I enjoy a good procedural show, regardless of genre: crime, British crime, hospital, or cozy mystery. I love meeting the often-renegade leading character who bucks against the rules. experiencing wins and losses.I like watching my favorite characters fail as much as I like seeing them succeed. Because the ability to fail is just as fantastical an idea to me as a hospital filled with ridiculously attractive doctors all having "supply closet time.“ Give me five seasons of dramatic arcs filled with wins and near-misses. nearly losing their jobs, Nearly losing that patient or that survivor, almost catching that bad guy, almost losing the love interest. It was nearly missing that bruise that brought a whole diagnosis together. it's ( insert 12-letter diagnoses)
Is it odd to say that I dream of failure and that I dream of helping people fail?
In a month so focused on the extraordinariness of Black people, I dream of failure.
I dream of failing. I fantasize about failing in a way that is entirely unique to me. I wish our failures didn't have such dire consequences. I want us to have the power of our failure narratives.
Stories of failure in business only live in the shadows of success.
How do you build when failure isn't equitable?
Because failure isn't equitable for Black people or any other marginalized group in this country. We can't talk about, or I can't talk about, building things like businesses, movements, and policies unless we acknowledge how failure's stakes aren't evenly distributed.
There's not an area of my life where I feel my ability to fail isn’t sitting at an actual angle, with a car barn above the hill and a town below.
As a first-generation everything, I hung up my dream of buying my parent's home, at least for now. I now dreams of being able to keep them comfortably in their rent-stabilized apartment. I can't afford to fail in this business because there isn't a retirement plan or nest egg waiting for my parents. As a Black woman conditioned her whole life to play into the exhausting magical negro trope, who won award after award and was granted access to advanced and honor classes with no one else in the room who looked like her. My success made me worthy; it was one more way to prove to other races that Black people are intelligent and respectable.
And I can't tell you how that has crippled me in my journey as a founder and it's only in these past pandemic years, I have been able to rehab that crippling fear.
According to a Harvard Kennedy School study, when an organization fails, Black women leaders are evaluated more negatively than Black men, white women, or white men. This is due in part to perceptions of Black women as atypical leaders. a shot in the dark, and if it doesn't work out, it returns to the previous system.
If failure is such an important part of the entrepreneurial process, what does it mean when Black people are unable to fail?
It's part of why I appreciate the discipline of business design , the reiterative process of experimentation and learning is exactly what many founders need. Founders also need a place to fail that has lower stakes, planned for outcomes and backup plans.
