John C. Maxwell’s How to Get a Return on Failure lands on the TAM desk, and Steve and David put it through their own filter: the folksy bits, the genuinely useful bits, and the bits where a neuroanatomist and a business coach turn out to be saying the exact same thing.

David reflects on the day he realised he would not finish his PhD, and why that 2-out-of-10 moment turned out to be one of the most important recalibrations of his working life.

A Meta phishing scam that apparently does not breach community standards has both hosts reaching for their Lord of the Flies analogies.

And a 1977 Ford Granada ad raises a question that cuts deeper than any car commercial should: have we traded a learner mindset for a judger mindset, and what have we lost in the process?

Get ready to take notes.

Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes

02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
When Shame Gets Off the Table

In the Person segment, Steve and David dig into Maxwell’s central argument: that failure is an investment, and like any investment, you can get a return on it if you handle it properly. The catch is that shame gets in the way before you even have a chance to analyse what happened.

David’s reflection on his abandoned PhD is the anchor here. At the time, it felt like a solid 2 out of 10. In retrospect, it was the moment that freed up everything that came next. Maxwell’s book, How To Get A Return On Failure, puts language around that kind of reframe, and David gives it real weight by grounding it in lived experience rather than theory.

The dinner table story lands particularly well: a father who asked his children every night what they had failed at that day, and celebrated every answer. The only exception? When the failure had a moral or ethical dimension and the child had not yet recognised it as such. For every other kind of stumble, the response was curiosity, not correction. As Steve notes, that is the fastest way to raise someone who does not spend their school years too embarrassed to put their hand up.

15:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
Six Steps, Zero Excuses

The Principles segment takes Maxwell’s framework and applies it directly to the business context. Steve walks David through six steps drawn from a video Maxwell produced alongside the book, and two of them dominate the conversation.

The first is the distinction between a good miss and a bad miss. A good miss is one you learn from and adjust. A bad miss is one you excuse. Maxwell’s line here stops both hosts in their tracks: a really good excuse is a really bad excuse, because it is convincing enough that everyone believes it, including you, and so you stop adjusting and start collecting excuses instead.

The second is the idea of keeping failure and success together rather than fixating on either one. Maxwell uses a slightly laboured physical exercise to make the point, which David declines to take seriously, but the underlying principle holds: success without failure creates pride, and failure without success destroys resilience. Keep them together and you stay balanced. Separate them and you lose the lesson from both.

David draws a line to Stoicism, and Steve connects the whole conversation to Jill Bolte Taylor’s Whole Brain Living from the previous episode. The message is consistent across a neuroanatomist and a folksy American business coach: breathe, reflect, then ask what resources you have and what you do next.

28:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
Meta’s Community Standards Are a Riddle

The Problems segment is fuelled by genuine frustration. Steve received a message flagging a copyright claim against his content, reported it as a likely phishing scam, and was told by Meta that it did not breach community standards.

What Perplexity confirmed is that these scams are sophisticated: the emails genuinely come from Meta’s servers, triggered by legitimate business manager accounts with deceptively official-sounding names. The notifications are real. The requesters are not. And Meta’s automated systems cannot, or will not, distinguish between them.

David’s verdict is delivered without hesitation: hiring humans and treating them with respect would solve the problem, and that is precisely why it has not been solved. The practical takeaway is simple and worth repeating: trust nothing in your inbox or your social accounts that asks you to take urgent action. Bounce it off someone you trust before you click anything.

32:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
The Ad That Would Need a Trigger Warning

In Perspicacity, Steve plays a 1977 Ford Granada television advertisement in which a man at a drive-in keeps getting into the wrong car and being ejected with escalating indignation. The ad’s point is that the Granada looks so good it could be mistaken for a Cadillac or a Mercedes. The humour relies entirely on forgivable social awkwardness.

David’s assessment is that if you ran this ad today, it would need trigger warnings. Not because the scenario has changed, but because our response to social awkwardness has. In 1977, you got back in the right car and life moved on. In 2026, the person next to you has their phone out and the footage is online before you reach the exit.

What follows is the sharpest exchange of the episode. David argues that we have collectively shifted from a learner mindset to a judger mindset, and that the speed at which we now consume everything is the reason: judging is fast, learning takes time. Steve connects this directly back to Maxwell, noting that a learner mindset is the exact disposition the book is trying to build in business owners. The ad, accidentally, becomes a test case for whether we still have the patience to ask what actually happened before we decide who is to blame.