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• What I’ve Learned

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What I Learned:

Pepsi A.M.

Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo.

The Amazon Firephone.

Apparently, a retail museum in Michigan exists with nothing but failed consumer products.

Products in which millions of dollars were spent on research, development, and marketing. Products that still make no sense (i.e., Colgate “TV Dinners”) and products that still make no sense to how they didn’t work  (i.e., a Google E-Reader).   

But here’s the thing—

The collector, Robert McMath, didn’t set out to collect failed products.

He just bought new items over the years, removed the contents, and kept the packaging.

By his estimate, “almost all consumer products fail.” 

Failure being defined as “product longevity, or sales expectations.”

But it’s the perspective shift in hearing about Robert’s museum that captivated me:

You realize that when you walk into your local grocery store—you only see the small minority of the products that actually made it.

If every item were still available, shelving would be practically infinite. 

And it wasn’t until I pulled up to an orthodontic practice that this idea hit home—

This entire industry is the 1%.

The odds of being an orthodontist in America (assuming you were randomized in a pool of possible careers) is .005%.

You have double the chance of being struck by lightning.

….Or winning the state lottery.  

You have a 5x chance of becoming a professional athlete amongst all sports.

And are 74x more likely to birth triplets.

Thousands of almost-orthodontists will be denied residencies each year, millions of undergrads won’t make it past organic chemistry, and tens of millions won’t even graduate from college.

—And even if you pass the gauntlet of becoming an ‘orthodontist’

The failure rate for the product you produce (i.e. a beautiful smile) will be advertised as a guarantee of success.  Which begs the question: what failures are being hidden?

Jonathan Martin, of McGill & Hill, sees the numbers in the industry, and the actual stats are almost “never touted.”

There’s a graveyard of doctors who could have retired decades years earlier, but wanted to play “empire-builder”, and spent decades working twice as hard for a failed expansion DSO. 

You never hear about those guys.

Watch any webinar, attend any course, listen to any podcast.

You’ll see amazing cases in minimal time, big practices with even bigger exits, and private equity deals that hit home run after home run.   

Orthodontics— like life—rarely display the real odds. 

You see the survivors.

Yet, failure is inevitable.  

So what’s the learning?

While the odds for failing are much higher than what anyone sees, it’s never the end of the story.

Because what Robert has in his Michigan museum is evidence that the product managers that failed became the same ones that ultimately succeeded.

It’s the burden of not being seen as successful that prevents success, not the actual failures themselves.

“Most products fail—But people rarely do.”

It’s only those that stopped taking shots that ultimately fail.

Enter a snippet of one of the world’s famous commencement speeches:

“I think it is fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale.

An exceptionally short lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in the modern world without being homeless.  The fears that my parents had for me, and that I had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every standard, I was the biggest failure I knew. 

Now, I’m not going to stand here and tell you failure is fun.  That period of my life is a dark one, and I had no idea there was going to be a fairytale resolution.  I had no idea how far or how long the tunnel would extend.

So why talk about the benefits of failure?

Simply because it stripped away the inessentials. 

I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct my energy into things that mattered.

I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized…and I was still alive.

Failure gave me an inner security that I never attained by being successful. 

Such knowledge is true gift

For it’s in failure that we painfully win,

And it’s been worth more than anything I’ve ever earned.”

-J.K. Rowling (Author of the Harry Potter series)

Success is still taking the shots in adulthood of what you dreamed in childhood.