The Speech I Would Have Given at VeeCon
On May 3rd, I applied to be a speaker at VeeCon, the annual conference hosted by Gary Vaynerchuck. He’s been very influential in my own entrepreneurial journey, so I felt compelled to speak and share what I’ve learned so far as an entrepreneur.
After submitting my application & publicly posting about it on social media, I didn’t get selected.
It was a fail.
But while applying, I started to really think about what I would say in my speech. My thoughts started to formulate in my mind and I started to jot down notes.
So this is the speech I would’ve given at VeeCon.
Do you think it throws me off to paste this into a Medium article instead of present it to a room?
Do you think I feel like a failure?
Do you think I feel cringe-y or lesser than?
Truthfully, I’m good.
It’s almost like I’ve been training for this my whole life.
At this point, I’m fit for failure.
I’ve sat with failure so many times, it no longer terrifies me.
- I’ve tried out for teams and not been selected.
- I’ve been laid off from 3 different jobs.
- I’ve started a company and exited before I wanted to.
- I girl bossed too close to the sun. And got burned.
Add it to the list: I didn’t get selected to speak at VeeCon.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an entrepreneur, it’s that avoiding failure is not the game.
The game is trying. Failing. Falling on your face. Picking yourself up. Dusting off your crown and carrying on.
You can’t let your fear of failure prevent you from playing the game at the level you were meant to play at.
You shouldn’t play small because you’re afraid of falling on your face.
If you’re someone who’s being held back by a fear of failure or is having trouble getting back in the game after a fail, I have three thoughts to share with you.
- Value your effort. Not the result.
If you can get on board with the fact that failure is a possible — if not probable — result, you cannot attach your identity or self-worth to that result.
Because often the result is out of your control anyway!
If or when you fail at something, that does not make you a failure. You’re only a failure if you don’t try.
So what do you do?
- You put in that full effort.
- You really, really go for it.
- You do everything you know how to do to make it work.
- You take a big swing… and leave it all on the field.
And you rest easy knowing you really went for it.
I went to college in Baltimore, and at the time that I was in school, Under Armor was just getting started. I was obsessed with their company. And I really wanted to work there.
I wanted to be on the client side of marketing. I wanted to work in fitness. And as you can guess, a jump from college into a global brand was pretty much an impossible task. But I applied to a Brand Manager role anyway. I applied online but I also printed out my cover letter and resume and mailed it into their headquarters.
Included with my cover letter and resume, I sent them one of my well-worn Under Armor cold gear shirts. I’d been playing soccer at Loyola in Baltimore and this was a long sleeve that I played in all the time. It was so worn that the tag on the inside was peeling off and you could barely tell that it was an Under Armor shirt. But I wanted them to know that I was a huge fan of their brand as well as their product.
I didn’t get the job.
But it’s in the act of trying that you start becoming. It’s in the act of trying that you get clear on what you really wanna do. I REALLY wanted to work in fitness.
Flash forward to today. I’ve been working in the fitness industry since 2012.
- So what are the things in your world that you’re willing to go the extra mile for?
- What’s the job that you wouldn’t just hit easy apply on LinkedIn, but you would connect with and follow and message every single person at that company?
- What are the things that keep you up at night because you want to keep working on them?
If effort is the unlock, pursue the things where effort is easy… where your effort feels obvious.
And know that the results will eventually be there.
2. Train to failure.
There’s a saying in fitness that you want to train to failure. It’s basically the idea that you should perform so many reps or such a heavy weight that your muscles can’t perform one more rep. You’re toast. You’re totally broken down.
But then this magical process happens. You start to recover. And you don’t just recover back to the same strength. Your muscles come back stronger. So the next time you execute that lift, you’re strong enough to handle more.
It’s exactly the same in business.
In 2020 — at the beginning of the pandemic, I started KickHouse — a boutique fitness concept. I named it. Wrote the tagline. Build the logo. Built it from the ground up — and grew it to 30 locations before it was sold.
In my mind, this was a big fail, not just because my equity was pulled off the table in the exit, but because I wasn’t able to grow the concept to 500 locations, which I knew it was capable of achieving.
But in that failure, I learned so many things about building a business…about leading a team… and most importantly, about what kind of people I want to work with and build with going forward.
Now, as I’m building, I’m building with all of those lessons under my belt. I’m a much stronger operator and entrepreneur than I was before that fail.
The education for entrepreneurship is building something and having it fail or failing and learning the lessons along the way.
And so failure is not something to be avoided. In fact, failure is something to chase because it’s where the growth happens.
If you know failure is part of the process, you’re gonna go big. You’re gonna have big dreams, big goals. You’re gonna take big moves.
And when you fail and you’re sitting at rock bottom contemplating life and eating way too much ice cream… know that your muscles are recovering stronger than ever.
You’re smarter. More resilient. More committed than ever before. You’re becoming more fit for failure.
3. Plan for Failure
If you know that failure is part of the process, you can start to prepare your toolkit for being able to navigate a comeback season. Just like in fitness where you have a process around recovery, you have to have a process around recovery professionally as well.
Because the comeback has to be greater than the setback. That’s why we train to failure, right?
I’ve been laid off 3 different times in my career. The most recent layoff was from Gold’s Gym which was my dream job at the time. It took me about 6 months to bridge from the setback to my comeback. I didn’t have a process for failure at that time and I started to attach the failure to my identity. “I am a failure.”
That’s the worst thing to do. You can’t attach yourself to the result.
Everyone is going to have different processes for bouncing back. Start your list now of things that you’ve done in your past to rebound. When you’ve been on a low, what are things you have done to get yourself back on a high? Make a list of them. And then stack all of those momentum shifting, positive things together to create your process for when you fail.
Some things that are a part of my process around failure?
- I control my controllables. I can’t control what happens to me, but I can control how I respond. I can also control all of my inputs… everything I’m listening to… everyone I’m talking to… everything I’m eating… how I’m showing up at the gym…
- I immediately start planting new seeds… applying for new jobs… making new connections. Go to events like VeeCon to get your brain moving onto what’s next.
- I remind myself that the good times don’t last forever… and neither do the bad. Everything is a season. Nothing is forever.
- I stay connected to people who believe in me and talk to them often.
- I reconnect to the things I’m passionate about and spend time thinking about or working on my passions.
My most recent setback: Not getting selected to speak at VeeCon.
My comeback? Reconnect to why I want to share… what value I have to offer… and post it online.
I appreciate the rejection and not just as redirection, but as reinforcement of my passion around this game.
I have more to say, I have more to give. I want to pay all of my lessons forward and offer value to the next generation of entrepreneurs.
I hope you all enjoy VeeCon.
I’ll see you there… as an attendee.
