Making a great mistake can be one of the most valuable of life’s lessons
THIS week, Rebecca Brooks, the controversial former Sun newspaper editor and chief executive of News Corporation UK, was announced as the new head of acclaimed Dublin-based digital news agency, Storyful.
Storyful was founded by former Prime Time presenter, Mark Little in 2010 when we he took leave from his permanent, pensionable public-service job to launch a start-up he believed would define the future of journalism. Last year, he sold the company to Rupert Murdoch for €18m.
Little says the journey from the public sector to enterpreneurship began with an accident, in 2008, that laid him up for two months. He was skiing on holiday. “On the last run of the holiday, I hit a bump at speed and the skis didn’t pop off,” he says. “My knee shattered before I hit the snow. I lay there for 30 minutes, before I was found and spent two months trying to get back on my feet.”
The accident altered his view of life. “Before, I had a sense of immortality; I thought I was indestructible,” he says. “I’d been in hairy situations as a reporter and never suffered a scratch. The accident made me think life is actually ridiculously short and fragile. It made me realise that — at the age of 39 — I had plenty of dreams, but not a lot of time to realise them.”
Mark founded Storyful two years later. “I don’t think I would have had the urgency to set out on my own had it not been for the lessons I learned from the dodgy ski bindings,” he says.
Do you make mistakes? We’re all trained from our schooldays to cover up blunders. Perfection is the goal and we pretend we never slip up.
But the smartest thinkers say this mindset is dangerous. Albert Einstein said that “anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new”, while novelist Bram Stoker said humans “learned from failure, not from success”.
This thinking also prevails in business. US investors are more willing to fund businesses run by entrepreneurs who have previously failed than businesses run by novices. There is one condition: the entrepreneurs must be able to explain why they failed, what they learned and what they would do differently next time.
Here, three more personalities share their ‘best mistakes’ — the ones that taught them life-changing lessons.
2FM radio presenter, Rick O’Shea, was given his P45 unexpectedly 14 years ago. “I’d been with the radio station for six years and I thought everything was going well, until one day they told me they were letting me go,” he says.
He was 28 years old, with a wife and young child. “My mistake was that I had no plan B,” he says. “I had no idea what to do next.”
Luck was on his side. For one, the station paid him until his contract ended and, for another, 2FM happened to reshuffle their schedules, creating an opening for him.
“I was lucky, but I was still unemployed for months and, at the time, I thought nobody would ever employ me again,” he says.
It made him more cautious. “I now operate under the presumption I could get fired at any minute,” he says. “I make sure I have a cushion to protect me if everything goes wrong.”
This cushion is financial. “I was a terrible saver, but I’m better now,” he says. “If you can at all, I’d urge everyone to start a rainy-day fund, because you never know when your business will go south or your company will downsize.”
It applies to his mindset, too. “I’m not complacent anymore,” he says. “I try to prepare for the worst, as it might be just around the corner.”
TD Michael Healy-Rae’s life-changing slip-up was as a farmer. Twenty five years ago, he set up a forestry business. “I spent two and a half back-breaking years at it,” he says. “But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make money.”
He has vivid memories of the struggle. He had a horse to carry the timber out of the forest, but there were areas the horse couldn’t reach. “I’d carry that timber out on my back,” says Michael. “Imagine carrying heavy logs over rough ground, soaked by rain or eaten by midges. It was like penal servitude.”
The price paid for timber was low and Michael’s business was unprofitable. But he was stubborn. “I wouldn’t give in,” he says. “It took me two and a half years to wake up to the fact I wasn’t making money.”
Looking back, he regards the experience as an education. “It made me appreciate what I have today,” he says. “Suffering hardship made me realise how good my working conditions are and what other people have to go through to try to make a living.”
TV3’s Anna Daly has made many mistakes. “I’ve made them on air and off,” she says. “But I’d like to think I’ve learned from them and haven’t made the same ones twice.”
Prior to TV3, she worked in international marketing. “I thought it was going to work out well, but from the moment I arrived, on day one, things went downhill fast,” she says. “I had one notion of what the job entailed and they had another. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic: they weren’t asking me to lap dance around the office. But the role wasn’t what I’d bought into.”
She decided she wasn’t going to go back after that first day, but worried she was being rash. “My parents taught me never to leave one job unless I had another and I didn’t,” she says.
Eventually she quit and soon after got a job in the marketing department at TV3. From there, she became marketing manager and presenter. “I did learn from that disastrous first job, though,” she says. “I should have asked more questions before I accepted the gig. Communication and questions are vital, and so is the need to be assertive and to understand that when something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.”
Entrepreneur and Dragon’s Den panellist, Gavin Duffy, says Irish people need to re-assess their views of mistakes. “We have a village mentality,” he says. “We don’t give people the chance to learn from their mistakes. Instead, we define them by their failures.”
One of his biggest mistakes was a TV advertisement for Tan Organic, one of the products he invested in on Dragon’s Den. “It would have to be one of the all-time worst TV ads,” he says. “It featured a close-up of the bottle of tan and then my head — the head of a fat and balding 50-year-old man — appears. I remember sitting down to watch it and immediately afterwards getting a call from my brother, asking what I had been thinking. It was so embarrassing — a huge cock-up.”
But he refused to see it as a failure. “I embraced the mistake and went with it,” he says. “I went on Podge and Rodge and on the Panel on RTÉ and they tore strips off me about it.”
The approach worked. So much so that when he attended a marketing conference six months later, he heard the ad mentioned as a tactical attention-grabbing ploy.
“Did I tell them it had all been a big mistake,” he asks now. “Did I ever? That whole experience taught me that we can’t change mistakes, but we can change how we react to them. It’s the reaction that makes all the difference.”
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