26A - Celebrating Failure

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1. Early on in the semester, for one of the first assignments in this class, I attempted to reach out to potential customers by contacting local Gainesville restaurants through the contact information provided on UF's business library. I contacted close to 40 companies through the site, and for more than a handful I received error messages (meaning the email could not be sent due to an inactive account or other technical issue) and I only received a response from a couple restaurant/franchise owners. This was a very frustrating experience even though it seems small at this point in the process.

2. Throughout the semester, I continued contacting various industry experts and any professionals who may be able to offer me insights into the restaurant/allergy friendly food industry. Eventually, I stumbled upon a firm named AllergyEats (this nonprofit aggregates allergy information for restaurants throughout the country) and left a comment in the "contact us" page on their website. To my surprise, the next day, I was greeted with an email response from the CEO of the firm (who also happened to be a former portfolio manager at Fidelity Investments). This success in making a connection taught me to persevere despite failure and continue chasing your goals.

3. Ultimately, I believe that failure is necessary to generate personal growth. Part of becoming a strong person is learning how to cope with failure. It is especially important to fail while you can (e.g. while you're young, or failing in the confines of this class) because an inability to adjust to small failures in those situations will mean catastrophe when a real-life failure/trauma arises. I think that I have always taken failure quite hard emotionally. Even playing baseball all my life (a game where, per the overused stat, "even the best players fail 7/10 times"), I have always taken failure personally. I think this is a strength because it pushes me to succeed, but also a weakness because it means more emotional anguish when I don't meet a goal. Ultimately, I feel that I am learning how to treat each failure as a learning opportunity rather than pressuring myself to such a high degree. I feel that after this class, I will be more willing to reach out to people seeking an unlikely connection/friend/mentor and, overall, more accepting of failure as a necessary step towards success.

Comments

  1. Daryl SutherlandNovember 22, 2019 at 9:10 PM

    Johnathon,
    I know you said there were times you felt like giving up but after failing all those times you picked up where you left off and made many improvements since the beginning of this semester. I am glad that you could get past your failures and find hope in your work again after emailing that CEO. It's the little things that can mean so much when it comes to your product. I never really enjoyed the little things in life until I heard feedback on my product for this class.

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  2. Remi TaylorNovember 24, 2019 at 10:18 AM

    Hey there Johnathan! You did a great job with this post. Your organization and content is very smart as well as interesting. It is super annoying that that happened to you when you tried calling all the different restaurants for your first time. I am very surprised that you received more than a handful of error messages. Those restaurants need to update those emails.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AustinAbramczykNovember 25, 2019 at 10:37 AM

    You did a great post highlighting your definition of failure! Failure is necessary for personal growth. What was great that came out of your failure was that you were still able to connect with a lot of companies which helped you gather a lot of information relating to your business venture. However, I sort of differ from you in a sense that I don't necessarily use the word failure, rather I convert the word into obstacles. I feel that in life you'll have obstacles and that some people push through these obstacles while others quit under the pressure. Those who quit, I would consider failures. However, those who push through, haven't really failed.

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