to actually write a proper essay to say why they wanted to be in the course, those are the ones who got in. We made them do a little extra work. Now we don't have to make it very difficult. But I'm a great believer in putting in a few barriers. So for example, I co host a leadership summit every year, and I do it from Thursday to Saturday every year because I don't want it to be a business trip, which is the weekdays, and I don't want to be a boondoggle, which is the weekend. So I screw your week and your weekend. So you have to really want to be there. A destination wedding, right, it's like a destination wedding exactly? Do you really love me? And so I think the idea of requiring people to do some work this is a perfect full circle of where we started over. Coddling, though instinctively, is the right attitude for a parent, which I agree. You know, we want to protect our kids as best we can and give them the best opportunities, et cetera. Every parent wants that, But the question is, are we denying them the joy of work? Are we denying them the importance of effort? And this goes not only to struggle, like how are you going to solve this problem? Like you fell off the bicycle, you have to get back up? But I think it's sometimes something not necessarily negative, but asking people to do a little more. You got to do a little work to feel the joy of what you've produced. In other words, impact doesn't come free. You can't just go buy a pair of Tom's shoes and feel like you've done good in the world. Like, it doesn't work that way. And I think that's the parenting thing. We don't have to make all of the kids refugees on, you know, and teach themselves how to read. You dropped off three miles from home. That's not what we're talking about here. But if there's an opportunity for a kid to put in a little extra effort to get the thing they want, Like if you save half, we'll match the other half and then you can have the thing you want. I think there's a there there, And it gets me wondering perhaps the innovation class that you teach should also be taught to new parents, because that innovation thinking and learning about risk and effort is maybe more than starting a business. It's starting a child in a very different path. Every once in a while, when I'm writing a business book about how to get other people to take a chance on you in business, right, all of a sudden, I started to see these principles that just like this is life, Like this is this is exactly how I need to be a better parent to my kids. You know. Like, for example, one of the things I found amongst backable people is that they really tended to surround themselves at the circle, like there were always a trusted circle of people around them that they could go to with ideas, they could go to for career advice, and they really nurtured those relationships. Backable people did a really good job with that more often than not. And you know, around the time that I was writing this book, I ended up going to the Kingdom of Bhutan, which Bhutan has always been fascinating to me because they measure progress in the country based on what they call gross National Happiness, so you know GDP and economic growth they matter a lot, but they all feed up into this sort of larger metric around the happiness of their people. And when I was there, I had a chance to spend time with this research team. And this research team has been you know, they've been collecting this data now for decades. And I asked them, like, when you're out there and you're talking to people, is there a single question that you can ask that can give you a pretty good sense of somebody's happiness? And they said, yeah, actually, as a matter of fact, there is. And the question is if you were in real trouble right now, who could you call and know with one hundred percent certainty that person would be there for you? And they believe people who have an answer to that question are much more likely to be happy. But there was a twist, and the twist was whose list are you on who can call you and know with one hundred certainty you are going to be there for them? And they actually feel like if you have an answer to that, you have an higher likelihood of being happy. So, in other words, it's not a line, it's a circle, right, And it's this idea of a circle that I think we can continue to come back to over and over and over again. So yeah, I mean, these principles that we teach for these sort of sometimes overly broad generic topics like innovation, teach me how to act in life. And on that note, it's so nice to meet you, really interesting, wonderful. If you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.