All successful work is in progress. There are many starting points, but few finishing points, until you admit failure and stop. Until then, you just keep on trying.
For my work in financial empowerment, there have been a lot of different starting points, for different projects in different places. I remember one of the clearest ones feeling like a total, dismal pathetic failure – to start with.
I had been working with a particular migrant worker organisation, developing some projects, but I had gone away from them for a while to develop a specific new programme, working on simple ideas that build towards understanding financial security, and wanted to teach this to a new group.
The idea was to teach a course with seven lessons, focusing in turn on Money, Income, Saving, Spending, Investing, Owning, Now. Each step built on the one before it, and later formed the structure for my book, “Happy Ever After: Financial Freedom Isn’t A Fairytale”
I had spoken to the head of this new migrant organisation, and she had arranged for me to speak to a class of students who had already done some background in financial literacy, and I would be giving them a course they could become confident in teaching themselves, to other students.
I had put in a lot of work, and was so confident of this project being a success that I brought both my daughters along, in part because I wanted them to learn these subjects, but also because things like this need a bit of documentation, and one of them was heading off to film school soon, and so could video what happened.
What happened was a failure. The room we were supposed to use had been double-booked, and was packed full of migrant workers studying something else. And thankfully it was, because hardly anyone had shown up to ours.
In the end, at the top of winding stairs we found an attic room barely tall enough for me to stand up in the middle, and in which both the air-conditioning and projector failed to work. The projector wasn’t a problem, as the two students who did show up could easily view the slides on my laptop screen. The aircon was worse, though, as the attic was directly under the mid-day Singapore sun, and I couldn’t be certain whether it was the heat or the catastrophic failure – in front of my kids, the worst kind – that was making me sweat so much.
But I was incredibly lucky. Sheena the head of the charity that was hosting me was so energetically apologetic that I could only be really sorry for her not myself. And then I had a thought: “Isn’t this a brilliant origin story?”
Because all great endeavours begin with failures. At least that’s the modern narrative construct. Whatever it is you’re starting, no matter how rich your parents or background, you’re going to need to tell someone else about how you scrambled up from nowhere, from nothing, from failure, to achieve what it is you have achieved today. If we were to believe all of these narratives, no wealth is inherited and there are only self-made millionaires (whether seven dollar ones or not!) in the world today!
We could be cynical about this construct – as I just was, admittedly – or we can use it to our advantage. We can use it to play mind games on ourselves and react in a way that we can reflect on later, more positively.
When the going gets tough, noting this as the moment you get going will establish you as one of the tough, at least in your own mind. If you feel like giving up, you can think about how it will feel later to look back on this as the moment you almost gave up, but didn’t.
The worse the moment, or even the more of them, the better your origin story is becoming.
I love those stories about successful authors who got 192 rejection letters from publishers not so much for their can-do, never-say-die attitude, but because they kept count. That’s brilliant. They must have known they were building their own origin story. They took each rejection letter, added it to the pile and said, “There it is. That just made my story better!”
This is open to all of us, as long as we accept that the struggles along the way are literally just that, struggles along the way, and keep moving in the direction we want to go. Log the problem as yet more texture in your impressive backstory, and start building again.
The following week, I taught the first in the series of lessons to a full classroom, almost bursting at the seams, with barely space for either daughter, and that continued through the whole course. Once that was done, we held workshops with some of the migrant workers, co-organised with a group of volunteer students, and together we developed “The Thousand Dollar Journal” giving out thousands of them the next year when covid-19 stopped classes from taking place.
That journal led to Wiley asking me if I would like them to publish the book I had written for my daughter based on the course, and I accepted, without even getting one rejection letter (so far! why did I write that – that’s bound to make it happen!). But that’s ok, because this story had already got one origin myth, it didn’t need another. If I do get rejections later, which is only likely, I will have to welcome them, and begin to start a pile that can build into a different story.
And we can all do this with every story. Financially, we may over-spend, miss out on a good investment, lose money in another, or fail to do exactly what it was we set out to do, but these are only mis-steps on the way. They are sunk-costs, of which the fallacy is to assume that they continue. They don’t. They are gone.
It isn’t easy, but viewing the rejection as part of our story, explaining how we emerged into our successful future, can give us the little extra boost we need to keep going.
Give it a try. You literal can’t fail.
