My museum of career failures

Hello, friend.

Today’s episode is inspired by the museum of failures trend I’ve seen recently on TikTok and Instagram (transcript below as always, in case you prefer to read.

If you haven’t seen the trend, basically it’s a photo or video or someone with the caption “my museum of failures” and then text describing their failures in life and, since I’m usually on the small business side of TikTok, their failures at work.

I really like this trend, because not only is it reassuring to see people you admire and who you know have achieved amazing things talking about failure, the comment sections are always full of kind and encouraging comments, which as you probably know, is pretty rare on social media.

So today, I wanted to share my own museum of failures, and I’d love to hear yours too - share them with me on Instagram.

Not getting the grades I wanted

So, starting early - I wasn’t happy with the grades I got in my A-levels or my degree.

For most of school, I got good grades. I was very academic, but I think it was a classic case of being good at things I found easy and not being great at subjects I actually had to work at. I remember the one subject I didn’t get good grades at for GCSE was Science, because I just found it so boring that I couldn’t concentrate in class.

If I’m interested in something, I will literally learn everything about it in detail, but if I find something boring, I find it almost impossible to concentrate on it. I think I’d rather do something I hate than something that bores me.

And it’s funny that I found Science class boring, because I love learning about Science now.

I’m a very creative person, so all my favourite subjects were the fun ones - Music, Drama, Art - and they were a little bit looked down on. Subjects like Media, Business Studies and Textiles were also looked down on and seen as a bit silly or “not for smart kids”.

Which is ridiculous, because they all teach skills that would have contributed to my current career. My ideal A-level line-up would probably have been Music, Media, Drama and Psychology.

What I actually did was Music, Psychology, English Literature and English Language.

I started to find Music difficult at A-level. A lot of our grade was based on composition, using a computer software to compose a piece, and I just couldn’t get my head around it.

At this time I was also starting to struggle with anxiety, I was going out partying a lot, I didn’t really want to go to uni but it was just assumed that was the next step, and I think I felt a bit overwhelmed.

I’d applied to study English at the University of Liverpool, and I didn’t get the A grades I needed to do that. So my choices were to either study at John Moores University or do a combined degree which accepted lower grades.

Now, Uni of Liverpool is a red-brick university, so I figured it would be better to have a combined degree from there than go to John Moores, so I chose the combined degree.

And boy did I regret it, because I hated my university. I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say that if I went back in time, I would have picked the other uni.

Whenever I do something, I want to do my absolute best at it, and combining a course I didn’t enjoy, a uni I didn’t vibe with and at this point quite debilitating anxiety, I was not able to get a First Class degree, which to me felt like a failure.

On the bright side, I worked pretty much full time throughout uni due to financial circumstances and that landed me my first full time role before I even graduated!

Also, no job has ever asked to see my degree, so if you aren’t happy with your degree or the grade you got, let that be of some reassurance.

Not making my dreams a priority

When I was little I wanted to be a vet, and then a popstar, but from the age of about eleven, I wanted to be a writer, specifically a fashion journalist. I had always been obsessed with magazines and when I started high school, my love for fashion began.

I was at uni during the time when a lot of magazines were shuttering, or at least closing down their print versions and publishing online only. I remember attending a journalism workshop at university where the person hosting basically said that journalism was a dying industry, so don’t bother.

So inspiring.

As I entered my final year of university, I began to look into how exactly one would go about becoming a journalist at a fashion magazine and what I learned was that you pretty much had to move to London and complete who knows how many unpaid internships.

Now, my parents are not rich, and even then London was so expensive to live in. As I mentioned, I worked pretty much full time throughout uni to pay my rent and bills, and the thought of working the same amount of hours or more without being paid was quite unappealing, to say the least.

I did have a little blog at the time, which I posted on sporadically throughout uni and for a couple of years after, until I started my first business, so I figured that would fulfil my need to write.

I worked my way into a project manager role at quite a young age, and then I decided that I wanted to start my own business. And I found that every time I went to market my services, I would always sort of sabotage myself. I wouldn’t give 100%, even though I always put 100% into the actual work I was doing.

I think that subconsciously, I felt that if I gave promoting a service my full effort and it failed, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. So instead, I held back so I could use the excuse that I didn’t give it my all if things didn’t go as I wanted.

I also hardly ever pitched, and if I didn’t hear back I would never follow up. Then I’d see my peers doing these incredible things and growing more quickly than my business was, and I’d feel even worse about myself.

I think that ultimately, with both of these things, it was a case of not believing in myself. It’s really taken until the last couple of years to realise that I would rather try to achieve my biggest goals and fail than not try properly.

I should also say that while the people around me try to be supportive, I didn’t really get the support I needed from them. My family and my partner of the time were quite cautious, and so if I had an idea or I wanted to work towards some ambition, I would usually be met with a list of all the reasons why I shouldn’t do it.

I’m not blaming them; of course it was and always will be up to me to pursue my goals. But I think it would have been better if they’d encouraged me to chase my dreams, especially when I was young and impressionable. I have a daughter, and I have a younger cousin who is in her early twenties, and I make it my goal to always be their cheerleader and support them in following their wildest ambitions and telling them that they can do anything they put their mind to.

Quitting my job with no back-up plan

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to the end of 2017.

The #girlboss era was in full swing, and I was at the very start of my first business. I had not made any sales yet - this is important.

I was also experiencing the year from hell. I don’t want to go too far into it, but the events of the year had me in a deep depression, with a generous sprinkle of self-loathing and social anxiety on top.

Work was one of the factors in my poor mental health. So, I quit my job.

But it’s okay, all the gurus said I should just quit my job and everything would work out! I could just manifest wealth, right? All I had to do was believe in myself and buy their $500 course, right???

What followed was one of the most stressful, challenging years of my life.

Because guess what? Clients don’t just magically appear because you’ve started a business. You need to have a proper marketing plan, and you need to pitch to potential clients, which I was very scared to do.

I’m happy to say that I surprised myself and really pushed myself out of my comfort zone to build a lovely community of clients and other business owners, I did pitch and this brought me lots of opportunities like writing for a magazine (my dream, remember?) and speaking at a few events. I even opened a paid monthly subscription at the end of the year which did really well.

But I was not having a good time behind the scenes. I was so stressed about money, I felt like a huge failure for leaving my job - the company actually closed five months after I left, so I probably made the right choice - and I sadly did not manifest my way into a six figure business.

But ultimately, I’m glad I did it. Quitting my job without another one lined up was so unlike me, and the opposite of the advice I’d always been given, that six years on I’m kind of impressed by my own gumption.

If you are in the beginning stages of business, I would not recommend doing what I did, unless you enjoy exacerbated stress levels and financial instability.

In my experience of the business world, once you get your first couple of clients, you do start to get more regular enquiries. So I’d probably wait until I had regular clients and save all of the money I made from my business instead of spending it before handing in my notice.

Quitting two businesses

I closed both of my first businesses for really silly reasons and again, this ultimately comes down to not having the self-esteem to believe in myself and not having a good support system at home.

So with my first business, I ran a subscription business at a time when they were really starting to take off. As I mentioned, I wasn’t having a great time at this point, and I would constantly compare myself to other people with memberships, other small business owners, pretty much anyone who I perceived to be doing better than I was, to be honest.

And then during covid lockdowns, I think it was sort of coming to its natural close. Before lockdown I’d been steadily building an audience on Instagram and then I decided to get a full time job to combat the isolation I’d felt during lockdown, I started getting more into web design, and I went from posting every day to hardly ever, so my growth stalled, and let me tell you - you can’t sell a subscription services to the same audience successfully many times.

As the business grew, I also started to encounter people who would join, devour all the content and cancel, people who would mess me about or try to get refunds claiming that they didn’t know it was a monthly subscription even though it was plastered across the sales page.

I just got a bit fed up with it, to be honest. So I closed the business in Spring 2021.

As I mentioned, in 2020 I got really into web design and I did a lot of courses and YouTube tutorials to learn how to create branding, because I’d somehow started being asked to design planners and logos and social media templates for other businesses after my designs for my own business caught their attention.

So I gradually built up a little freelance design business. And again, scammy clients who didn’t want to pay for my services are the reason I shut it down.

I don’t regret closing either business, because I learned so much from each of them and I now feel like I’m in a position where I love my job and am starting the Quiet Leaders Club community, which I’m so passionate about.

However, I think I could have dealt with the situations I was in better. Every business has to deal with a bad client occasionally, and I took it so personally and to mean something bad about me when that simply wasn’t the case.

With each failure I’ve learned a lot and it’s led me to where I am today. I couldn’t be more grateful. I feel like I took the scenic route to finding my path, but I had a lot of baggage to process and lessons to be learned.