Yo yo yo. Welcome back to the Further your Lifestyle podcast conversations on lifestyle passions and hustles. My name's Chris, I am your host and I'm super excited to be back here having the conversation with you Episode 176 today and I just want to say, if you're new here, hey, how you doing? Welcome to the podcast, and I've been doing this podcast for almost four years. It's been an amazing journey to get here and I love having these conversations with you. The first thing I just want to say, if you enjoy this episode, two things Let me know, leave a comment down below here on the YouTube channel, or you can reach out to me on Instagram. But the second thing is share it with someone. Share it with someone that you think will resonate with this episode or maybe will actually resonate with one of the other episodes.

Now, in today's topic, it's actually kind of a little different. I've always asked people to ask me a question or if people would love to see things on the podcast, what would you like to see? And that is our topic today. I've had a question come through. It is from an anonymous person, which is fair enough. Not everyone likes to share that, which is 100% okay, and it's a really good question. It's deep and it's off the cuff and I want to answer it off the cuff. I don't want to be sitting here planning in advance. I've got some directional points in terms of maybe how I want to make sure I bring in themes and things like that, but I haven't gone into the detail. So we're going to dive into that today.

And the question which I guess will lead into the whole topic of today and this is the question what is a significant failure or setback you've experienced and how did it ultimately shape your perspective or approach to life? It's a deep question, it's very full on. I want to dive into it. That's the episode today. This could be a very quick episode or it might be a very long episode, depending on how much I get into the detail. And as I think we dive into that topic, I'll probably be able to understand it a little bit better and you'll either go real long or real short, but you'll find out soon enough anyway. So appreciate being here, get comfortable, get cozy. We're going to roll the intro and let's get into it. The question again what is a significant failure or setback you've experienced and how did it ultimately shape your perspective or approach to life. Like, I mean, there's a lot we can dive into this. We can talk about lessons learned, we can talk about, you know, the different setbacks that do come through.

Oh, I do want to touch on a whole bunch of different things, right, you know, making sure that this perspective and the first point is this perspective of failure I don't think in my life I've ever experienced something where I've said I've failed, maybe in the midst, like in the moment, I've said, oh, this is it, I failed, it's not going to work out. But now that I look back in hindsight, there hasn't been a moment where I think because of that I failed and I wasn't able to get to where I wanted to be. I am exactly where I want to be now. Of course, I'm heading into a direction of where I want to continue to grow, but I'm in that position towards where I want to go and grow. So when I think about failure or setbacks, I think they're two different things. Failure is when you 100% give up.

Now, look, I've had a number of different businesses over the years and some of them they didn't work out. They failed in the sense of we didn't make enough money from it. It didn't make sense to continue it. Therefore, we sold it or we stopped doing it and we moved on to something else. But in that perspective, I see that as it's a redirection, it's a refocus of where I'm putting that attention and that effort. Ultimately, having multiple different businesses enables you to make something bigger and better as you can gain that experience.

So whether we I had back in the day during university with my mates, we did a project and it was called Mr Mum Laundry and we actually won the, we came first in our whole class in terms of who had the best business idea, in terms of viability, you know, net profit and all these different things, and we actually thought why don't we actually start this business when we leave university and make it happen? And a lot of the people didn't want to. They didn't want to take the risk, they wanted to go focus on, yeah, really just getting into the nine to five. And look, I got into the nine to five as well, but I had a little bit of time before that job started. I think I had six months off and at the time, my business partner, jeremy and I we were trying to make this happen and we're running through running the numbers. We were getting ready to start and it was at the last minute. We ran some more numbers and the time, effort and things like that. We were like it's just not feasible for where we're at at this point. So we made a judgment call. We stopped doing that.

And Jeremy had a different idea which, kind of you know, had come from a few different inspiration points, and that was to build a subscription sock business. And we did that. We had that bootstrapped pretty quick and like in a couple of weeks we went and set up business accounts, got all that ready and we probably operated for two and a half years, didn't make huge dollars, but we built that business and then by the time it wasn't getting to where we were wanting to go. We also weren't putting in a lot of effort to it. We were learning. It was kind of like our first business together and it was a different type of business sourcing, getting the product, shipping it out. We had constraints with postage, which everyone does at the moment as well.

This is going back like 10, 15 years ago probably 10 years ago, yeah, 10 years ago and anyway. So he decided he wanted to move out of it. He sold his half to me. I purchased it and I continued on for a bit, got harder and harder. If I was to think about it now, we should have done things completely different. Right, and that's hindsight for you, but eventually I ended up selling that as well, sorry. I stopped the business and I sold the business name and it was all done and dusted.

Now my point here on this one is was that a failure? The business failed in the sense of like it didn't continue to thrive and grow, but I didn't put in the effort to make that happen. Did it create a setback? No, it did not create a setback. From that, I have continued to want to build more businesses. I have been working on trying to build businesses ever since I knew I could and that has just been in my core.

What that looks like is always going to be different. Sometimes we get, you know, writer's block in the sense of you're trying to seek inspiration. It's all too overwhelming. But usually it's the simple things which are the real big successes. But in that point you know I reflect back on that and there was amount of things that I've learned from that, that when I set up my business on eBay, there was a lot of things that I was able to take from that and apply and lessons learned from that, especially one with postage. And you know this isn't an episode about postage or anything like that, but postage has continued to increase every year since then. When I started reselling, which was almost four years ago this is my fourth year doing it I think postage to send something into like just you know, just interstate domestically was on average around $7.60. At the moment it's now about $10.90 or $11. It's gone up basically a dollar every year, a little bit more than that, about 3% every year. That's a huge impact to the bottom line, that continued cost. But it's something that you've had to adapt to, something that we've had to be able to figure out and work through. So that's that perspective.

I don't see failure as something which is that's the end. It's how do you use that to then redirect. And I think from that there's been moments. I guess, if I look at this, like what other things have ultimately shaped my perspective or my approach to life, from things not going to plan, things failing, things not working out, having setbacks right. And I think there's other things which, if I was to look at it from the perspective of, you know, maybe it's regrets, you know, and I failed to maybe execute something or I didn't do something. So therefore it's created a setback later in life because I don't have experience with it and I think that one was risk-taking.

I've always been a person that kind of follows the not necessarily. Yeah, I'm very routine based and I don't like getting outside the walls and doing things which might, you know, step on people's toes or get people uncomfortable, because I'm a people pleaser. That's naturally who I am and it's sometimes a good thing and a bad thing. And, as people say, one of my weaknesses but it's also one of my best strengths is I'm too nice. So I don't like to create discomfort to others, I don't like to create conflict, all those different things, which is a bit of a setback and it's a failure of my point to enable me to be able to grow and gain additional experience and to thrive.

And I remember getting this feedback from my career counselor back when I was working full-time and when I got promoted to manager. Getting to manager, to senior manager, is a lot harder, of course, and you know I was mid, you know I'd been manager for about I think it was two years, three years, and looking to how do I get to that next level. And the conversation that came up was he's like mate, just chill out. And his encouragement to me was take more risk, like go do something which is going to stretch you, that gets you really uncomfortable, that forces you to grow, or, you know, being proactive in a way that maybe people didn't see it coming. Now he's not saying go be silly, because obviously I'm working on a client, you know situation and I can't go do things which is going to screw up a client. But he was more just. You know, just try things right.

And now at that point I didn't really understand what he meant by that. I loved what I was doing and I didn't really want to get out of my kind of comfort zone. That's really more the point. And now that I'm working for myself and I'm the only one that is leading where this business goes, I don't have a choice but to get out of my comfort zone. If I don't get out of my comfort zone, I will not grow, the business will not grow and I become the bottleneck and the main reason why the business would possibly fail or have a setback. Learning to take risks and learning to put yourself in a position that's going to force you to grow is probably one of the best things that I've done.

Now. I've been doing this probably forcing myself to grow ever since I probably started the storage unit and part of the business where I spent money per month to have a storage unit. It meant I now started to have to start working a little bit harder because I've got a little bit more skin in the game. That was scary, that was calculated, it was uncomfortable and that was two years ago, two and a half years ago, and since then now I'm on my fourth storage unit I still remember buying when I got my first wholesale order, spending like between $500 and $1,500 from a few different areas, places, and that was scary as heck. Like, oh, I'm spending so much money. And since then I've now spent over a hundred thousand dollars in sourcing from the same wholesaler Like that. That just blows my mind and I've been comfortable with it and that's the thing.

Like I didn't do that, obviously, the next time I've done that over a period of time, but the fact of the matter is is because I was willing to step out of a setback that I experienced, from learning, from a hindsight experience, that because I didn't go stretch myself, because I wasn't willing to take a risk, because I failed to execute on that part or take action, I didn't get that experience, which didn't set me up for success when I started the business. Now, what did set me up for success for starting my business was, you know, being diligent, being proactive in the sense of being on time, being punctual, being willing to go above and beyond, ensuring that things are client ready, but also internal ready, and keeping in mind who are the stakeholders. So, thinking beyond myself, and that's a lot of that doesn't translate into okay, how does that enable you to be a better version of yourself? Or how does that, you know, enable you to ultimately shape, you know, a better perspective of life or a better approach to life or success? But it's in the nitty gritties of putting in the reps, being self-aware but also being aware of the people around you, having empathy. There is a book called I don't think I've got it right next to me, I think it's 12 and a half by Gary V, which talks about all these 12 different emotions and different things you feel while you know, going through life and going through business and at the end of the day, it comes back to the empathy that we have with other people. How do we handle other people, how do we communicate with other people, how do we act with other people? You know there's some themes that I did put down, that I've pulled out across. You know just my life and I think these themes that come out are resilience, personal growth, overcoming challenges, and I mean these are all central to the podcast anyway, but they're probably the three points that I think we all are going to go through at some stage and they all kind of if you were to put them into like a Venn diagram, they all kind of overlap in the middle, and the middle is you then being able to grow and thrive and, you know, experience life for the better.

During resilience, it's probably because you're going through a failure or a setback. Right, maybe you've had an emergency bill pop up, a death in the family, something out of your control has happened, like a setback, which man? It's now a time of resilience you've had to push through. Look, I've been very fortunate where I haven't had huge life-changing things like that happen before, but there has been times where I've had to make sacrifices of. I chose work over friends, family relationships and, you know, getting closer in some of those areas. I chose work instead and you know I was working 70 hours some weeks to just get things done. But it was a time of resilience because I knew what I wanted and I wanted to be able to prove that to the people that were above me. Or I wanted to be able to go for a promotion or whatever it may be. Some of it I enjoyed, some of it I didn't, but that was a part of that was a part of resilience. You had to see it through, ride it out, just like when we had the pandemic.

It was a period of resilience. We had a huge setback in all of our lives, out of our control, and in that we had to learn how do we be our best versions of ourselves in a redefined box of what we call life, and a lot of us broke like we couldn't handle it. And it shaped our perspective of going back to work. It shaped our perspective of what is important to us in life, what is our purpose, why are we doing this? Which ultimately, for me, that led to me actually taking this journey and actually building this business, starting this podcast and taking a chance on myself, because I started to question why was I doing those things right? In that sense, resilience because of one setback or frustrations, or of work or things where you had to kind of go above and beyond or spend extra time. There was a silver lining from it and that's why we need to focus on being resilient, seeing it through, working through it. How do we handle it, how do we manage it, how do we mitigate it, how do we get ourselves a bit more comfortable when things aren't comfortable at all? And then we can see that ultimately, from that we can then make better decisions or we have different opportunities and we can be, I guess, present in making those decisions.

The next thing was personal growth. I mean, if I play it back to again, I think the biggest setbacks or significant points in life which has enabled me to then ultimately shape my perspective and my approach to life, has been obviously the pandemic. But then not seeing, just having that realization of clicking that what I was doing wasn't ultimately going to get me to where I wanted to be, and by continuing to do what I was continuing to do, such as working for someone else great job, very rewarding, high salary. It was not ultimately going to shape me to where I wanted to be, so something had to change, and it's that personal growth period. The personal growth didn't come until I actually took the initiative and took the chance on myself and actually made that decision to do it, because that was scary as heck. I figured, you know, if I fail, you know I'm going to have to come crawling back, I'm going to have to get another job. But I was comfortable with that. I was willing to do that and even now to think where my business is, how my lifestyle is. It's not what I imagined, because I didn't know what it was going to look like, but that's the personal growth journey I've had to go through becoming a better version of myself, coming out of my shell, learning who I am, what I want, how I work, how I operate.

And by doing that, that personal growth has enabled me to overcome some of the things that has stopped me from being, as I said before, taking risks, stepping out of my comfort zone or being willing to put skin in the game. And some of it is like imposter syndrome. Sometimes it's external forces, such as tall poppy syndrome, other people bringing you down. So, yeah, sometimes there's a confidence thing or just a doubt or a fear, but when we understand that worst case failure is, it doesn't pan out. Worst case failure is actually you giving up. But if you hit a roadblock, if you hit a barrier, if you hit something which is a challenge, and you overcome those challenges, the path is still forward. The path is still going to ultimately continue to take you to where you want to be. But where we most struggle is we have these problems, barriers, issues, conflicts. Things arise and we think we can't get past them, we can't go over them, we can't go around them, we don't know what to do, we freak out, so we go the other way or we try something else completely different and we lose focus. That's why the theme of resilience is so important as well, to enable us to have that personal growth, because when we overcome challenges, we still continue to build and create the lifestyle that we want right, and it will ultimately shape. You know where you want to be and your approach to life. When you know that you're capable of doing things, you will be able to do so much more.

It's you know the problems that I had two years ago in my business, building my business. You know they're not even things that I think about today. My problems at the moment is, you know, I've got to make sure that I've got enough, you know, revenue coming through and cashflow coming through and profit. I've got staff to pay. I've got people to look after. I've got rent to pay. I have suppliers wanting for me to do my next order, so making sure that I can bring that in. Can I house it all? Can I do it? I want to grow so I need to stretch it a bit more. Can I afford to do that? How do I calculate that? All these decisions I want to make, how do I make what are the decisions I need to make today? That's going