Famous Failures

Austin Buchan is the CEO of College Forward, which is a nonprofit that coaches students from underserved backgrounds to achieve the benefits of higher education and a college degree.  One of the central tenants of College Forward is the belief that everyone who wants to go to college can go to college. College Forward helps universities build and implement student coaching programs that increase retention, persistence, and graduation. Connect with Austin on Twitter and learn more about College Forward at this link. In the episode, Austin and I discuss: How Austin got started in education by building a program for high school students on a rural island in Nicaragua The one practice that all university presidents should institute and the one practice they should eliminate Why the students that College Forward serves have more grit and perseverance than most of the population The notable failures that Austin experienced as the CEO for College Forward How to create an environment where employees are willing to raise their hands and challenge the leadership How to know when to kill a project that you started. - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening. 

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine. He writes about topics as diverse as behavioral psychology, professional sports, and blockbuster films. Derek also hosts The Atlantic’s latest podcast Crazy/Genius, and is a weekly contributor to “Here and Now,” the national afternoon news show on NPR, and he appears regularly on CBS, the BBC, and MSNBC. He has appeared on numerous lists, including both Inc magazine’s and Forbes’ “30 Under 30” and Time magazine’s 140 Best Twitter Feeds. Derek’s debut book is Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. In this beautifully written book, Derek tackles a seemingly simple question: Why do hits become hits? Why do some songs, movies, and books become bestsellers while others fizzle out? The book is a riveting read, whether you're in the business of creating hits or simply curious why Fifty Shades of Grey became a worldwide sensation. Derek and I discuss: Derek’s personal failures in finding a job as a writer and how he ended up getting his job at The Atlantic. What Derek learned from covering the notoriously secretive X, Google’s moonshot factory (you can read his article on X at this link). The strategies that X uses to cultivate an environment where employees embrace failure. Why X decided to hold an event modeled after Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The two big ideas from Derek’s book, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. Why writing a book is similar to organizing a massive house. How learning is accumulation and understanding is elimination. - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening. 

Jordan is the CEO and Founder of DebtMaven, which is like eHarmony for commercial lending. The platform has facilitated over $350 million in deals. Jordan is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Elite Meet, a nonprofit dedicated to helping Navy SEALs and other elite veterans find their place in the civilian world after leaving the service. He has traveled to 32 countries, lived in China for 18 months, trains Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, is a private pilot, SCUBA dives, and speaks Mandarin Chinese. You can connect with Jordan on LinkedIn and follow the adventures of his family on their vlog at The Hybrid Family. In the interview, Jordan explains the failures he experienced in starting two companies; how he ended up losing a co-founder and with only $800 left in his business bank account; what strategies he used to bounce back from these bumps; the #1 regret he has in his entrepreneurial journey; and how you can fulfill your life’s potential through the simple, but powerful act, of persistence. Jordan is the CEO and Founder of DebtMaven, which is like eHarmony for commercial lending. The platform has facilitated over $350 million in deals. Jordan is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Elite Meet, a nonprofit dedicated to helping Navy SEALs and other elite veterans find their place in the civilian world after leaving the service. He has traveled to 32 countries, lived in China for 18 months, trains Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, is a private pilot, SCUBA dives, and speaks Mandarin Chinese. You can connect with Jordan on LinkedIn and follow the adventures of his family on their vlog at The Hybrid Family. In the interview, Jordan explains the failures he experienced in starting two companies; how he ended up losing a co-founder and with only $800 left in his business bank account; what strategies he used to bounce back from these bumps; the #1 regret he has in his entrepreneurial journey; and how you can fulfill your life’s potential through the simple, but powerful act, of persistence. - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening. 

James Clear is an author and speaker focused on habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Time, and on CBS This Morning, and is taught in universities around the world. His website receives millions of visitors each month and hundreds of thousands subscribe to his popular email newsletter. He is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and his work is used by teams in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. His latest book, just published, is Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results. In the interview, James and I discuss how James took his website from 0 to 100,000 subscribers in just two years; why he decided to write annual reviews on his website publicly sharing his successes and failures; why 2016 was the worst year of his writing career and what he learned from it; the lessons he learned from two failed businesses; and much, much more. - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening. 

Chelsey Korus is one of the most preeminent teachers of yoga.  Over the course of her career, she has been featured on Live! with Kelly and Michael, PopSugar, Fitness, Shape, Prevention Magazine, Yoga Journal, and Women’s Health, and many, many others. She’s been teaching yoga since the age of 15 and has been an avid life long learner in numerous movement practices. She shares her vision with thousands of students every year, hosting retreats and teaching classes for Wanderlust. In the interview, we discuss why Chelsea worked so hard in college to land a role in a New York City production, but quit after just a week of rehearsals; what strategies she used to deal with one of the hardest setbacks in her life; how she takes a tragedy and turns it into a love story; why she meditates on a few choice lines from her favorite poems every morning; and much and much more. This was one of the most honest conversations I’ve had on the podcast, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you’d like to follow Chelsey’s work, check out her Instagram page (@chelseykorus). - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening.

Susan Henderson is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award. She is the author of the novels, Up from the Blue (HarperCollins, 2010) and The Flicker of Old Dreams (HarperCollins, 2018). She blogs at litpark.com, which is a supportive community of writers and artists who are in this game for the long haul. Sue grew up in a family of overachieving scientists and engineers yet created her own path as an author. We talk about how she navigated that journey; why she stopped writing for 10 years; how she deals with failure and critique; how a janitor in her high school taught her how to give good feedback; and why you should read the 1 and 2-star reviews of the artists you admire. She also shares great practical advice for aspiring writers. Her latest book, The Flicker of Old Dreams, is about the death of small-town America as told by a mortician. - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening. 

Neil Pasricha is the author of five New York Times bestsellers including The Book of Awesome, a catalog of simple pleasures based on his 50-million hit, award-winning blog, and The Happiness Equation, a nine-step guidebook to happiness based on new research. His books have been on bestseller lists for over 200 weeks and sold millions of copies. Neil is also one of the most popular TED speakers with his first TED Talk “The 3 A’s of Awesome” ranked as one of the ten most inspiring of all time. His new podcast, 3 Books, discusses the most formative books of inspiring individuals from all walks of life. His work has been featured in hundreds of outlets including CNN, BBC, The Today Show, The Early Show, The Oprah Winfrey Network, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Fortune, and Forbes. In the interview, we discuss the ten years of blogging failures helped launch Neil’s viral blog, 1000 Awesome Things; the 2-minute practice that Neil uses every morning to build more gratitude into his life; why focusing on external validation leaves us unhappy and what we can do about it; and what Neil learned from launching his new podcast, 3 books. You can subscribe to Neil’s podcast at this link. - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening.

Caroline Webb (Facebook and Twitter) is the CEO of Sevenshift, a firm that shows people how to use insights from behavioral science to improve their working life. Her book on that topic, How To Have A Good Day, was published in 16 languages and more than 60 countries. The book was hailed as one of the "top must-read business books of 2016" by both Inc. and Forbes and described by Fortune as one of their top "self-improvement through data" books.  Caroline’s work has been widely featured in media outlets, including: The Financial Times, Forbes, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC Radio, The Economist, WIRED, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and many others around the world. To learn more about Caroline and her work, please go to howtohaveagoodday.com. You’ll find a list of free resources as well as information on how you can sign up for workshops designed to help you be your best at the office and beyond. In the interview, Caroline shares her diverse career path and why the quality of her day-to-day experience didn’t necessarily improve as she moved up the career ladder; how she decided to write a book on improving our professional lives; why focusing too narrowly on long-term career goals can backfire; why she sings Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” before client workshops; the strategies that she uses to teach corporate leaders how to build resilience in the face of failure; and how she unintentionally ended up in a professional dance audition that failed spectacularly and what she learned from it. - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening. 

Shane Snow is an award-winning journalist, celebrated entrepreneur, and the bestselling author of the books Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking and DREAM TEAMS: Working Together Without Falling Apart, as well as the co-author of The Storytelling Edge. He is founder-at-large of the content technology company Contently, and is a board member of The Hatch Institute, a nonprofit for investigative journalism in the public interest. Snow's writing has appeared in Fast Company, Wired, and The New Yorker. He's a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and has been called a “Wunderkind” by The New York Times, a “Digital Maverick” by Details, and his work “Insanely addicting” by GQ.  In the interview, Shane explains strategies based on research on how we can learn from failure; shares his own personal and business failures and what he learned from them; and discusses the power of storytelling in building relationships and dissects how a captivating story is structured.   You can take Shane’s intellectual humility test at this link and find out how open-minded you are. You can also grab a copy of Shane’s latest book, Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart, here. - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening. 

Jessica Bennett is an award-winning journalist and author who covers social issues and culture through a gender lens. She was recently appointed the first-ever Gender Editor of the New York Times. Jessica is the author of the bestselling book, Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace (HarperCollins), which has been translated into 10 languages, a podcast, and is being adapted for television. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, where she began her career; Time, where she was a columnist; as well as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, the Washington Post and The New York Times. Jessica has spoken about sexism and gender bias at a variety of institutions, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Harvard Business School, Facebook, Google, Thomson Reuters and others. Yes, she's in a real-life feminist fight club. You can keep in touch with Jessica by signing up for her newsletter, The Gender Letter, at nytimes.com/genderletter. In the interview, we talk about a wide array of topics: Jessica’s decision to write a major New York Times piece on failure on university campuses; why minorities disproportionately suffer from the imposter syndrome (and what to do about it); how she quickly bounced back after being laid off from Tumblr; how she ended up as the first gender editor of the New York Times; her writing process and failures in writing; and so much more. - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening.