Failure

You'll will very likely recognize Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank in the clip above.  This clip is a Ted Talk she gave about her experience with failure.

"I looked up one day and saw that it was up to me.  You can only be a victim if you admit defeat." 

 -The Descendents

By all "normal" standards, I'm a complete failure.  I've been unemployed for 3 years and I have no income whatsoever at the moment.  I live in a small apartment with my mom in a small town in North Carolina.  My last attempt at job hunting landed me one interview... at Wendy's.  The manager turned me down when she saw how fat I am.  I last worked as a taxi driver, but can't do that job anymore because of health reasons.  Taxi driving doesn't pay around here anyhow.  I have very few clothes.  I don't even have a phone, let alone a smart phone.  I spent the last couple years on medication that turned me into a zombie.  I could go on and on.

But I'm still here.  I survived a couple years as a furniture mover, six and a half years driving a taxi in Southern California, and I survived a year living on the streets when the taxi business tanked.  I survived being hit by a Jeep while riding my mountain bike.  I survived a near head-on collision in the taxi when a guy was driving the wrong way in my lane.  I survived four bouts of cellulitis/MRSA, a bacterial infection that kills more people than AIDS.  I'm still here.  Am I a failure?  Yeah, compared to my successful friends in the BMX and skateboard world.  I'm a failure compared to the much more normal people I know here in North Carolina.  I don't have a house, a wife, children, two cars, a dog and a cat.

What I do have is lots of stories.  I started blogging about some of my BMX stories a few years ago and wound up with the top two old school BMX blogs in the world at the time.  Then I started a blog about panhandling and homelessness as a joke.  That became the top panhandling blog in the world.  I didn't make any money off of those blogs, but it opened me up to new opportunities.  I started learning about blogging and how people make money with blogs.  There may be as many as 200 million blogs in the world, but very few actually make money.  But I learned that blogging can lead to other opportunities.  That led to me study internet marketing and how technology and "new  media" are changing both society and business.  We are at a time in the world where there are all kinds of opportunities in business.  Everything I've learned has led me to dust off a business idea that I started thinking about 25 years ago.  I'm gearing up to get that idea going soon.  This blog is part of that process.  I realized that I'm one of millions of people who have to reinvent themselves in the 21st century.  That insight gave me lots of new ideas to blog about.

Am I really a failure?  That's what people called me when I started doing tricks on a BMX bike 30-some years ago.  Riding that bike took me places and led to adventures that I couldn't have imagined at the time.  Everyone thought I was crazy... until I had some success and started working in the BMX and skateboard industries.  That led to working on TV shows including four years on the crew of American Gladiators and producing BMX videos.

While I get frustrated a lot, I try not to wallow in my apparent failure.  The biggest thing I learned from BMX and skateboarding is to get back up after I fall and try again.  That's how I look at my life now.  It feels a lot like those early days in BMX when everyone kept asking me, "What the hell are you doing with your life?"  I stuck to my guns and kept plugging along and eventually found success in writing and video work.  Like Barbara Corcoran in the clip above, success in my life seems to follow bouts of failure.  Time will tell how this works out.