Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off, Start All Over Again

My dad loves Frank Sinatra.  He would play Sinatra's albums on the weekends during my childhood, and I remember this song fondly:

Here are the lyrics:

Pick Yourself Up

 (Lyrics by: Dorothy Fields / Music by: Jerome Kern)

Now nothing's impossible, I've found for when my chin is on the ground,

I pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again.

Don't lose your confidence if you slip, be grateful for a pleasant trip,
And pick yourself up, dust off, start over again.

Work like a soul inspired until the battle of the day is won.
You may be sick and tired, but you be a man, my son.

Will you remember the famous men who have to fall to rise again,
So take a deep breath, pick yourself up, start all over again.

You gotta work like a soul inspired until the battle of the day is won.
You may be sick and tired, but you’ll be a man, my son.
Will you remember the famous men who have to fall and then to rise again,
So take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.

Once again now:
Will you remember the famous men who have to fall and then rise again,
So take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.

Those of us detoxing from the employment Kool-Aid are slowly learning what entrepreneurs and inventors have known for centuries:  before there can be a breakthrough, there must be at least one, if not more, breakdowns / failures.  

I won't exhaustively list examples here:  however, I think of Thomas Edison's multiple versions of the light bulb before he hit on the right combination and changed the world forever.  Think of it:  all of those previous versions were failures. Surely Edison must have worn a hair-shirt at times, wondering what the hell he was thinking and doing.  It didn't stop him for long, though.  I think Edison, in all of his creative genius and fervor, was a glass half-full guy of a particular sort:  I believe that when his laboratory in Menlo Park caught fire and burned to the ground, he called his wife to come and watch the beauty of the myriad chemical rainbow flames.

Just as the modern economy continues to remove us even further from our agrarian and journeyman roots, the increasingly passe' employment paradigm also makes a mediocre vacuum of the research & development experience of experimentation and failure.  Failure is implicitly and explicitly not an option as part of an employee innovation process, if innovation is welcomed at all in an organizational culture.

It is an unnecessary compounding layer to the already stressful experience of entrepreneurs who most recently were only laid-off employees.  As a culture and as individuals we are programmed to be at least satisfactory employees who should avoid errors.  I wholeheartedly support that level of perfectionism when it comes to human and environmental health and safety.  However, I wholeheartedly believe that everything else is up for grabs from an innovation standpoint.  And in order to innovate:  to create new products, to fill needs in the economy that are unmet either as a vendor or an employee:  the creative process of trial and error to both drive profit and change the world must be engaged, again and again.  

Bottom-line:  if you define being laid-off as a failure, great!  Keep trying:  working for yourself, or working towards your next position, or both:  the breakthrough is coming.  None of us can predict how many tries it will take, but if you persevere, you will achieve breakthrough.  More often than not, you will need to try options you have never tried before:  you will need to innovate to achieve breakthrough, and experience failure on the path to breakthrough.  You will need to embrace the joy and rewards of risk, and abandon the fear and shame of failure that has been hammered into us, one of several generations of employees.

I had a conversation with a colleague who recently started their own business "until they get their next job."  Their business is growing; and they're trending to earn 30% more than in their traditional career position working just 4 days a week than the 5+ days they worked for their former employer.  They're already doing it:  it just feels weird to them not to be an employee, and there's grief and loss around that, as well as anxiety and fear.  Not surprising:  we don't have a strong cultural or economic context for new entrepreneurs, or a good support system.  It's like bush-whacking in a wilderness into which you've been dumped unceremoniously.   It's okay.  It will start to feel normal, and believe it or not, even better.  My best advice is to stay connected to a support system of other entrepreneurs and colleagues, and build your own new self-determined economic context.

Once again now:
Will you remember the famous men who have to fall and then rise again,
So take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.