I think my most notable failure in this class would have been for the first assignment where we had to interview customers. I went around Turlington that afternoon and had seven people deny me before I got my first interview. This was extremely frustrating and I almost gave up on the assignment. I didn't understand why people wouldn't want to be interviewed for just 60 seconds. There were some people who were even kind of rude when they rejected me.
I did learn a very important lesson from this failure though. I figured out the key to interviewing customers. The first seven people that I talked to all were walking somewhere when I talked to them. When someone is walking somewhere, I realized they are far less likely to agree to an interview. The five people that I did ended up interviewing were all either sitting or standing around somewhere. Since they're not going somewhere already, they are far more likely to agree to the interview. In the next few assignments where I had to interview customers, I made sure to talk to people who were sitting down. I did end up failing a couple more times but I never reached seven again which was great.
Failure is extremely frustrating for anybody to deal with but it is inevitable. Anybody who wants to be an entrepreneur will fail at one time or another. I think whenever I face failure, the first thing I do is think about what I can change. If I'm failing then I'm obviously not doing something right. I look to see the source of the problem and what changes I can make to eliminate the problem. I think this class has changed the way I look at failure. I'm definitely more likely to take a risk now. Before this class, I would never have wanted to interview customers about a random idea but now I think I could do that easily.
Matt, I know the frustration of trying to interview people. For me, it was when I was trying to give away $5. I went to the mall and people looked at me like an idiot when I tried to give them a free dollar. It was surprisingly hard to give away free money! Maybe next time I'll use your tactics of only going up to people who are standing still or sitting down. Check out my failures here:
ReplyDeletehttp://keifermcclainent3003.blogspot.com/2016/04/celebrating-failure.html
I went through the same thing for many of the assignments that involved trying to find people for interviews. I know personally, I don't like to be recorded so I understand why people say no, but at the same time, it is very frustrating when you have time find five people and it takes asking ten just to get one recording. I agree it definitely helps asking people who are sitting and not busy on their way somewhere else. You should check out my failure on my blog, http://theyact.blogspot.com/2016/04/celebrating-failure.html.
ReplyDeleteMatthew,
ReplyDeleteI hated all the assignments that require you to interview people, and the free money one. I didn't even do some of the interviewing customers one because I hated getting rejected by people. In the free money one, people were very rude and I was just trying to give them a dollar! Good luck with the rest of your semester and exams!
You can check out my post here:http://ariannaschmid.blogspot.com/2016/04/celebrating-failure.html