How I Failed: nearly dying, quitting singing career & losing $150k on book launch - David Wood

0:00If you're not doing hiring right, then your business is not going to succeed. But finding the right people is a nightmare. You get sent loads of irrelevant applications, so you spend hours sending LinkedIn messages to great talent, hoping for the best, and honestly, it's just exhausting. The good news though, is I can tell you about Otter, who I use at my company Heights to hire some of our best people. Otter have over a million users on their platform, and they match my jobs to only the most relevant candidates. Plus, Otter makes sure candidates know exactly what kind of company they'd be joining, our mission, our values, and our culture.

0:37This means by the time I get to interviews, the applications that come from Otter are on a completely different level. The whole process is quicker too. So ultimately, we get to hire the best people in less time. So if you want to upgrade your hiring, check out otter.com forward slash secret leaders. That's otta.com forward slash secret leaders. I did a launch once for a book and I was on my knees crying in my bedroom because the server crashed and the whole thing, all the years of preparation for this launch probably cost me$100 ,000 or$200 ,000 this mistake. That felt like an epic failure. David Word is a high performance coach.

1:26He's been doing that for 25 years and has recently taken up acting. but his life has been peppered with failure and tragedy. David will tell you that failure is a part of a life well lived because it means you're pushing yourself. The people you've really got to worry about are the people who never fail because they're the ones who never try. David has tried a lot of things and succeeded in several, but we're here to learn from his most memorable failures, including one which nearly killed him.

2:02Around the time that Tim Ferriss published The 4-Hour Workweek in 2007, David started writing a book called Get Paid for Who You Are. He wanted to explain stuff like how to be a digital nomad, which was a pretty new concept back then. He poured a lot into it. By the time I paid the ghostwriter and the editor and the PR campaign for the book to be on national TV and all of that, it added up to$150 ,000. And what went wrong, we did a special kind of a launch. So I gave away the book for free and invited people to donate. So you got the book for free and then invited you to donate to the Rainforest Foundation that Sting created.

2:46I raised$60 ,000 for the Rainforest. So that was good. Got the message out there. A lot of people got the book. And the money monetization of it was I'd offer a course on the back end to help you implement the book. It was like$300 or something like that for the course. And we did a time-sensitive launch, which meant you needed to line up and be ready at a specific time because the first five would get this massive prize and the next 10 would get another prize and the next whatever. So it was time-sensitive. And I even paid a guy for server reinforcement so that it wouldn't crash with a huge amount of traffic.

3:26Well, the fucking thing crashed. and that was so bad for my launch because people figured, oh, well, I didn't get in. I couldn't get in, so I couldn't get those prizes, so now it's too late. And I was just on my knees in my bedroom crying, sobbing, all the release of all this pent-up tension and energy towards this massive launch that was going to have me make back the$150 ,000 and make a profit and serve even more people just fizzled out. And I tried so hard to get it right. And I cried and I cried and I cried. To be brought to tears by a business disaster is obviously not what we want. But crying is a necessary release in many situations.

4:20The thing is, though, for David, crying hadn't come easy. When I was seven, my little sister and I were coming home from school and somehow she got, and by just, you know, trigger alert, this might be upsetting for some people to hear, so you're welcome to skip forward. But she was somehow got under the school bus and she was killed by the school bus. And I was there and I saw it and ran home and that was the last time I saw my sister. And the impact I have learned since, because we just went on with life and my parents went to the funeral. I didn't go because back then you tried to insulate kids from that kind of stuff.

5:07But apparently I grew up very left-brained, very intellectual, very cerebral, which may have some positive impact. I became an actuary and I came top of my school and got paid to go to college. But the downside was I didn't know anything about emotional intelligence. I didn't know how to feel. I didn't know how to be in my body. And intimacy was very difficult for me, true intimacy. It looked like intimacy, but if it got too deep, I'd need to get out. So thank God I discovered personal growth and therapy and got to really go back and uncover those feelings and those events. And I went back and interviewed my mom and my dad and my neighbors and found out about it and went through my sister's things that my mom kept and old photographs and learned how to cry.

6:10Because I just hadn't cried and I learned how to cry. David used his left-sided brain to become an actuary in New York, and then he made a move which didn't work out. Well, I quit my job to go back to Australia because I thought I had more friends there than I did in New York. And I thought, hang on, if I'm quitting, if I'm taking a break from work, this is a chance to really play because once you're in a job you often don't have the option to go and do something for six months so I thought what would I do if I could do anything for six months what I want to do and I'd always wanted to be one of those guys at the ski fields who's walking around with a radio wireless mic and their guitar and they're playing piano man and getting everybody in the bar singing you know and I saw this guy he he wore a kilt and did 500 miles by the proclaimers.

7:03Well, I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more and get everyone singing. I always wanted to do that. So I thought I'm going to do that. And I went back to Australia and I hired a singing coach. And two weeks later, I had my first gig at a squash court that had a bar attached to it. And they paid me 50 bucks to go and sing. And it was a good experience. So I did that for a year and a half. And I do not have a strong singing voice. I can sing 500 miles, but anything else, it's not that great. I'm a good entertainer. And I did that for a year and a half and I full time. Well, on the side, I was doing some actuarial consulting to kind of keep me afloat financially.

7:54But a year and a half, I did this and I'd go out there and it'd take six hours, you know, drive out, set up all my equipment on my own, do a four hour gig, pack it all up, drive home, unpack all the equipment. And if I was lucky, I would get$200 for that. And often it was less. And here's the thing, I almost never got invited back to the same place. David realised he wasn't going to make it as a singer. And he's got some good advice on how to tell if a career change or new venture isn't right for you. If you're really not good at what you're doing, that's okay. Train. Get better. Practice. But if you've been at it for a certain amount of time, and you've got to choose what that is, it might be six months, it might be a year, it might be two years, and you are not getting feedback from the universe that this is where you should be, then you got to reconsider.

8:53Maybe this isn't something. And Seth Godin has a great book called The Dip, which will help you evaluate, do I have the time, the energy, and the money to go through the dip, through the hard bit, to get to the part where things are good and I'm getting paid or do I not? Like if you want to be a doctor, you got to really seriously consider. You don't want to get three quarters of the way in and then go, this is too hard. Acting. You know, I said to myself, I'll try it for a year and see what happens and then I'll decide. And if at the end of that year, I'm just pushing uphill and I'm getting nowhere like most actors do, I'll leave Los Angeles.

9:39But that's not what's happening. I got myself a manager now, I just booked my first big commercial, I've got an agent, and I'm about to leave and record a radio spot, so the universe is telling me, hey, keep going with this. David used this logic when he decided to stop being an entertainer back in the day. He sold his recording equipment and focused on coaching, which was a good move. But the thing is, you don't know if something's going to be a good move until you do it. You've got to give yourself the chance to fail, or you'll never succeed. But that's just not how most people present themselves to the world.

10:14People see our successes. They're the ones that we brag about. And they're the ones we go and do the speaking circuit, talking about our successes. And we see on Facebook and all the shiny stuff. Like I'll probably post about going and recording this radio ad today because I got booked as an actor to do this brand name ad. And you see all that. But you don't see the 2 ,000 things that I've done that didn't work. You don't see the entertainment business that I started that just was a flop. You don't see all the marketing methods I tried that went nowhere. You don't see the thousands of hours that I didn't get paid for or all the auditions that I'm doing now as an actor that you never see.

11:00So I just wanted to get on my soapbox a little bit and say, you see successful people, for every success, they've got at least 100 failures, even if they're micro failures. So take heart in whatever you're doing and keep moving. You've got to keep moving. But sometimes moving can kill you, as David nearly found while paragliding. There were two separate incidents. One was an incident, one's an accident. The difference is when someone gets hurt in an accident. So the first incident had a full collapse 300 feet above the ocean, plummeting towards the earth. And I think your chances are about 50-50 at that point that you're going to reinflate before you hit the ground.

11:45And I reinflated at 80 feet and managed to get back to land. I avoided the cliff. I avoided the ocean. I got back to land and I lived. And then you'd think I might've given it up then, but I was like, no, I'm going to keep going with paragliding. And I was in Columbia flying around a mountain and I came in to land on the top of the mountain and I was five feet above the ground and a little bubble of air caught me and took me up and back into an area that had a bit of bad wind. and I didn't control the wing correctly. And I had a 50 % collapse and fell from only 10 or 15 feet, but I fell into my butt and got a compression fracture in my spine.

12:34I was screaming. I still haven't posted the video publicly. That was five years ago. And I still one day I plan to go and get that footage and post it because I had the GoPro on it. So you can see me come in and hit. You can hear the screaming because of the agony. And then you can hear me say, it's okay. It's okay. I know what this is. Because I'd had a similar accident doing parkour a few years before. And I could wiggle my toes and I knew what this is. I'm like, this is a compression fracture maybe of my spine. I got bruising, contusions. It hurts like a mofo. but I'm going to be okay. So I was actually quite calm about two minutes after I hit and people were rushing over and they were so nice to me.

13:25They're all like talking in fast Spanish and they're telling me to, hey, just relax and just be quiet. And I said, actually, I am relaxed and I'm trying to speak. I want you to listen to me. And so I was able to communicate and tell them what I wanted and the camera's still rolling and they put me on a stretcher and they left me in a shed on my own for about an hour while they went back to flying while I waited for the ambulance. And the worst thing about that day was that I needed to pee. And I pee a lot and I'd been flying already for like an hour and a half, two hours. And I really needed to pee when I crashed and I needed to pee and I'm waiting for the ambulance and finally, and I couldn't move and I'm in a, like, they put me in a C-spine thing.

14:15And in the ambulance, I kept saying, tengo que orinar, tengo que orinar. I need to pee. And so they'd stop the ambulance and the two of them would like roll me over carefully, keeping my head straight and then hold a bottle for me and look away while I, while I tried to pee. And I couldn't, I couldn't. And the more I needed to, the less I could. And I even filmed a little video in the ambulance saying, the irony is right now that I was prepared for a cross-country trip, so I am wearing an adult diaper. What are the odds? I'm actually wearing an adult diaper, so I can just pee my pants right now and I'll be fine.

14:59You think I could do it? Could not do it for the life of me. I couldn't pee and got to the hospital. Tangle KRDNR. And then finally, when they left me alone for two minutes with a blanket and a bottle, that's all it took. And I was able to pee. And that was one of the best moments of my entire life. David has experienced many failures, which he says, of course, suck at the time. But he's also happy to have failed many times because it means he's tried lots of things. He's giving himself opportunities to succeed. Thomas Edison said, he said, I didn't fail in my experiments. Inventing the light bulb was just a 2000 step process.

15:45And I really liked that. Get out there, go hard. That's just how I like to live. And so I'm not prescribing this, but if you want to be on your deathbed and saying, you know what, I really gave it everything, I would ask, how could I even go a little harder? How could I go even bigger? Could I take more risk? This is if you're not already on your edge. But if you're not already on your edge, how can you take more risk?

16:20David Wood, who says it's not what happens to you that matters, it's how you deal with it. Stay on your edge, keep trying things, keep failing. Thanks for listening to this episode. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter. If you like this episode, please hit follow or subscribe. See you next time.