Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

Thinking, writing, business ideas … You’re only a stranger once.

18.3 Honoring Our Failures

Filed Under Business Book, Interviews, Successful Blog | 8 Comments

Failure as an Ingredient

Bounce! The Path to True Business Confidence

Yesterday we talked about how people say the road to success follows three archetypes. Barry names and exposes them as myths in Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success.

But what about our failures?

Hi, Barry. I like that you find it important to take a moment to stop talking about our success in order to honor our failures. What do you mean by that? How do we honor a failure?

Well the first thing we need to do is stop letting our egos brag about our successes but instead Honor Our Failures. A year after leaving a 9 year career at IBM, I was fired from my new job. Then I was kicked out of business in my second company by my two partners. This was the first place where I learned I could actually fail in a huge way. This is the first place I diverged from the master plan of success my mother had for me.

Now unfortunately in our culture, business wisdom tell us that when we fail there is always something to learn

We are continually reminded by those around us that failure is an important ingredient in the next success, possibly even a prerequisite. We tell ourselves that failure “happened to us” so that we could learn some important lesson that would later propel us to even more success.

Let me tell you the truth, when we fail. Sometimes it just sucks. There is absolutely nothing to learn. When I lost my largest client because they were indicted by the SEC, what did I learn? That I wasn’t suppose to do business with criminals? I knew this… When my best employee left my company because her husband got a job in another state, what was I to learn? Not to hire people who are married?

Failure is valuable only when we realize it is a normal part of the business process even when there always isn’t something to learn.

And there can be a lot of fear involved in this whole failing process. We have all heard about being afraid of failure and more recently, we are supposed to be now be afraid of success.

The fear in this process is not brought on by our competitors or other outside people. It mostly originates within us. The biggest fear we have is that someone in our position would have done better than us, made better decisions than us and would have built it faster and more profitably than we did. We believe that that we should be in a different place than where we are right now, and that we would be, if only we had made better decisions. Nonsense. You can’t be anywhere except right here right now. Zen Philosophy says that we need to start from where we are.

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow Barry explains the upside of One-Hit Wonders. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

18.2 Three Archetypes that Lead to Success

Filed Under Business Book, Interviews, Successful Blog | 2 Comments

Getting to Success

Barry J. Moltz

Yesterday, Barry Moltz, the author of –Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success, and I talked about what it means to Bounce! Barry explained that by letting go of successes and failures, we can Bounce! We Bounce! from success and failure, failure and success. Being able to Bounce! leads us to develop resiliency and true business confidence, passion, and enthusiasm.

Today, we’re talking about success.

Barry, in the book, you talk about three archetypes that we all follow to achieve success. Would you talk about them and why they’re true?

Most of us look to follow one of three paths to get to business success:

    You can create something from nothing. You have few financial resources but you do have an idea and you are willing to work very hard. Your many years of hard work and bit of luck, finally result in a million dollar payday This is the American Dream, right. No matter where you start from, there is the infinite possibility that you can get there!

    —–

    You fail miserably, you may even go bankrupt, but you are able to learn something important from this failure. As a result, this new information propels you to even greater financial success this time around.

    —–

    Finally, once you get there after you made that first million, success leads to even greater success since we all know, it takes money to make money. I love the business adage that says how do you make $100M ? Start with $10M!

And there are places where this is true.

Bill Gates after he dropped out of Harvard, he did create something from nothing in building Microsoft and became as a result one of the richest men in the world.

Simon Cowell, my favorite American idol judge, did have a miserably failure. He went bankrupt, lost a million dollars and had to move back in with his parents. With the success of the show, American Idol, he now makes over $8M a year and in 2003 he sold half of his S Records to BMG for $43M. Pretty good comeback

And finally, Donald Trump was able to take over his father’s real estate business and become even richer. I laugh because in a recent issue of a pop-culture magazine, Stuff, one of the headline read, How to Get Rich, by Ivanka Trump. I did not even have to read the article to know the answer—have “The Donald” as your father!

These stories are great to read about and sometimes they even inspire us. But are they always true? For most of us they are not. No matter how hard we look for the ten steps to success, we each have to make our own way.

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how honoring our failures is also important. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

18.1 What Does It Mean to Bounce?

Filed Under Business Book, Interviews, Successful Blog | 7 Comments

Bounce! Not Bounce Back

Bounce! The Path to True Business Confidence

Barry and I met the first time in a local coffee shop. We shared a bit about ourselves and quickly got to the many facets of Barry’s business career, his books, and his experiences. We talked about his first book, You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth about Starting and Growing Your Business. He told me a few stories about his own successes and failures and how they contributed to his new book –Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success. Bounce! is about how to gain true confidence by learning from and letting go of past success and failure.

Barry, I love the cover of Bounce! So let’s start there. What is Bounce! anyway? Is it about bouncing back? Why a rubber band ball on the cover? What does the rubber band ball mean and how can I get one?

I don’t believe that we bounce back. That is too simple. The business world is not structured in a linear way,

Bounce! is about letting go of what you were taught was the secret path to succeed in business. Letting go of the idea that something to learn comes from failure or that you can always duplicate your success. Let go of the shame of losing and the enlarged ego that comes with a big win.

If we let go of whatever the last result was — we can actually Bounce! We can learn what — if any thing — from the last success or failure and get ready by bouncing to the next decision that we have to make.

Any success or failure is just a part of the entire business lifecycle. Individually, a particular result or outcome actually means nothing. No event will guarantee the same result in the future. By learning to bounce through this repetitive process of “success and failure, failure and success”, you will develop a resiliency that will lead to the true business confidence that ultimately determines which ones of us succeed.

More importantly, it allows each of us to have passion and enthusiasm regardless of where we are in the cycle. It allows us to get ready our next great success!

I love the rubber band ball for a lot of reasons. I grew up making rubber band balls. They became somewhat of an obsession for me. I loved how you take a simple rubber band and make it into a cool toy ball that could bounce. The biggest one I ever made was about 6 inches in diameter. Recently I went on YouTube and there are so many videos with rubber band balls doing a lot of things.

I concept of the rubber band ball is that while there are not 10 steps to success, there are building blocks. In order to build true business confidence, you layer on these bands or foundations for yourself. Rubber bands are also very flexible and that is what you have to be in the business world to succeed.

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow we’ll talk about the Archetypes that lead to success. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like to invite Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Jason Alba, Matthew Reinbold, Kelly Anderson, Wendy Piersall, Tim Stay, and B4B Conference

Filed Under Business Book, Successful Blog | 6 Comments

relationships button

The fabulous Blogging for Business Conference in Salt Lake City last week was like the living web in the real world in real time. Turn the comment box into a conference room and the same exchange of information and relationships was happening with the same dynamic engagement.

Kudos to Jason Alba and Matthew Reinbold for a conference that provided a schedule of top-notch speakers from the morning keynote by Wendy Piersall through the afternoon keynote by Gary Goldhammer to the last session by Tim Stay — all were exceptional opportunities to interact and learn. Lindsey Pollack, who spoke on GenY, explained my son to me . . . now I am wise. The attendees were equally as stellar. I got to meet Hal Halladay, Jordan McCollum and Kelly Anderson. Kelly showed Wendy and I around SLC. What royal company she is!

AND I MET LINDSEY POLLAK!!! She has a smile and brain that don’t quit!!

All in all, that Blogging for Business conference showed Utah and all of us what a conference should be like. [Yes, Jason, the title of this post is an effort to hijack your names. grin]

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

121: How a Colossal Mistake Taught Me 3 Keys of Blogging and SEO

Filed Under 121 Conversation, Business Book, Successful Blog | 14 Comments

one2one blog post logo

Boy, Was that a Bad Idea!

Lately some folks have felt defeated, wondering whether their readers have left them. Dawud tackled that question in his post, What To Do When People Aren’t Paying Attention To Your Blog? Did you see it? His advice was right on the money.

When Dawud finished his counsel, he tossed the ball back here with this question.

What have you thought would work on your blog that bombed with your readers? And what did you learn from it?

Oh my! Many things have bombed, and I just let them go. But those don’t make for interesting stories. For me, only one stands out as the Bomb of the Century.

How a Colossal Mistake Taught Me 3 Keys of Blogging and SEO

It’s been long enough now that no aftershocks will come from speaking of it. At the time it was noisy and I owned no small part of it. It happened just a few short weeks after I started at Successful Blog and just a few short months after I wrote my very first blog post.

I tried to do a series on SEO when I couldn’t even spell it yet.
It wasn’t pretty, but in the end, it was beautiful.

The story goes something like this:

It was the wild, early days of the blogosphere, not even the trains had arrived yet. I think there were 15 million blogs about then. Picture me in Mankato, Minnesota, straight out of “Little House on the Prairie.”

I had done a popular series on Blog Promotion and maybe I was a tiny bit pleased with myself. I decided the next week would be on SEO. I had no clue what I was doing. I asked a friend to help — a young man from the UK, a programmer, not an SEO guy. He was as new to blogging as I was. Neither of us understood what we were taking on.

I announced the series. It got some attention.

One post in the series delivered information on metatags that was totally, entirely, and unabashedly out-of-date. The musicians, the sales folks, and the kindly tech guys began gently correcting the errors via their comments. They were both gracious and gentle with their replies.

Despite their grace, it was not fun nor particularly pretty.

I apologized.

Then, I caught up with my friend, Yaro Starak, and borrowed some of his knowledge to correct the misinformation we had supplied. He was most generous.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end.

A prominent SEO guy used us as the reason bloggers shouldn’t talk about SEO, leaving out the part where he had been invited to help.

A couple of posts went up from bloggers I still know and respect, who said, “Yep, she was wrong, but you didn’t need to shout her down like that.”

They just stood up like that.

It was about honor and community.

The prominent SEO guy and I talked offline and made peace with each other. He bought me a copy of Aaron Wall’s famous book so that I’d never find myself there again. What a beautiful resolution to the conflict!

The rest of the story is myth and legend of the wild, early blogosphere.

Sure I wish I would have been smarter, more circumspect, but I’m at the same time I’m grateful for the event. I learned these things from that colossal mistake.

I guess, you might call the learning part a success.

Which leads me to the very next question.

What do you do when a commenter seems to misinterpret what you’re saying no matter how hard you try to explain what you mean?

If you’re reading this, I’m not just asking Dawud the question, I’d love to hear your answer too, in the comment box below.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

One2One is a cross-blog conversation. Find the answer at dawud miracle on Monday. You can see the entire One-2-One Conversation series on the Successful Series page.
In Case You Missed It: Writing 06-13-07

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