Sorry for the sales-ish subject line. I don’t usually write in that fashion, but it’s true in this case.

A scientist recently studied thousands of startups, successful scientists, and other organizations to look for patterns in what made some groups successful and others not.

I won’t rehash the details here, but you can watch this excellent YouTube synopsis.

Anyone who’s worked with me before can tell you right now that these three things will seem familiar to anyone who’s been offered my services.

Let’s go into the three secrets of success and how I uniquely help you pursue them:

No Fear of Failure

Ironically, this is the step I can help with the least. This is about mindset, and I insist on a judgment-free zone and the pursuit of trying (and possibly failing) to learn.

So, I can help here. But can I uniquely help here? Besides me being pretty good at the “business therapy” side of things, no. You can probably get this from a reasonably good business coach. They’ll remind you to try things, be comfortable with failure, and remain persistent.

A key part of dropping a fear of failure, which I offer uniquely, comes from my approach to the next two levels of success.

Learn from Failure

Here’s where I come in. My clients will tell you one thing that sets me apart: I ask good questions. I always have a unique perspective. I will help you tease apart the lessons from each failure by looking at it from multiple angles.

I know this because the one person I know who cannot access me is me. In other words, I struggle to implement this for myself because it’s so hard to step outside yourself. I am incredibly useful to my clients because I am that outside perspective to them.

Can you learn from failures on your own? Absolutely. I am doing so. But it is much slower and less effective without someone who sits beside you nonjudgmentally and helps you analyze what went wrong and what you can do about it.

As much as you’d like to get this from a “business coach,” you often won’t. They don’t know what questions to ask. They usually haven’t been in the driver’s seat like I have. They’ll have the questions their certifications and checklists ask them to ask you, but not much beyond that.

(Besides, can’t you get those same checklists and coach yourself?)

I can’t tell you the number of times all I’ve done is asked a question—a tailored, unique question about your particular circumstances, not something from a checklist and I hear, “Wow, I hadn’t thought about it from that angle before.”

It’s an unlocking conversation. A good question leads to a good understanding, and a good understanding leads to a good plan to try again.

In this way, I can help you overcome a fear of failure because, together, we can extract so much useful information from each failure.

Fail Faster

The second thing my clients will tell you about me besides the insights is that one of my number one interests is what I call “decreasing cycle time.”

It’s a Lean concept, but it can be applied to many things, including the fundamental learning loop at the heart of many phenomena—the OODA loop.

I have no idea why I seem to have this talent. If I did, I’d be teaching you. I think it’s incredibly useful: breaking big ideas down into the smallest things that can possibly work and maximizing the amount of information we gain from each one. It sounds so easy on paper, but time after time, I find myself the only one with the ability to break things down.

Then, once you have those bite-sized ideas prioritized for the amount of learning they’d bring you (learning about your market, a technology, whatever it may be…), we optimize your team and process to blow through those ideas as fast as possible.

Frankly, it’s a long-term goal of mine to better understand why and how this works so I can help people learn to do it themselves. But for now, again, many folks who work with me will tell you that I’m often the best person they have helping them do this.

This further helps you not fear failure because I will help you see its benefits and value. We won’t call it failure. We’ll call it learning, and I’ll show you how to learn faster and faster. Further, this isn’t something you can easily find in other consultants. They all know their particular brand of “process improvement,” but they all seem to struggle to apply it outside the narrow scope they were trained in, if at all.

Summing Up

Success is about learning from failure and failing as fast as possible.

I know a leadership and strategy advisor like me can help you because I haven’t found one for me yet, and I can feel how much that’s slowing me down.

I’m getting better. If you’re in a similar situation, a good cue is to think, “What if you were your own client? What would you say?” But like any habit, it takes time to build that.

Regardless, that’s my problem. Luckily, it isn’t yours. You do have access to me. As always, respond to this email with your thoughts—or any questions about help you need. I’m always available for a free Zoom call to shoot the shit, and you can see if I’m helpful for your problem.

Good luck, and happy failing!