journal features

stories of career set-backs

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2013.01.19

At the conference today the keynote speaker was making a point about learning from failure. He asked if anyone in the room (of three hundred people, all of whom were project managers and half of whom had indicated they had advanced University degrees) would recount a tale of a career set-back. Ten long seconds passed, then fifteen, and then twenty.

I put up my hand. Choosing a card from my deck of setback stories, I recounted the failed business launch in Japan, concentrating on the diamond jewelry business rather than the go-nowhere consulting side of things. "It's a billion dollar business in North America," I told them, "And despite their being 750,000 marriages a year in Japan, there's no one selling engagement rings online on the Internet. Now I know why!"

I related that back to the small venture I'm now working with, and explained that I'll put everything I've learned (and am learning) toward another venture of my own some day. Several people later congratulated me on the job of explaining the situation, and I had a few questions about the current venture as well. Which is good, because having demo'd the product several times I can roll that stuff off no problem.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)