Harnessing the Unexpected Rewards of Failure with Dave Mason

Unlock the paradoxical wisdom of thriving through failure with Dave Mason, as he joins me, Coach Ratner, on the Living Clarity podcast. We celebrate Dave's enlightening new book, "Hurry Up and Fail," where he illuminates the counterintuitive notion that stumbling can be a springboard to success. Discover how figures like Sarah Blakely used sheer grit to turn Spanx into a household name, and how my own aspirations during National Novel Writing Month revealed the transformative nature of creative endeavors.

This episode is a treasure trove for anyone embracing risks and writing their own success stories. We'll traverse the fine line between audacity and caution, taking cues from the likes of Richard Branson's adventure-fueled risk management to the strategic preparation that saved Mrs. Goldfarb's Unreal Deli. Engage with the art of exceeding expectations, as we draw inspiration from Marie Forleo's B-School and Stephen King's perseverance. These narratives are bound to shift your perception of setbacks as we dissect the power behind pre-mortems and early warning systems that can steer any venture clear of disaster.

By the end of our journey together, you'll be equipped with a new lens to view your personal and professional challenges. We wrap up with recommendations for must-listen audiobooks that promise to fuel business growth and personal transformation. With stories, insights, and strategies shared by Dave and reflected in my own experiences, this episode serves as a beacon, guiding you through the maze of trials towards triumph. So, let your curiosity lead the way and tune in to discover how to harness the unexpected rewards of failure.

Transcript

Coach Ratner: 0:00

This is the Living in Clarity podcast. I'm Coach Ratner and I'm filming from Old City Radio Studios sponsored by Faces International, and today we have a very special guest. Today I'm so honored to have here Dave Mason. Dave, it's great to see you.

Dave Mason: 0:15

Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Coach Ratner: 0:17

Yeah, the reason why I have Dave Mason. He just came up with a new book. It is called Hurry Up and Fail. You can see it here if you're watching on YouTube, if you're not on YouTube. But it just came out today, self-published, and I have to tell you I don't read a lot, but I read a lot of Malcolm Gladwell, a lot of self-help books, and there's always like I have a few books in my library I would say less than five or six of them where I do not learn them out. And I tell you this is one of them and I think you've done a phenomenal job on this book.

Dave Mason: 0:47

Thank you so much. Cool, cool, cool.

Coach Ratner: 0:48

I'm really very impressed. In fact, it's one of the. I read some books twice and this is one of the books I'm excited about reading again. I read it last week when I was in Italy. I literally started on a Friday night and I finished by Saturday at one o'clock. Wow, I mean it was very, very fast. It's not a short book, but it's not long, but I just couldn't put it down. How did you come up with all those like concepts and ideas about Hurry Up and Fail? Let's start. Let's start first of all, how you got the title, the idea of the title, hurry Up and Fail. So I really stumbled across it.

Dave Mason: 1:18

This was years ago.

Dave Mason: 1:19

We were teaching a course about around our book the Size of your Dreams that one over there on the table and it's called Dream Design Manifest, and we had all these people in this course and we actually, the first time we tried to teach it, we were in the Ecuadorian rainforest.

Dave Mason: 1:32

We had this beautiful location and we shot this whole beautiful course and we tried to get everything just right and we never, ever even went live with it. We were just so afraid oh, maybe it fell short a little bit here, maybe it fell short a little bit there. And a couple years later we're just like you know what? Let's just go and teach this stuff live. Why do we need to have the perfect thing that we're doing here? And we start teaching it the first night and we say you know what? We don't really know exactly what this course is going to be, but we decided we just wanted to hurry up and fail. And I kind of braced myself for the reaction of everyone that all paid good money to be in this course and they just heard five minutes in that the guy running the course didn't really know what he was doing and they all started to applaud.

Coach Ratner: 2:18

That's really strange, like why would, when you've said that let's make her up and fail, did you think yourself I shouldn't have said that?

Dave Mason: 2:24

I thought it was kind of a risky thing to say that you know what. I don't really know what I'm doing here, I'm just going to kind of hurry up and fail. And they loved it. Was that imposter syndrome? I don't think it was imposter syndrome.

Dave Mason: 2:37

We definitely talk a bit about the book about imposter syndrome, how so many of us feel that and you know what. Maybe to a degree it was. Maybe I was feeling a little bit you know less than I was there, but part of it was also just this fact that you know what. I didn't know exactly what was going to come out and I wanted to just say I'm going to go forward with what I have right now and see how it works, and see what works and see what doesn't, and adjust on the fly. And the rest of the group it's like they took it on as a mantle and people started using the hashtag hurry up and fail. They'd start doing things that they didn't feel ready for and putting themselves out into the world and it just became this kind of calling card within the group and I'm like okay, people resonate with this concept. I need to actually delve more into this.

Coach Ratner: 3:22

Yeah, so is the. It's a great title for a book. By the way, is the title has been used? Has it been used before for another book, or is it the only only book that called hurry up and fail? I?

Dave Mason: 3:30

have no idea.

Coach Ratner: 3:34

I go today I didn't see another book like that. A lot of titles of books have been used. I have a new book coming out on self esteem, coming out next year, and it's called Unloved. And there are books called Unloved that have been published but they're all romance novels, not self-help books. So I figure I can use that title again and. But it's really so, let's get. Let's get into the, the. So we got, we got into the idea of how you came with the name hurry up and fail. So just let you know that Dave has produced you have four of the books out and I've mentioned some of his books before. That.

Coach Ratner: 4:06

My two favorite well, only two, I've read other ones is called the Size of your Dreams and this is a book about personal growth into a novel, into a story yes, and it's. And another book is called the Cash Machine, right here. And the Cash Machine, I gotta tell you, is a brilliant, brilliant book. They're both brilliant books about personal finance and I learned you know someone who's been in in investing and and built businesses. I thought I knew everything. I made so much in that book I had never heard before.

Coach Ratner: 4:34

And it's built around a love story and that's the most amazing thing that you could take a love story. That's it's. You know, I would say it's kosher, it's not like there's not anything going on in there. But you take a love story and there's a lot of character development and there's a lot of tension between the two Cause like he likes her, she likes him, but she doesn't like to spend money and she likes to spend money and like, and the book just comes. So many great lessons in life, and so I was expecting to have a good book and the story up and fail and I was still blown away. So let's get into the concepts that you talked about in the book. You start talking about Sarah Blakely. Let's talk about her for a second. So what's amazing?

Dave Mason: 5:12

about Sarah Blakely is that she started with almost nothing. She had no experience in this area. She created the, the company Spanx, with only $5,000. But she, she was in sales. She was in sales, she sold fax machines.

Coach Ratner: 5:24

Yeah, so she was hard. That's hardcore sales, by the way. You know, anytime you're selling fax machines or printers or copiers, that's hardcore selling, right Door to door pretty much.

Dave Mason: 5:34

And Sarah Blakely just showed incredible bravery as she went out with her new product and first she was fearless and getting people to make it, and then she went right into the buyer of Neiman Marcus with like her only product in a Ziploc bag and the woman was so impressed and she said sir, you know, can you come with me to the bathroom? And the buyer is like what it's like, just come with me to the ladies room, I want to show you how this thing works. And she literally took Spanx into the bathroom and showed her how her butt looked without Spanx and how her butt looked with Spanx. And the woman's like okay, I finally get it. Yes, I'm putting it in seven stores, I want to run with it.

Coach Ratner: 6:13

But that's not the amazing thing about the story. It's not the amazing thing about the story.

Dave Mason: 6:16

The amazing thing about the story is people say to Sarah how did you do this? The concept of Spanx was not novel. After she came out with Spanx, many, many women told her you know what? They've been doing the same thing cutting the toes off of their pantyhose for years.

Coach Ratner: 6:31

Now, the idea of Spanx is that you have no panty lines. That's the idea it smooths out the butt.

Dave Mason: 6:39

The idea of Spanx, very similarly, very, very simply, is that it's pantyhose without feet. That was the initial conception.

Coach Ratner: 6:47

Okay.

Dave Mason: 6:47

That pantyhose exactly doesn't have panty lines. It's not going to show through her see through cream pants that she had bought and couldn't wear because she was showing pantylines. She was embarrassed about that and she didn't want to wear it with sandals, because she can't wear pantyhose with sandals. So she just cut off the feet and she realized, hey, I've got a product here and she went out and she tried to get it made, which was very difficult, and she had to really use force of her will to get through there. And she then had to try to sell it and she got into Oprah's hands right away.

Dave Mason: 7:14

She did all kinds of incredible things and people always say, Sarah, how did you do this? You had no experience in product manufacturing, you had almost no money. How did you get through this? And she tells this story. She says when I was a child, Sarah Blakely, she says you know she'd come home from school and her father would say how did you fail today? And it wasn't like making fun of the kids because they failed. It was the very opposite. It was encouraging and rewarding people for failing and she grew up thinking that failure was really not trying, that she got rewarded in her family for trying things that were above her head and falling short and rewarding the efforts. And for most of us it's the exact opposite, and we start out that way when we're really young.

Coach Ratner: 8:06

Every baby, I get the whole analogy of like I love how you start out and go back to the beginning of the book again, like what Could you tell the story? Go ahead and tell it.

Dave Mason: 8:14

Tell the story of. If you think, when a baby comes home and they're first learning how to walk, they get up and they fall, and they get up and they fall, and they get up and they fall, and the parents tell them what? You're a loser. What kind of a step was that? I'm embarrassed to be seen with you. It's like no, they embrace it, like, oh, you can do it, come on, and they cheer them on, they cheer on your failures, but, like, at a certain point, I think it really shifts in school. We get there and you know your hands in a paper and the teacher takes out their red pen and they put like a red A on it, or a B or C or D or even an F. They tell you, this is what you are.

Dave Mason: 8:55

And the crazy thing is, if you think you take somebody who's gone from an F to a D, to a C, to a B, now to an A, well, this is awesome, right? This person, this is what the school system is made for. They've taken somebody who couldn't read, they couldn't write, they couldn't do anything and they've worked their way up. This person should be rewarded, right? No, they've got a C average. They've got a C average.

Dave Mason: 9:17

This person is going to get into a lousy school, because we don't reward failure, we don't reward progress. We reward being excellent at all times. And, as one of the chapters, I start with this line from Stephen Wright If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence you ever tried. And that's really how we look at failure, as it is something to be embarrassed about, it's something to be avoided and it's the exact opposite. We need to go towards it, but we also need to go towards failure intelligently, because not all failures are created equal. There are ways of actively engineering failures so that we can learn more from our mistakes, and that's what we need to do and that's what this book really tries to unpack.

Coach Ratner: 9:54

You give lots of great examples. Like you mentioned Sarah Blakely, I was amazed when she got her first sale in Neiman Marcus. You think, oh, let's go out and have a beer and celebrate. No, she went to the store every single day and she told all the employees, especially in the shoe department, why they can buy these spanks and not have to factor what they were in their shoes. And she went to the clothing department and you said, she went out and bought this cheap plastic display case, I guess, for her product and put it right at the cash register without permission from anyone in the store. And then people started complaining to the president of Neiman Marcus that this woman's here bothering us all the time. He looked at her sales and she sold a million dollars. Let's leave her alone.

Dave Mason: 10:36

Exactly, and this was one of my great lessons from Sarah Blakely, because I would have gotten that contract from Neiman Marcus and first of all, I probably wouldn't have gotten it in the first place. I never would have pushed myself to do that. She had Chutzpah, she had tremendous Chutzpah. But even after Sarah Blakely got the contract from Neiman Marcus, she said the mistake people will make is that they pack themselves on the back, have a beer, like you said, and then wait to see all the sales come in. But usually it's the opposite. She was selling a product that nobody knew existed. Nobody was going to ask for it. The salespeople didn't know how to sell it. Had she sat and patted herself on the back, Neiman Marcus would have bought all the stock. It would have sat on their shelves for three months. Nobody would have bought it. They would have returned it to her. She would have had to take it back and they would have said sorry, this product is clearly a dud.

Coach Ratner: 11:22

It doesn't mean the product is not great. It doesn't mean that. It just means that no one knows about it.

Dave Mason: 11:27

Exactly, and honestly, as I bring up in the book, I look at my books. Like you say, you're a fan of my books. You've given me feedback multiple times on my books. I'm very proud of my books and yet I know my books have not sold a ton because I haven't hustled like Sarah Blakely, I haven't put myself out there with the same amount of determination, the same. I'm going to go through any walls to get my books in the hands of people that she did, and I know had she written my books they didn't have to be any better than they were. She would have made them best-selling.

Coach Ratner: 11:54

You know, I totally agree. I think that if Sarah Blakely came up with this book, herripen Fail, it would be one of the top-selling books on Amazon. That's what I believe. I think all the ones that I've read are the same way. And funny writing a book is. I have another book coming out very soon called Infinite Marriage. It's the four phases to a loving relationship and unfortunately not unfortunately, but I'm using a vanity press and it's going to be coming out in the next few months. But once you write the book and get it published, that's I mean, no one's going to buy the book. I have to get there and somehow try to sell the book. Exactly, that's the hard part. Writing the part is an easy thing, even though it takes a long time. Oh, it's what I want to get into. I want to kind of skip a little bit this idea, something called I have to find it my notes about Nano-Rymo, nano-rymo, nano-rymo by Chris Beatty. He started this idea about writing 50,000 words of a novel in the 30 days.

Dave Mason: 12:51

Yes, and I did Nano-Rymo, actually when I was writing the first draft of the Key of Rain, my second book in the Age of Prophecy series. And Nano-Rymo is awesome. Nano-rymo is really a hurry up and fail machine and it says that anybody in Nano-Rymo. So Nano-Rymo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's something that Chris Beatty started just with his friends, just to encourage a whole bunch of people. Hey, who wants to write a book, let's get together and we'll try to write a book in a month. He literally says it came up with a 50,000 because he took all the books off his shelves, found the shortest novel he had and it was about 50,000 words. He's like okay, that's the minimum size of the book. My biggest is 45,000.

Coach Ratner: 13:26

That's my biggest, yeah, but I mean I'm working my way up. It takes time, all right.

Dave Mason: 13:30

Yeah, awesome. And he created this thing, national Novel Writing Month where you try to write a book in 30 days, no-transcript. To me it was great, the first draft of the key of rain. I just needed to get out there and write before I started self-editing. Before I tried, you know, looking over my shoulder before I started saying, is this good, is this not good? It's really about getting out there and doing it and I went through iteration after iteration after iteration of the key of rain.

Dave Mason: 13:57

Later this version doesn't resemble at all the one that I wrote during that along nanorhymo, but the very structure of it is awesome, like and there's a get-together at a local cafe with other writers who are in nanorhymo and we had challenges and we did different things to encourage Each other. And each day you'd put your word count into the software and it would let you know how you're doing and when you hit the 50,000 words. It's all about quantity and not about quality. Nobody's assessing the quality of your work, but if you hit 50,000 words, your nanorhymo winner. And I wanted getting a discount on the writing software that I use now and other and a Little bad I can put on Facebook. Hey, I run net one, nanorhymo. It's all designed to get you to go out there. It's quite a fast.

Coach Ratner: 14:34

It's about quality, not it's about quantity, not quantity reminds me of the it's all about quantity, not quality. It's all that movie with With Brad Pitt and he's working for the Oakland A's and he only hires baseball players that can hit. He doesn't care if they can cast, doesn't care if they can pitch money ball, money ball. Yes, such a good movie because it, because that's the, that's the main thing in baseball is if you can hit and get on base. He didn't carry anything else. And same thing with this. You say nanorhymo.

Dave Mason: 15:05

Nanorhymo Nanorhymo writing month and.

Coach Ratner: 15:07

I love the concept. You call it a vomit draft. Yes, right, so it's the same thing with. Basically, it doesn't matter what else you can do as long as you can hit. All you want to do is get the words down on paper and get the 50,000 words. And then then they say writing is really about rewriting, which is obviously you know, it's true, that's, you can write the book, but then you spend more time rewriting the book and editing it and editing it.

Dave Mason: 15:27

Oh yeah, the first. My first book, the lamp of darkness, took me Six years to write and I was really teaching myself how to be a writer. During that process, I must have written, rewritten that book 20 times, yeah.

Coach Ratner: 15:39

So that got you that? That's one way that if people I know that people come hey, coach, I'd love to be a writer. I'm like just start writing and just let the idea slow down on paper and then you go back and rewrite as time goes on and you got to put stuff away. I know, as I Still don't consider myself a writer. Even I'm writing all the time because I don't know I've no one reads my books, I don't. So so what you should be doing is just writing it down, getting down on paper, and then you go back and edit it after a few weeks, you know, and take time. It takes time. I'm 30 days. To write a book is just the vomit draft, not the final edition, and you'll find that books have their own personality.

Dave Mason: 16:14

Yeah, for instance, you brought up the cash machine, how the cash machine is a love story. I never in my life thought I'd write a love story. That is so not me. And it didn't start out as a love story, really started out as actually a buddy book between you.

Dave Mason: 16:27

Know the two, these two guys who were on the same path and went different ways and then One of them had had this girlfriend and the girlfriend was kind of the third main character. And then she went bumping out the number two character and saying this is about the two of us, I'm the second main character. And then she wanted bumping out the number one character. Said not really, this is a book about me and my boyfriend. Okay, he can be like a second character, but the, the third main character in the initial drafts, became the main character and it's the first person. That Narrative from her perspective, became the main character in the final draft. Just by following the threads and letting the book Dictate to me where I was going, I'd love to talk about that book because great, but I want to try to stay on the rhythm field, right?

Coach Ratner: 17:08

So because let's talk about the Mount Everest for a minute. Yes, yeah, john crack hour, who wrote a book. What's the name of this book called?

Dave Mason: 17:17

Into the, into the wild, into thin air. What?

Coach Ratner: 17:19

interest in there and into the while. I think you did both those, yes, yes. So interest in there is about the fateful, I guess, track to Mount Everest and, I think, overjusting. People died. I don't remember the numbers, but many, many people died. But do you do you know what the percentage of deaths are on? People have attempted Mount Everest, the final, the final climb.

Dave Mason: 17:39

I think there might be 300 or so who've died, making the percentage wise. The percentage I don't know 14 percent.

Coach Ratner: 17:46

14 percent of people. I was shocked. I kept looking at. This is hard to believe that if you attempt the Summit, they call the summit the final. Yes, I don't know how many thousand square feet. I mean how many. I think ever says 28, 29,000 square square feet, 20,000 feet and I believe the the death zone starts at 33,000.

Dave Mason: 18:05

I think it goes up to like 34,000, if I'm not that what it is. I'm not mistaken. I got it right here, yeah, so anyway.

Coach Ratner: 18:11

That 14% of those people die. I'm like I would you ever try that? And you're looking to talk about people, really practical stair climbers, and attempt and attempt this. So how does that, how does the, how does the Mount Everest danger fit into your book?

Dave Mason: 18:23

So I use the Everest example, for whatever reason, this particular climb that John crack hour was on it. I read multiple books on this climb, some multiple talks on this climb. I don't know why I'm so fascinated by it. I kept coming back to it over and over again and part of what hit me was when you have a really big goal like Everest, with a huge percentage of people who die in the attempt like you said point out, 14 percent and it just kept hitting me all the little things that kept going wrong and the whole chain of things that led to all these people dying.

Dave Mason: 18:53

And I wanted to highlight this is not what we're talking about when we're talking about hurry-up and failing. We're not talking about going and doing something so big with such horrible consequences that if you don't succeed you could die. We're actually talking about structuring Failures that are going to be very low stakes, not practicing on just a stair master, then going up and trying the biggest mountain in the world. But how can you actually Try something that is much, much smaller, succeed? Okay, then we then step it up, then step, then step it up from there. That want to be doing an average. You don't want to be putting yourself in position where you could seriously harm yourself through failure. You want to be creating failures that are very small, that are you're gonna get lots of learning from them quickly, without kind of putting yourself on One huge success or failure moment that could really destroy you.

Coach Ratner: 19:46

So the idea with with Mount Everest is that sometimes fear of failure is healthy to have exactly when it has to do your life, which can a segue into Richard Branson when he attempted to cross the Pacific in a balloon.

Dave Mason: 19:59

That was a great story you wrote so Richard Branson is a really fascinating character because on the one hand, he's a daredevil and You'd think he would have died dozens of times based on some of the crazy things he's attempted. But on the flip side, the way he runs his business is he's always looking to minimize his downside. He's always looking for ways of engineering business ventures so that if he fails it won't tear him down and it won't have huge financial loss and it can easily go on to the next venture.

Coach Ratner: 20:29

So tell me how he started version for version airlines.

Dave Mason: 20:31

So virgin Atlantic Airlines is a perfect example. He actually was able to negotiate with Boeing that, should he fail, that they would buy back the 747 he purchased from them. And not only would they buy it back, but they'd buy it back for more money than he paid if the market was.

Coach Ratner: 20:47

If the market went up, which it did yeah.

Dave Mason: 20:49

So the plane was actually worth more after a year than it was when they when they bought it. So they would have had to pay him more than he had paid for the for the plane, and he knew that they were so eager to get this plane sold and they wanted a competitor, british Airways, that he was able to push and push and push. So really he was starting an airline with very little downside because the plane was fully refundable.

Coach Ratner: 21:10

Yeah, that's amazing that you could do that, and of course it's. It's the idea you talked about in this book that Sometimes you want to try things a little bit, in small amounts before you go full full. Like you talked about Elon Musk. Elon Musk can't say, hey, I want to try making this car and see if anyone buys it. You can't just design a car in like three months for, like you know, a million dollars, come out of a car and see if anyone buys it. That doesn't work that way with cars. But started airline their planes already existing. You just need to get a route and start selling and start selling seats. I know a lot of people have started airlines by doing charters, like I know people on charters for, you know, for colleges, for spring break. People do charters for ski trips, people to charge for beach trips, different places, and people in the Galapagos Islands. They do charters To fly groups down there and that's one way you can start in the airline. But he, he started this airline without taking a lot of risk, which is amazing.

Dave Mason: 22:00

Exactly so. You're always looking to protect your downside, and that's one of the real things about her up and fail. The more you can protect your downside, the more you can go out there and try things and potentially fail, because if you're gonna succeed, you're gonna succeed big, as he did, and if you fail, if you're gonna fail, small. So you want to have asymmetrical risk for award.

Coach Ratner: 22:19

Yeah, this is kind of like I'm a coin dealer or used to be a coin dealer. I'm actually going back to the business now and that's how I'd be on coins I try to buy coins for as little money as possible. Have the biggest upside. I Right, and there are. There are coins you can sometimes buy for a thousand dollars. They can be worth 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars. It does happen. I want to discuss his his trip over the Pacific in that balloon that he died, really died three times. He should have died three times. I think the first one was when he left. It was a Japan. He left. The other flew from Japan and he had to let go one of the canisters that had few I guess, was a fuel for the balloon and he let that. Instead of one canister down, he actually let like three or four other ones down, so they lost fuel and the balloon. I believe. Anything over 43,000 feet you can't.

Dave Mason: 23:04

He can't survive up there and the balloon was starting up too high and he figured a way to keep below 43,000, exactly two extra gas canisters fell off, so he didn't have enough fuel to make the trip right, at least as much as he planned he needed and he shot up All the way up to where the point where he was in danger of the entire capsule he was in exploding.

Coach Ratner: 23:22

Oh right, because of because of the pressure, because the pressure wasn't because they are, because the pressure of the air was so tight that the capsule explode. And that was one of them, and I remember the last one was when he landed in a some Ice lake in Canada exactly, and they weren't rescued yet and they were gonna have, you know, died from being frozen to death. But what? There was one other one. Do you happen to remember the other one that he almost died at a certain point? The balloon?

Dave Mason: 23:44

capsule caught fire.

Coach Ratner: 23:46

Oh right, there was a fire on board. I'm not how do you? And they had to get up higher, close to forty three thousand feet, because that's for the air sin, where there's no, where the fire would go out, exactly because no air to burn, there's nothing to burn the fire. Wow, that is an amazing story.

Dave Mason: 24:01

Yeah, it is, but I'm part of why I brought up that story in the book. It's a really contrast. Like he's this larger than life daredevil type, but as much as Richard Branson risks his life on a regular basis in some crazy ventures, like ballooning across the Pacific, which a number of people had died in an attempting.

Dave Mason: 24:17

Yeah his Mindset is always in business, how can I protect myself and minimize my downside? And so we expected, in business he's gonna be a daredevil too. But if you actually unpack what he's done, he's been incredibly smart and calculating about minimizing the risk of his failures.

Coach Ratner: 24:38

Taking a balloon up Pacific, how much? How much minimized and can you do?

Dave Mason: 24:41

there's not in his personal life.

Coach Ratner: 24:43

He is not contradiction between his personal life and his, his business.

Dave Mason: 24:49

Yes, when we talked about Everest being something that it's good to have a healthy fear of failure. Everest is so much safer than the things that Branson has done in the balloon that it is.

Coach Ratner: 24:59

You're not gonna follow the sky or blow up, he's gonna freeze to death, which, by the way, I believe is like, if you have to die, that is like the best way to die for my understand. Do you know about this? I'd rather go in my sleep personally, of course, of course. But yeah, like, if you have a choice of, like a starvation I heard starvation is the worst. God, I mean, no one, ever know this.

Dave Mason: 25:17

Let's move on. Let's move on anyway.

Coach Ratner: 25:19

So let's talk about Marie. Marie for Leo, for Leo tell me about her.

Dave Mason: 25:26

So Marie for Leo created B school and I was a B school student and at first I didn't sign up for B school because I actually thought it only took female Be. What is B school? B school is? A is basically a business school online course, and Marie for Leo teaches all these different techniques about business and I was looking at it and a it was expensive as a couple thousand dollars and B Every single person on there was a woman.

Dave Mason: 25:51

I'm not even allowed to take this course I'm not certain if I am and then I went and took B school and I learned a lot from the course. But I even learned more from the way that Marie for Leo put the course together and one of the things that really spoke to me was this idea of surprise bonuses that You'd think if you're selling a $2,000 course, you want to show as much value up front as possible. You want people to like reach in their pocket and pull out to $2,000. Yes, I feel like they're getting a good deal on that, but part of what was counterintuitive that I got from Marie was that you know why. You also want to be slipping things in under the door that you're not telling people about you, creating zero expectations around?

Coach Ratner: 26:32

sure.

Dave Mason: 26:32

And you want to keep surprising people. So they walk away thinking, oh, I paid two thousand dollars to get this and I got so much more than I bargained for sure. And I watched how Marie, for Leo, did that with B school, how she kept adding surprise bonus after surprise bonus and even though I paid a ton of money and these bonuses really didn't cost her a lot to create, I was walking away feeling like, oh wow, she exceeded my expectations.

Dave Mason: 26:55

Yeah where's that contrast that with the piece of software that I bought, which was super cheap. I got an incredible deal on it and the CEO said, hey, I'd love to speak to you one-on-one and show you the software. And then he didn't show up for that meeting. He had somebody else show up for the meeting. Yeah, you were disappointed and I was disappointed.

Coach Ratner: 27:09

It was a great deal it was a great deal.

Dave Mason: 27:10

It was a much better deal relative to what I paid than B school was. But B school I thought I was getting a certain amount and I got more this piece of software I thought I was getting a certain amount and I got less, and that left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Coach Ratner: 27:24

So you have these personal connections to B school, even though you didn't get as much value for your money it was a lot more money because you have a personal connection, because they gave you more than what they told you they're going to give you.

Dave Mason: 27:34

They gave me more than what they promised. And this is one of three elements we go into in Hurry Up and Fail, about how you can get people to excuse your failures Because you don't really want to go out there say you're a business owner, you've got all these clients, you got all these customers. You don't want people to feel like you failed on them, so how can you go out there and Hurry Up and Fail and try new things and push the envelope without disappointing all of your followers? So that's one of the three things we looked at was you go out and you intentionally exceed expectations. You try to give value that you are not promising, that the people aren't expecting, and that is one of the things that people say oh, wow, yes, it might not have been perfect, it might have been an early draft, but wow, did I feel like you over delivered for me?

Coach Ratner: 28:15

Yeah, sometimes I give talk sometimes. And one thing I've seen other people when they speak they go, oh, you're going to love this joke or you're going to love this story. I never anticipate what people are going to feel, because I don't want to suddenly that their expectations are much higher. And then, of course, I'm never going to come through. So I never. I just say here's a great, here's a story. And I don't say great story, I don't say I've cast myself and I was saying, oh, you're going to love this, you're going to think this is funny, because I'm not going to predict what someone's going to feel, but I want to give them things that they're not expecting, because then they'll have a better connection with me and enjoy my information better. So rejection, like you said in the book, is like a muscle you have to keep in order for you to grow in life and to become greater. You have to be basically get. It's called rejection therapy.

Dave Mason: 28:56

I believe right. There's something called rejection therapy and one of the stories I look in that that in that section is actually Stephen King. Stephen King is one of my favorite authors and 11, 22, 63 is one of my all-time favorite books, his first book being His first book being Kerry Kerry 1964,.

Coach Ratner: 29:15

I think.

Dave Mason: 29:17

And it took him a lot of failures before he got to Kerry and, as Stephen King was a kid, he was writing and submitting, and writing and submitting, and writing, and submitting 14 years old.

Dave Mason: 29:26

you said and well, he eventually got to 14. He started off taking his rejection slips when he'd send things into magazines and put them on a nail. When he was 14, the nail was no longer strong enough to hold all the rejection slips he'd received and he had to replace the nail with a spike to hold them. So he'd already been submitting even at. I don't even know how old he was the first time he submitted, but already by the time he was 14, he'd received enough rejection slips to overwhelm a nail. And you see, like this is part of how he became such a fabulous writer. If you spend 20 years writing the perfect novel and that's only then put it out, it's probably not gonna be so great. But if you write and submit and write and submit and write and submit, you're probably gonna get a lot better.

Coach Ratner: 30:09

Yeah for sure. He's got like 70 or 80 books out there. He's got a ton, yeah, a ton of books. Let's talk about investigative failure. So there's a TV show called Shark Tank, very popular, and you talk a lot about. A number of different stories have gone on Shark Tank, one being Mixed Bikini and other called Mrs Goldfarb's Unreal Deli, and the third being I don't remember the third one, but you discuss these different ones and how one failed and one didn't, from expectations of success, and you mentioned that Mixed Bikini. They went on Shark Tank and when they introduced their product for the first time they had no sales because the server failed Exactly. So let's talk about that for a minute.

Dave Mason: 30:54

So we're looking. This is in the section we talk about pre-mortems. So a pre-mortem is something very, very simple. So a post. Let's start the other way. A post-mortem. You can look at Mixed Bikini. You could say, well, why did they fail? Well, it's very easy to see. Oh wow, they were on national television and they came out with this product.

Coach Ratner: 31:09

Mixed Bikini explain. I believe it.

Dave Mason: 31:11

Mixed Bikini was a product that went on Shark Tank and, instead of women buying a Bikini as a set with a top and the bottom, Mixed Bikini allowed you to buy a separate top and a separate bottom so that you can mix and match and come up with any combination you want. Barbara Corkin put $50,000 into it on Shark Tank and it was a big success and the night it came out they threw a huge party oh, that's right and celebrated the big launch at Shark Tank With lots of women in Bikini.

Coach Ratner: 31:37

Lots of women in.

Dave Mason: 31:37

Bikini and lots of alcohol and a big pool. And the next day the CEO shows up in the office and says okay, how many sales did we make? And he sees none. And while he was out there partying, his product was on TV and lots and lots of people tried to go to his website and buy it, enough so that it just brought down the website. It crashed and all these people who had all this interest went. They couldn't find his products. They left and the company went up going under and you can see looking backwards where they messed up.

Dave Mason: 32:13

It's like okay, don't spend your time partying, spend your time making sure you've got a robust enough website to make sure that it can handle any load that it gets. That would be a post-mortem investigation. You look at a failure and say why did this fail? But this is in the section we're talking about, pre-mortems. We're talking about you know what? It's kind of predictable that when you go on a national TV show, you've got your tiny little company, that your volume is gonna go absolutely through the roof if you've got a good product and they did. And so you know what, maybe you should have worked on the website and made it stronger. Maybe you should have seen that coming.

Dave Mason: 32:50

And I brought up the example of our friend we call her Cool-Gen. She's known as Mrs Goldfarb professionally and she pitched Mrs Goldfarb's Unreal Deli and she had a deal with Mark Cuban. And then I talked to her like what happened after that? What follow-up was there? What preparation was there to make sure that you didn't become another mixed bikini? And she pointed out like it's very simple, like he's got his whole team of people that help and they went through all of these different ways that the business could fail when it launched on big nationwide and they wanted to make sure that the website was on a strong enough platform. They it happened to be that she was already on the platform that they recommended, so there's nothing to change there.

Dave Mason: 33:28

Shopify right, shopify exactly. But when there you see an area with very predictable types of failure, you want to use checklists. That's why surgeons use checklists before going into surgery. That's why pilots use checklists before launching. That's why when you launch on Shark Tank, the smart thing is to have a checklist of all the ways that you can fail. And Barbara Corcoran apparently didn't do that with mixed bikini.

Coach Ratner: 33:49

I think you said it's called failing to ask is asking to fail. Yes, you have to go through all of those things that can happen, perceived beforehand. What are these things that can go wrong and dip in the bud before you proceed with your opening? Yep, yeah, was there a third? So how did Mrs Goldfarb's Unreal Deli do on her opening day? Did great, and is she still in business?

Dave Mason: 34:09

She's still in business. She's been killing it, she's been growing, growing quickly Really.

Coach Ratner: 34:13

And what does she live? She lives in LA. Oh, very nice. I guess that is considered not real meat, right?

Dave Mason: 34:20

Exactly, it's vegan deli meat. She actually used to be right here in Jerusalem. She used to come to our Shabbat table all the time. No way, jerusalem. That's amazing, and she was somebody who is a real regular in our house. Can you get her product here in?

Coach Ratner: 34:32

Israel Not as far as I know.

Dave Mason: 34:34

Yeah.

Coach Ratner: 34:35

In America. You can get it though. Yes, wow, I have to try it next time I get there. So there's something called successful synergy. What is that? I remember seeing this in your book successful synergy. Do you remember what that is about? I do not recall using that phrase in the book. Ok, we're going to move on for now. Ha ha ha. Oh, early warning systems. I think this is also similar for seeing failure also to build in these early warning systems you talked about when you went down to Ramon's crater to go visit, and you happened to see a science museum there about Elon Ramon.

Dave Mason: 35:10

So we went to Ramon crater and it's a beautiful place to hike to look at the stars and we got there and it was a huge storm. We couldn't see like five feet in front of us. We went into the visitor center and they had all these things on the geology of the Ramon crater and all that. But then they had also an exhibit to a different Ramon, to Elon Ramon, who was the most famous pilot in Israel history and he had died aboard the Columbia space shuttle which burned up upon reentry.

Dave Mason: 35:35

And part of the tragic thing about the Columbia disaster they knew about it Was they knew about it. They didn't know about it on the day of launch. The day after they watched the entire launch in super slow motion and they saw that a piece of foam had broken off of one of the fuel tanks and hit the wing at over 500 miles per hour and they didn't know. Did this damage one of the heat-resistant tiles on the wing that would protect the shuttle on reentry, or did it not? And there were at least three different requests made within NASA to investigate. They could have sent an astronaut out in a spacewalk. They could have done that, or they could have taken a picture just by passing a satellite, did they not take that?

Coach Ratner: 36:12

picture? They didn't. Oh, they never saw a picture of a broken heat shield then?

Dave Mason: 36:17

They did not know there was a broken heat shield. They only figured that out after they picked up all the broken pieces that spread across Louisiana and Texas.

Coach Ratner: 36:24

Yes.

Dave Mason: 36:25

And they found over 40,000 pieces of this blown up space shuttle and they were able to work backwards and figure out exactly what had happened there. But the point was in the section we talked about early warning systems.

Dave Mason: 36:37

We talked about another example at a certain rave concert about doing drug tests in order to find if there was any adulterated drugs, to make sure that you didn't have this big disaster like you had in this concert in Buenos Aires. It's important to have ways to detect things early, and the Elon Ramon story is given in the following chapter, which is that it's One super important have early warning systems to let you know when something is going wrong. But two you have to be able. You have that need, the emotional fortitude to listen to those warnings when they come up. So if your early warning systems do go off, well, what are you gonna do about it? And so you have to be really careful.

Dave Mason: 37:18

Sometimes we'll make early warning systems that are so sensitive. I've got this one website that Every single day, I get an email that says there's something wrong with this, with the site. Yeah, it's too sensitive. I started stopped paying attention to those warnings. You know many, many years ago, and so you can't have too many warnings. You need to make sure that you're you're only seeing important warnings, and then you need to make sure that you're actually following through and investigating, because with the Columbia disaster, their early warning systems were phenomenal, but they didn't follow through and investigate and do anything about it.

Coach Ratner: 37:49

I talked about warning systems. You know you don't hear it that so much anymore. But cars, you'd have a lot of these alarms. You know and I'm would be in you know DC somewhere and sleeping in a hotel and alarm car alarm would go off no one's looking at the wind, like someone's stealing that car, someone stealing that car because car alarms to go off. They became worthless alarms Some of could still car, no one care, because everyone's car alarm would go off. It's almost like the alarms you have in your house. They go off so much like yeah, I stopped showing my alarm on because it was worthless.

Coach Ratner: 38:16

Now, with a shuttle, just so you understand that when the shuttle comes back into earth atmosphere it heats up to 3,000 degrees. So the space shuttle has to have these heat shields covering all parts of it. And when this piece of foam fell off, they were concerned that I would hit a piece of the shield, knock a piece of shield off. Now I'm surprised that NASA didn't take a satellite and get a picture of it or send just one spacewalk and this spacewalks are dangerous, but that's a major thing. Can they mention that? You mentioned the book that they hadn't the shuttle ready to go within like 30 days and they could have survived that there. That long. They could have, you know, lowered the amount of oxygen in the air. They could have rationed their food they had plenty of food and water that NASA didn't do attempt to make a rescue and, instead of having to risk their lives, to come back in and there was one piece Of heat shield that wasn't on there because of that, that's why the shuttle didn't make it through the entry.

Dave Mason: 39:09

Yeah, the problem was they didn't even investigate to see whether there was damage or not. They they had at least three internal requests to say we're concerned about this, please look at this, and they just ignored it.

Coach Ratner: 39:21

Yeah, well, because no one wants to find out there's a mistake, especially when it's. The cost would have been, esther, astronomical, obviously. But you mentioned the book that that I was an insurance companies put a value on it human life Right. I think you said that values $10 million. But that is for a random human life Right, just a random stuff like it's.

Coach Ratner: 39:40

Like you know, I had a deal with lung cancer and they say, okay, the average time that you live with lung cancer is, you know, 3.5 years, whatever it is, but that's a statistical average, that's not one specific person. So when you know the value of one specific person, when it's Elon Ramon or some astronaut from NASA, well, it's not $10 million, because now you know who they are Right, and so they doesn't matter how much is going to cost. You're going to try to save their lives. And I thought it was really interesting how, like you know people, they didn't. They had the, where I thought to look and find that there was a broke, broken heat shield, but they didn't take a picture of it or do an attempt for a spacewalk. So that was that they. They ignore the early warning system. I guess what you're gonna say.

Coach Ratner: 40:21

So what else do you want to tell me about this book? And like, what was, what was the? What I want to know about this book is what was your inspiration to write this book? Because this is so different than your other books. Your other books on the lamp of darkness and the key of rain are more like Bible-focused books, right and but, and your cash machine is a finance book and your size of your dreams is a Personal growth book, and this one's about a business. It's really kind of a business book, isn't it?

Dave Mason: 40:49

It's definitely a business book.

Dave Mason: 40:52

It's both. It's business. It also has a lot of elements that go into the personal. I love teaching through story. All of my books teach through story.

Dave Mason: 40:59

My age of prophecy teaches, tries to immerse people in the biblical world through through a novel. Cash machine is a novel that teaches financial lessons. The size your dreams is a novel that teaches all kinds of lessons about life, and this is my first time actually going into the realm of pure nonfiction. One of the difficulties I've had with the other books, in fact, is that they don't actually fit into any categories. They're, you know, the cash machine.

Dave Mason: 41:22

It's a novel and it's a money book. There's no categories for now. Now, the money books, you'll be number one, exactly. So this is the first one that actually fits into a real category. That it's just a pure nonfiction book and I'm still able to teach through stories, but looking at stories of actual people. It's it's a very different writing experience. I think I enjoy the writing experience of the others better the size your dreams type books, where I can just make up whatever situations I want and have my characters do whatever I need them to. It's very easy to mold it to that, whereas this one just needed so much research, and then research upon the research.

Coach Ratner: 42:00

A little while research in this one.

Dave Mason: 42:01

Yeah, so much research in this one, because I'm sharing stories of real people, I need to make sure I'm getting the facts right. Yeah and so when I'm writing the size of your dreams, my characters can do whatever I want them to do. And, harry, I'm trying to teach all these different principles, but I have to I'm, since I'm doing my three stories. I need to make sure that I'm really accurate to all of the stories that I, that I'm representing.

Coach Ratner: 42:22

Yeah, you talk a lot about. One of my favorite things really is is trying something for as little money as possible, like just the testing, testing these things out. And you've talked about Airbnb, how Airbnb started with a bunch of guys who I think there was a conference coming to San Francisco. I believe, yep, and Excuse me, there was no room in the hotels and hey, let's rent our air mattresses. That's cool. I guess that's why it's called air B&B it is because it was air mattresses they were renting, which is funny. They kept the name air bed and breakfast.

Dave Mason: 42:54

Yeah, so their initial website was air bed and breakfast calm.

Dave Mason: 42:57

Yeah they later shortened it to air, to Airbnb, but one of the things that was amazing about that, they actually built a website, built a website in just a couple days and it didn't do any of the things that I love about the air B&B website now didn't take credit cards. I didn't have that little map view. We can go on and think and things would change, and all it did was gonna advertise the fact that you could Rent an air mattress in their apartment for, I think, $80 per night.

Dave Mason: 43:21

Yes, when there's a big design show coming to San Francisco and all the hotels were booked out. So this is in the section we talk about minimum viable products and we look at at least three different forms of minimum viable product, a way that you can test the business idea Without needing a tremendous amount of funding behind it. So Airbnb was able to take their hypothesis Would people rent out an air mattress in somebody else's apartment or would they not? They were able to test that idea with a tiny amount of money and Later on they kept talking to people. They're looking for funding, they're looking to get into why combinator as an incubator and a lot of people thought that their idea was pretty stupid, but they couldn't deny that. They went out there, they tried it with no budget and it worked.

Coach Ratner: 44:09

Why do people think it?

Dave Mason: 44:09

was stupid people that are stupid because they didn't Think that people would trust one another enough to want to rent a place in there in their apartments. Which is interesting to me, because I actually knew at the same time that Airbnb was coming out, even before there's something called couch surfing, and that was the Airbnb concept, except with no money. Yeah, people would allow strangers to stay in their house for free, and I knew friends who are doing that. So I was like, well, yeah, if it works for free, it'll probably work for money. Sure, but all these people were comparing it to hotels and saying nobody is gonna spend money to stay in somebody else's apartment you could be a psychopath, who knows what you'd get it or the your apartment. You have somebody else coming there. They could be a psychopath, it's isn't gonna work. And so people rejected it. But they couldn't deny they had tried it and it worked.

Coach Ratner: 44:57

So Airbnb is is definitely one of my favorite companies and I'd love to talk to you more about Airbnb and some of these other companies. You mentioned how they were able to Start with very little risk and that's kind of like one of my favorites, I think, what I want to continue discussing with you about. But we have to, we have to go now. I know you have to leave and I have to leave, but this book, her open fail I I can't tell you how much I highly recommend this. We're gonna put a link below for you to purchase this on Amazon and I'm sure it's as a, as a e-book, and it's just a.

Dave Mason: 45:26

It's not a hardcover, I assume, right, just a paper back yeah, paperback, e-book and the audiobook will be up soon, hopefully.

Coach Ratner: 45:33

Oh, who's doing the audiobook, are you?

Dave Mason: 45:35

No, I found somebody on online.

Coach Ratner: 45:37

No way. That's amazing. I've never done audiobook before, but I Highly recommend this book and I really want to have you back again because I didn't get to really touch a lot of ideas in this book that are so Insightful and, I think, can help anyone who wants to grow a business, anyone who wants to Become greater in life and really really reach your potential. There's so many great ideas here about failure and how you can look at it in different ways and how really you need to hurry up and fail. Thank you so much. This is the Living Clarity podcast. I'm coach Radner. We'll see you next time.