Understanding the Psychology of Failure and the Importance of Persistence

Gresham discusses the unexpected power of a ‘fail wall' and the lessons learned from failure, emphasizing the importance of embracing failure as part of the path to success.

Gresham and Anatolii discuss the psychology of failure, the fear of failure, and the importance of persistence in the face of setbacks.

Gresh highlights the common mistakes in media marketing and SEO, emphasizing the importance of aligning strategy and understanding the tools used for optimization.

Business Pillar: Entrepreneurship/Journey

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Full Interview:

Transcription:

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Gresham Harkless Intro 00:01

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast and I wanted to share with you one of the episodes that I was a guest on for someone else's podcast. I always talk about how important it is to build a media company. One of the next best things you can do is be on somebody else's media company. So I had the pleasure of being a guest on this podcast and I wanted to share a little snippet with you because it would help support the eight business pillars we've really been trying to focus on with a lot more of our content, a lot more of the solo episodes that I'm doing.

So make sure of course that you subscribe to our podcast, but of course you take some time out, check out the show notes and subscribe to the podcast that I've been featured on as well too. And get to learn about some of those eight business pillars and how you can continue to leverage and build that up. So you can go from builder to architect to a course at Rockstar and Luminary. So this is Gresh signing out. I hope you enjoyed this I AM CEO special episode.

Anatolii Ulitovskyi 00:49

You have an incredible, special, amazing job to do. You have the business.

Gresham Harkless 00:55

Yeah, absolutely. I moved here about a year or so ago, so it definitely wasn't set up as it is now. But obviously I have a lot of sound proofing around here, but I also have a dry erase paint that's here. So it allows me brainstorm a lot, but actually I'll tilt this over a little bit to the right. You can actually see I have, and it's hard to see, but when I was doing the dry erase paint, I actually got to the bottom of the can and it was all supposed to be white. But I was like, I just wanted to do certain parts of the wall. And I said, you know what, I got this here, so let me just keep using it.

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And what happened is it ended up turning yellow. So that corner I actually call my fail wall. And it's one of the most powerful things that wasn't supposed to happen, but ended up happening. So I ended up putting a bunch of quotes about failure, about how failure is not final, about like how when a baby falls down, no one tells the baby, hey, you're not built to walk. So stop walking, just crawl for the rest of your life. Just all of those things. So I'm addicted to quotes. I have so much brainstorming things up, but I really think that fail wall that's in the corner that you might see some of those quotes is probably one of the most unexpected things that happen that end up being really powerful for me to see on a daily basis.

And I think too, it just reminds me a lot of the process of marketing or the process of business and the process of life at that, how it doesn't necessarily always go the way that you want it to go, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's worse. And I think that a lot of times you can be set up for success by just, I say a lot of times don't get attached to the how, get attached to the why. So just how things are done may not go exactly how you want them to go. But if you have a strong why, you know, you're doing this for X, Y, and Z reason, then regardless of what the how ends of being then you're still going to be able to set out and and manifest your why.

Anatolii Ulitovskyi 02:38

You remind me Jackie Lanil once he said about failure, failing he told that when he starts something new any new project business he always fails always because we start from generic strategies, best practices, then we need to adapt to learn from failure to go ahead. But I see when content creators give up, most content creators give up by recording the second episode of podcast, to write the second article, I don't know, because they can't get results from the first one.

I have no idea how to do it. Next time, even Mr. Beast, many other great influencers, they spend time. Gary Vee shared that he spent 7 years on Twitter to create content from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. every single day. He avoided parties, many other things, and was consistent with that. Can you tell about failure for you? What kind of failing you can meet? Because in my times, in my life, I made a lot of mistakes. I keep doing that, but I love learning from them. So describe your understanding of failure and how not to give up and go ahead.

Gresham Harkless 03:50

Yeah, I think this might be a whole different episode if we talk about failure and just like the psychology and why we're so like afraid to fail, which that sounds that it didn't make sense like you're afraid to fail so we net we don't you know try at all and I think that we have such a misconception on what failure is and it's been a process for me and continues to be a process was part of like why I have this big wall up of like really understanding that failure is not the opposite of winning. It's not the opposite of success. It's not the opposite of where you want to be. It's actually part of the process.

And it's taken me a really long time to get to understand that. And I always say if I could jump into a time machine, that's exactly what I would tell myself is that failure is actually the path. That's actually the opportunity. That's actually setting you up for success. And if you embrace that, you embrace the learning and you try to fail, fail in a way that's not catastrophic, which often the failures that we have built up in our head are catastrophic. We think if we post that post on TikTok and it gets 0 followers or even 0 likes or 0 views that we have failed at life and we have failed at business and we have to put out a business up and all these things.

But in reality, a lot of it is not that. What separates those people is really just stepping in and going further. And Sarah Blakely, who founded Spanx, I read and listened to an interview that she said that when she was young, her dad would always ask her, how was your day? And of course she always wanted to say, hey, this went well. And I did XYZ, and A, B, and C. So he started to ask her like how she failed every day. And every time she would mention how she failed, he would give her a high five. And it completely changed the way that she looked at failure. So I think that hearing those stories and hearing like the true path to success that your Shaquille O'Neal's, your J.K. Rowling's, who got rejected so many times before she wrote Harry Potter.

Like all those people failed so much and that's what led them to success. It helps you know that, hey, failure is not this terrible thing that we feel like it be. Don't get me wrong. Everybody wants to succeed with everything that they do. But one of the reasons that success is, and I think success and how we define it varies, but success is so powerful, is because there's so many people that fail and they just stop. But really the opportunity is to fail and keep going and learn from it. And then you continue to lean your way to success. A super long answer, but hopefully that helped how I think about failure.

Anatolii Ulitovskyi 06:21

Yeah, nice. Yeah, I remember when I read a book, Dale Carnegie wrote this book about stop worrying. And he shared the story about a guy who lost a job, was disappointed a lot, and after meeting another guy who didn't have legs, without legs, but this man without legs told him, wow, it's a nice day, sunny day, I love it. And after that, he changed completely his mindset about failing. If you have legs, if you have health, if you have hands, you have enough to overcome all obstacles, it's boring, just go ahead. I love it, I agree with that. Gresh, I wanna ask about mistakes, common mistakes in media marketing, in SEO. Can you list mistakes that you can see that marketers still do and your way how to find a much better way.

Gresham Harkless 07:19

Yeah. I think that a lot of it we touched on a little bit, I think in terms of going to see what keywords you want to rank for is not niching down from there. Because if we're talking about the most competitive keywords, we're talking about your titles, tag and meta description and getting really technical from that standpoint, not having those set up, but it's not just saying that Yoast or whatever plugin that you might use gives me a green light. So that means that I have my SEO set up correctly. There's a lot of strategy around like SEO and a lot of that strategy, even with AI tools and all these technological softwares that we have in the SAS tools that we can leverage, I think is only as good as the questions that you ask, the prompts that you put in. You hear that a lot around ChatGPT.

ChatGPT can be an incredibly powerful tool if you ask the right questions. But I think a lot of people think they're just going to sit down and the questions, at least not yet, it's not going to pull the questions, you know, from what you're looking for. But you start to, to realize that your ability to be able to know exactly what your strategy is, it's going to set you up for success more than anything else. So when we're talking about your title tag meta description, yes, you want to of course make sure that you're within the amount of characters and you make sure that you have your alt tags set up for your images and all of those things are important, but it's only as important if you know exactly what you're wanting to rank for.

And I think that when, and you're honest about what that looks like, because if you're trying to rank for the most competitive keyword, as we talked about SEO, you can have everything in line, but you don't necessarily have everything in line because there's so many other considerations that you haven't thought of. So I think first and foremost is making sure that you understand what your strategy is and you're starting to look and be in a line with that strategy, not paying attention to what other people are doing, but just being aligned with that. The other big thing that I see a lot is, especially with COVID, you had a lot of organizations and businesses that were pivoting.

They might've rebranded their businesses. They might've also decided that they were going to start another business or another arm of those businesses. You can get some benefits, but a lot of times, if you're getting like a new domain, you're starting from, I usually say like building a new house. So you can get some benefits in terms of getting backlinks coming back from there, but overall, you have to understand that you're not gonna start from the same place that you started from an SEO standpoint, from a Google standpoint. So it's understanding that as much as possible, you wanna try to benefit the URL that you have, but also know if you're launching something new, that it, that in fact is probably going to be something new.

And there's of course different ways you can work through to try to improve that. But I think most people think that, okay, because I've been successful, because I have all these accomplishments on my bio, Google is going to know that. And when I launched this new business, it's going to be the exact same, but it's usually not where we're talking about the website or we're talking about even creating like a new social media handle and things like that. So I think from a very granular standpoint, it's understanding the whole kind of psychology and the way that these tools work, but it's also using the tools to support the mission and the strategy that you put in place and it ends up being a strategy that you can execute on. So hopefully that's somewhat helpful.

Anatolii Ulitovskyi 10:47

Yeah, nice, nice. Let's talk about AI. So it's hard to ignore this topic today. Impossible tomorrow. And you mentioned about writing prompts. You remind me Elon Musk, when he shared a screenshot after with the question that he asked on ChatGPT. And I read a few times this question to understand what Elon Musk want to get. So he wrote a unique prompt, a unique question, and I gave a unique answer. And it's what I see when people set up prompts, write an article, how to play guitar, how to lose weight, how to build muscles. You can get content that you can find on Google.

Even on Google, you can find much better content because I just rewrite existing content. So can you tell how to write these prompts? How to create unique prompts that Elon Musk did before? He did it before criticizing AI and signed this letter with my thousand other companies to procrastinate the process. And it's interesting after that, he decided to buy expensive equipment to develop this technology on Twitter. So Elon Musk can change his mind fast. It's his attitude. And yeah, let us know about writing these prompts.

Gresham Harkless 12:07

Yeah, I think that one of the big things that you see around all different types of technology, whether we're talking about SEO or we're talking about social media, there's this hesitation or kind of fear, maybe since we were talking about fear around like how exactly to do that. And when we're thinking about AI, I feel like it's a lot of the similar things and insane things. I think We're just scratching the surface on what it could potentially be. And AI has been around, if you really think about it, from being able to take information and synthesize that information very quickly.

So it's been around for some time. I think it's just become obviously a lot popular with chat GPT and writing college essays and taking GMAT tests and all these tests and passing them. I think people are starting to see, oh, wow, this can be pretty powerful. So I answer that question in much the same way that I would for most technology tools is that the technology is getting advanced enough to where you can end up having conversations with it. So I think some of the best prompts and I think where things are moving is that you're able to ask very specific questions.

The questions that you might ask in your dining room or you might ask in your board room where it's very specific. That's I think where you're going to see AI continue to improve. So not just asking, hey, I want to, I want to prompt for my meal prep for the rest of the week or for the rest of the month. It's asking questions along the lines of, hey, I'm 178 pounds and I want to increase and bulk up to 200 pounds. What types of things should I eat Monday through Friday so that I can continue to kind of increase my weight. And oh, by the way, I wanna work out 3 or 4 times a week too.

And I think when we start to get a little bit more specific on what that looks like, and just like you're having a conversation with your personal trainer that you might use or your friend that you're chatting with, I think that's really where the power of it is. But I think it's still somewhat of a, there's a gap between understanding the totality of who you are, understanding if you have certain health conditions and you didn't put it there, or even just taking the output that you received and making sure that it is actually something that you can achieve or is logical and things like that.

So I think, again, so many times we think that it's human and technology. These are on two ends of the spectrum, but I think the opportunity is really where these things are hand in hand. So it's thinking that specificity, but also being able to think, use that creativity to say, okay, this does work or this doesn't work. Hey, I'm actually allergic to shrimp. So I can't eat that. And I forgot to input that. So just things like that. So I think it goes hand in hand, just like a good game of like Batman or tennis, where you go back and forth with AI and you ultimately just have conversations.

So I think there's, of course, If you've been on any type of social media, you've probably seen a million props that you could buy for $20. But I think that we're going more and more towards understanding that it's at the heart of it having a conversation and having the prompt be exactly like you were talking with your best friend.

Gresham Harkless 15:12

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh again, and I hope you enjoy that special episode of the I AM CEO Podcast. Just like I mentioned in the beginning, we're really trying to laser focus on these eight pillars and show you as a builder, how you can leverage these eight pillars and really level up there so it helps to level up your business and organization.

So hope you enjoyed this episode and definitely please check out the show notes so you can learn more about the pillar, learn more about the person that I guested on, their episode, and of course learn more, a little bit more about us as well too. This is Gresh signing out. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

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