Hey friend,
We are suckers for a success story. You know it. I know it. We love to hear about people who made it against the odds. We eat them up like a broke college student at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
But this fools us and distorts our view of reality. We believe these extremely successful outliers (the ones on the front covers of magazines) are just built different. We like to think they rode on a linear trajectory that was up and to the right. Even though it was more like a rocky rollercoaster with more downs than ups. We don’t want to acknowledge their difficulties. We would rather shove those down into the dark musty footnotes of history.
There is so much value hidden in those footnotes. It’s time to dust them off and bring them to light.
Let me illustrate with a story my friend shared with me (we’ll call him Joe). He applied and interviewed for a role with a startup company. The job description fired him up when he read it. Joe aligned with the work they were doing. And he desperately wanted to be a part of it.
So he reached out to the founder via cold email on August 23. And immediately got a response with “Epic email! What makes you a no-brainer for this role?” Woah. Maybe Joe was on to something here. He spent the next 23 days finding out everything he could about the company and the founder. He listened to all the podcast interviews the founder had done. He handwrote the job description. Joe even recorded himself reading the job description so he could play it back on repeat. He had multiple interviews that felt like smashing hits. He even went on a walk-and-talk interview with the founder IRL (in real life). Everything seemed to be progressing swimmingly.
Until September 15 at 10:28am….he received the dreaded rejection email from the founder. With that gut-wrenching line, “You just aren’t what we are looking for.” Ouch.
So he did what any self-respecting person in his situation would do. He sulked. He complained to his partner. And he slurped up a milkshake from Chick Fil A (most helpful).
As I was listening to him retell his experience, I wondered how he could benefit from this. Then it hit me. I didn’t have a name for it yet, but I texted Joe later that night. I told him to take a screenshot of the rejection email and put it in a new photo album in his phone titled “Anti-Success Folder.”
What the heck is that?
The idea was inspired by Nassim Taleb. He coined the term Anti Library. Which is a collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read. He claims the more unread books you own the more well-read and therefore better off you are.
It sounds counterintuitive but let’s say your library contains 1000 books and 400 of them are unread. That means you have read 600 books! Compare that to the person whose library has 100 books and only 10 of them are unread. They have read 90 books. Now math was never my strong suit, but 600 > 90…..(googled it to confirm).
Now a baseball analogy. Babe Ruth struck out 1330 times in his career. I only struck out 27 times in my little league career. He had more anti-successes than me, but who do you think was a better hitter? The numbers speak for themselves: Babe Ruth home run total: 714. Arman home run total: (approximately) 0.
The Anti-Success Folder works the same way. Let’s say your folder contains 400 items. I’m talking - Strikeouts. Errors. Mistakes. Rejections. No’s. Failures of all flavors. You know, the good stuff. And mine only contains 10 items. Without knowing anything else about us, who do you think is doing better? Again, math is scary, but 400 > 10. If I was a betting man (had to call it quits after my last Vegas trip), I would go with you!
Are you catching what I’m putting down?
Too many of us let our anti-successes go to waste. The first key is to create a folder Not just any folder, an Anti-Success Folder.
They are painful to think about so we’d rather forget them. But that is a tragic mistake. They deserve to be treasured like the gold they are.
Don’t try to store all that gold in your head. Keep an actual folder. Personally, I’m a manila folder kind of guy. And keep track of your anti-successes. They will (hopefully) accumulate faster than you imagined.
Adding to your folder means you are trying and “anti-succeeding.” Which is what you want! Every item added to your Anti-Success Folder gets you one step closer to where you want to be. It may seem counterintuitive, but I suspect the larger that folder becomes the more successful you will become.
The quicker you act, fail, iterate, repeat the better off you will be. Even by sheer dumb luck.
Become a keen observer of your own life. Notice those anti-successes, big and small. And capture them all. Take a picture. Write it down. Print it out. Whatever it takes. Remember it, so you can increase the rich contents of your Anti-Success Folder.
You can make a game out of it with your amigos. It will be like middle school when you used to compare the size of your…..shoes. But now you will be comparing the size of your Anti-Success Folders. The one with the smallest folder will be embarrassed into collecting more anti-success badges on honor. And make them buy you lunch!
You just have to keep trying, testing, evaluating. Over and over again. Until you find something that hits. The more you do this the quicker you will find the winner.
There are so many great lessons hidden in your anti-successes. Every one is a valuable data point. At the very least, now you know one more way not to do something in the future! That’s a win if you take a long term view.
Why would we want to harp on our anti-successes? Won’t that just bring us down?
No. In fact, it will serve as the ultimate progress tracker.
We are all familiar with Thomas Edison and the thousands of anti-successes it took his team and him until they finally discovered how to make a functional light bulb. I bet he had a detailed Anti-Success Folder tracking all of those failed attempts. Because they provided valuable insights. Every one of them. So if it was useful to him, why not you?
Still not convinced? Let’s turn our attention to another American legend. Michael Jordan. Ever heard of him? The dude from Space Jam missed over 9000 shots and lost more than 300 games in his career. But do you consider him a loser? He watched countless hours of film and studied those misses and losses (anti-successes) the way a scientist studies their failed experiments. With the sole purpose of improvement.
Think about your own life. What anti-successes stick out? Remember: the more the merrier.
Once your Anti-Success Folder is bursting at the seams it’s time for the next logical step. To turn that folder into an entire Anti-Success Library. Have it be a prominent part of your home that you are proud to show off to guests. Get those rejection letters framed and hung on the wall. Stock the bookshelves with notebooks filled with those messages saying: “You aren’t the person we’re looking for.” “Why are you wasting your time doing this?” “You just aren’t cut out for this.” Remember, every new piece you add to your library means you are headed in the right direction. Your pile of no’s is inching you closer and closer to those life-altering yeses.
How cool would it be to flip through the Anti-Success Folders of the all-time greats? You know they had them. I guarantee they received those exact same messages you and I have. “Sorry Steve Jobs, but you don’t have enough experience. We decided to go with someone else.” “Albert Einstein, you seem so uninterested in math class. We signed you up for summer school to get you up to speed.”
Show me someone’s Anti-Success Folder and I can predict their life trajectory with 99.97% accuracy. The smaller the folder, the smaller the life. It’s as simple as that.
I’ll finish with one more story to send you home:
I learned this lesson early and often during my first big boy job after college. I was an entry level sales associate for the Atlanta Hawks. And my job description was something along the lines of: “Call 100 people per day to try sell Hawks tickets. Expect to get rejected 99 times. But always remember that next call could be the 1 out of 100 who wants to buy!” This got me so comfortable with rejection it quickly became comical. I was in a small, dimly lit room with 14 other fellow associates (boiler room style). They became some of my closest friends. We would be cackling while we heard each other getting rejected time after time. We would put some of our calls on speaker phone when someone really decided to let us have it. Because how could we not? How selfish to hoard those anti-successes for ourselves! Even though I was barely earning enough money to pay for my gas to drive to work it was worth it. I started piling up those anti-successes faster than a squirrel collecting nuts on the last day of fall. I proudly claimed hundreds thousands of quality items for my Anti-Success Folder. And guess what? I survived to tell the tale. There was nothing to be afraid of. The fear of rejection left my body. I was David slaying the Goliath of rejection. And I collected those anti-successes to file away in my folder. Nobody can take those precious gifts away from me. I earned them.
What about you? How many anti-successes have you earned lately? I couldn’t imagine why you wont start a treasured collection of your own. Today.
Treat them as your prized possessions. They are invaluable. And nobody can claim them besides you. Take some time to curate them. Put a little creative flair into their presentation. Then share them with others. It is the ultimate creative expression.
Don’t hoard them. Others will benefit. More than you know.
Send me some electronic mail with your most impactful item. Leave the others for family and friends. I only want to hear the best of the best Anti-Successes.
I can’t wait to hear from you!
TLDR - The larger your anti-success folder becomes the more successful you become. That is a fact. There is no other conclusion.