As an entrepreneur, you are constantly playing in uncharted territory, and sometimes things don't work out. That doesn't mean you failed; it just means you may be off course.
I've had many failures in terms of technological... business... and even research failures. I really believe that entrepreneurship is about being able to face failure, manage failure and succeed after failing.
Every entrepreneur knows how agonizingly difficult it is to make the decision to give it your all, knowing that failure is inevitable; the successful ones know that the only way to get back up is through learning from that failure.
When most people hit failure, they give up, but good entrepreneurs simply treat failure as a learning experience and use it to fuel and inform their next move.
When you're younger, everyone wants to be a point guard. Everyone wants to shoot fadeaway jump shots all day. Nobody wants to be a big man. Nobody wants to go stand on the block and just set picks.
You're not going to reinvent yourself in the middle of a playoff series.
Failure has never been a signal for me to quit; it's always been a sign for me to go down another path.
A successful entrepreneur can't be afraid of failures or setbacks. An initial setback can be a great opportunity to take a new and more promising approach to any problem, to come back stronger than ever.
The first rejection that 'Dexter' got, I was like, 'OK. This hasn't worked. Let's try something else. I'll go get a teaching job or something.'
In general though, if you look at the track record of pivots, they don't become big companies.
I'm like a decathlete who does all of the events he's used to, but is being forced by certain circumstances to focus on three events, and being forced to focus on events that he wasn't that interested in, and also weren't his strongest events.
That's the way it is with entrepreneurial people. You try one thing, it doesn't work, you try another.
One thing that I had to remember in my personal journey in the music industry and coming up in the music industry was how many times I was told no. I was signed, I was dropped, I was signed, and I was put on a shelf.
Whether you're winning or losing, you've constantly got to be changing.
I'm very, very used to hearing no - repeatedly! - and through my experience founding startups, I've learned to view those two little letters not as a final roadblock but as a problem to be solved.
The entrepreneurs that really make it are the ones that start with an idea but are ready to change it at a moment's notice.
In the NBA, there's always a guy who is only around because he can jump. He doesn't have a clue about the fundamentals. I learn more from the WNBA. They know how to dribble, how to pivot, how to use the shot fake.
You can widen the feet of a compass, but they are still attached at the top; you can spin them away from each other, but you always wind up where you started.
What's crucial is to never get stuck. Making hard decisions is such an important part of being a startup in order to keep moving forward.
For every athlete, the roar of the crowd goes away, and we have to learn how to turn the page.
Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone - investors, customers, friends, family, and employees, to name a few.
My acting career wasn't going where I wanted it to. I wasn't getting good parts. I got so bored with myself that I started writing.
Generally, our first idea of what our business is going to be is not the right one. It takes a few iterations; to get there, you have to be able to let go.
Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.
Being given a terrible piece of information shouldn't ruin the interactions you have with the people around you or mean that you can't become something, even if it's not the idea of what you thought you were going to be.
