To boost the amount of great failure in order to embrace the learnings and explodify the successes, we came up with the following hashtag;
#flearn
Of course it’s a combination of Fail plus Learn.
Simple.
Short.
Brilliant.
Brief history;
- Australia doesn’t embrace failure because life is so darn good why have the ambition to bother trying and even risk failing.
- We want a great startup industry here so we want more good failure.
- Some great peeps ran Failcon in Sydney and we all got jazzed up.
- I ran a final session on turning the ra-ra into action.
- We started a shared spreadsheet with fail ideas and owners of them.
- We followed up with a brainstorming session at Pollenizer today with some people from a co-working Jelly jumping in.
- Right at the end when we almost gave up, Ross Gerring suggested flearn. Great work Ross and team!
What a great story – so much good came together!
So why use it?
- Most importantly because you will always fail and learn your way to success so embrace it.
- To give us a comfortable language in order to share our failures.
- To bring failures out to the world and stop them being hidden under the rug.
- To have a way to search and find good stories when we’re feeling bad (or complacent).
How to use it?
- Easy – just whack it on the end of tweets
- Use it in blog posts
- Pop it in presentations
- Add it to your LinkedIn profiles (Like me)
- Write about it in your magazines and newspapers if you’re a journo (hint!)
- Say it out loud.
- Use it at a task, project, business or life level – all learnings from failings are beneficial.
- Share it and share it and share it.
Some suggested sentences;
- “Oh god, zero responses, what a epic #flearn”.
- “Server not responding… umm, #flearn”
- “So the customer said to get lost, he’d never pay me ever. Great #flearn”
- “We just stuck it up there and tried some different options. Super fast #flearn”
Some of my proud #flearnings:
- Blowing up 5 monitors I was trying to sell when 19.
- Trying to sell advanced technology to governments when I was 24.
- Trying to sell disruptive technology to big corporates at Kazaa when I was 26.
- Getting a lift with guys I’d just met in Tanzania. Big #flearn kids.
- Going against my gut instinct just because someone was more ‘experienced’ than I was. #zapr
- Not saying someone should not doing something because it would hurt their feelings.
- Doing far to much at once. #tangler
- Launching to the world when you’ve only got 10 customers. #posse
- Thinking that because I convinced someone to do something that they really got it. #manytimes
So go and #flearn as fast as you can.