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FEAR | Hitting Zero: The Art of Public Failure | Chapter 1 | 🍵 Sunday Sips | EP29
Published 3 days ago • 10 min read
🍵 Sunday Sips
Hey Pretentious Engineer here... I know you didn't ask, but welcome to 🍵Sunday Sips where I carefully curate my latest "Big Brain" Insights worth "Sipping On"...
This Book Isn’t For You:
“Fear can save your life… or it can kill you…
Some men are at their best and enjoy themselves most when they are scared…
On the other hand, some men became paralyzed when faced with the simplest survival situation.
They are not listed among the survivors.
How you will react depends more upon yourself than upon the situation….
Your fear will greatly influence your behavior…
… and your behavior… -> Your chances of surviving.”
[Jocko Podcast Ep 424]
A Quick "Hey!"
If you would prefer to listen through the "Audio Book" of "Hitting Zero: The Art of Public Failure" 👇
Throughout the experience, the prevailing emotion I navigated was Fear.
Fear for the safety of my wife, who had multiple pre-existing health conditions such as gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia. Fear that something could be going wrong with the baby.
Fear of the unknown… that my wife’s healthcare needs could be lost in translation. Fear of interventions that deviated from our experiences in the US with our first three children. Fear of logistics on the home-front concerning who would care for our three kiddos as we navigated weeks of unexpected complexity.
Fear that spiraled between me, my wife, the clinical care team and our support team at home.
Note: In Japan, they kick husbands out of the hospital during the evenings… So as I would drive home under the Tokyo skyline each night… I reflected… and haphazardly stumbled upon Episode 424 of Jocko Willink’s Podcast. Jocko is a retired Navy Seal, Author, TEDx Speaker and one of the prevailing culture shapers of the “Fuck your feelings and Do” movement.
Sorry not sorry… this book is will often set our mental health on a shelf for a moment, as I’ve found business results are often indifferent to your emotional state.
During Episode 424, Jocko reads from the 1954 Air Force Manual called “Psychological Aspects of Survival” which documents cases studies of where fear either led downed pilots to their survival or an early grave. The common thread was this concept that, “How you will react depends more upon yourself than upon the situation.”
Folks who you would have expected to be the “Hero Type” became victims of paralysis [inaction] and perished… while others who should have died were suddenly awakened by fear and led their teams to unexpected survival.
Such a timely, cathartic and applicable message as I was in a position of choosing where I would let fear lead me.
I chose action.
I chose survival.
I chose protection for my family.
In that hospital, I kept myself busy working the situation within the bounds of my control.
I acted as a buffer between my wife and the Japanese care team. I lived on Google Translate. There were times when we flowed with what clinicians wanted to try next… and moments where I stood in the gap and advocated why we needed a different path [which was incredibly countercultural in Japan].
I even escalated conversations to the head OBYGYN as we realized my wife’s dosing for this induction was much lower that what was common in the US due to different control limits in Japan from a BMI perspective. When the clinical team attempted to break my wife’s water percutaneously [a needle through her stomach and uterus]… I stopped the procedure as she didn’t consent to that escalation.
Hours later, under ultrasound guidance, a senior nurse was able to break her water despite limited dilation… I could see the strain and commitment from this clinician, who exhaled a sigh of relief when she was successful.
High Risk… High Reward.
Turns out my wife had an excessive amount of amniotic fluid so every day that she was navigating contractions… the pressure was only on the fluid and not the baby so dilation never progressed.
As soon as the fluid cleared, labor moved quickly and within a few hours we held our newborn son…. Relief… Joy… Survival.
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Over the last two years of all-in entrepreneurship, FEAR is the most dominant emotion I have experienced.
Heck, I’m afraid right now.
I had a $6,000/month stealth client “pause” their retainer with no notice and I honestly don’t know how I’m going to cut rent…
This is our 12th month living in our own place and I don’t want to displace my kids a 17th time if our landlord doesn't renew our lease.
FEAR…
But I’ve trained an emotional override to ‘Do the Doing’ regardless of the feeling… to triage the situation.
Within 3 weeks of the lost client, I had my wife trained up as an Executive Admin and she’s been booking me solid with VPs and CEO’s of stealth mode medTech startups and large strategics [like Olympus Corporation, Intuitive, Johnson & Johnson MedTech, Medicaroid etc.].
So on top of waking up at 12:15am and working third shift at Amazon until 1pm… I stack sales calls from 1pm-6pm… cook dinner for the kiddos… put them to bed… normally have a heart to heart chat with my eldest son until 8:45pm… wake up at midnight and do it all again.
My current situation calls for me to be in savage mode… borderline violent action to challenge external circumstance… and it still may not be enough.
Rent is $2,500…
I’ve pulled what we have left out of our personal banking so a student loan doesn’t eat it… [money, literally on ice in my freezer] and moved the last of my business banking over too. But we are still coming up short. We still need to close the gap and then rebuild momentum from there.
Internally, situations like this compel me to freeze like a deer in headlights… only to get run over by circumstances.
I’ve failed enough times over the last two years to realize no-one is coming to save me. Indulge the temptation of fear driven paralysis and you lose precious time to pivot and work circumstances in a new direction.
Comparison is the thief of joy… but it can also be the fuel to get your ass out of bed and try to get better.
So here’s all the shit I’ve been afraid of over the past two years:
Exiting a Decade long career at Johnson & Johnson in Japan with no alternative job/revenue secured
Pulling a $75,000 personal loan during said exit with uncertainty of how long I could clear the minimum payments [$2100/month] leveraging the principal balance of the loan
I didn’t know how to secure health insurance in Japan… and turns out that because my salary was inflated by JNJ to offset subsidized housing, substantial back taxes were owed to get on Japan’s national health insurance [~$60k+]… so we lived without medical insurance in Japan and the US for over a year including multiple ER visits and a broken toe.
7 months into all-in entrepreneurship I discovered I legally couldn’t self sponsor a Business Manager Visa to build a consulting business in Japan without substantial Capital [which I obviously didn’t have]… this was the “dead in the water” moment for me and my first business.
I saw money in both US and Japanese banking running to zero [and credit cards accounts kept freezing]. I didn’t know how I could buy groceries… let alone ship my whole family and our stuff back to the US.
I was afraid that I would have to send my family to the States while I was stuck in Japan because of sea shipment container logistics… and I was unsure how many months we would be separated.
I was afraid of losing my marriage as my belief that I could make life work in Japan work via entrepreneurship blinded me from seeing the reality of our failures that had become obvious to my wife…. the strain we experienced in those moments was unbearable for us both.
I was afraid of how my children would respond to being pulled out of their international schools midterm and navigating a scorched earth transition back to Chicago… a city they didn’t know and a 14th relocation.
I had to pull my 401k [life savings] to re-establish us in the US. This included purchasing a Honda Odyssey [depreciating asset] with what would have been a compounding asset. This was a massive ego check for me to truly face my failure financially.
I was afraid to answer calls from unknown collections numbers throughout the day as multiple credit card and personal loans defaulted.
I navigated litigation with JNJ for Tuition reimbursement claims while in parallel leveraging WIC [government subsidized food for our kids] and food pantries to feed my family.
I was afraid to share on LinkedIn that I had “fallen” from a Director of Front End Innovation Japan at JNJ… to a 3rd Shift Warehouse Associate at Amazon… succumbing to the lies of LinkedIn Corporate Polished
I was afraid to keep doubling and tripling down on my business instead of putting full focus into applying to Medtech jobs in Chicago
This list could go on and on, my friend…
In sharing all my fears I hope they will get you moving and make you a tad less afraid to:
Quit that job that longer serves you
Post your first piece of content
Start a business without perfect starting conditions
Move to a new country
Propose to the Love of your Life
Have more kids than you can afford
Because you couldn't possibly fuck it up more than I did.
And if I could leave you with one encouragement to carry with you on your own entrepreneurial journey…
It would be to train the emotional override muscle.
This is not a trait that some folks ‘do or do not have’… it is a learnable skill… a honed response to fear that can lead to immediate and focused action.
The inconvenient… and honestly painful truth… is that you can only glean this skill through looping through exposure to fear, failing publicly, realizing you didn’t Die, finding a path forward, getting better and then facing a greater fear.
It’s a hard earned skill… that’s why so few can embody it… and despite all the pain we’ve navigated as a family, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
We’re radically different people because of the fears we’ve faced, the resiliency/grit that we’ve embodied, and the new paths we’re carving together…
I’m so proud of all my tiny humans and who they’re becoming… They’ll take the world by storm and face fear head on.
“Fear can save your life… or it can kill you…
Your fear will greatly influence your behavior…
… and your behavior…
… -> Your chances of surviving.” [Jocko Podcast Ep 424]
🍵 Sunday Sips is Caffeinated By:
Moonlight Medical, Kinetic Vision, Nerdian Inc., Skool MedTech & The Big Brain Club
Learn more about what the team and I are building towards at Moonlight Medical -> HERE
Learn more about Kinetic Vision’s capabilities and my personal experiences partnering with them -> HERE
Learn more about Nerdian Inc.’s Founder Ian McEachern -> HERE
These writings come from the heart, my experience and are my own words.
I don’t use ChatGPT or any SEO optimization in 🍵 Sunday Sips, because I think capturing my authentic voice is more meaningful than catering to LinkedIn's almighty algorithm.
That said, if you find my writing helpful, please repost and forward this along to a friend with some context... its always more meaningful to get a message from a friend then from an indifferent algorithm.
I Help Engineers, Global Leaders and Entrepreneurs find their Way...
🫀MedTech Innovation 🧙♂️Master Storyteller 🪡Network Weaver 💡Strategic Vision ⛩️Japan Market Access 🤖Robotic Surgery 🔮AR/VR 🏋️♂️Stay@Home Dad of 4
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