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3 Life Lessons We Can Learn From Our Mistakes

3 Life Lessons We Can Learn From Our Mistakes
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The early days of Life is Good, when the two brothers, Bert and John Jacobs, were selling t-shirts on the street.
The early days of Life is Good, when the two brothers, Bert and John Jacobs, were selling t-shirts on the street.
Jacobs Family Archive

The most valuable business lessons I’ve ever learned aren’t business lessons at all. They’re basic values learned from our customers after our own missteps led us astray. Whenever our company gets lost, our community seems to right the ship by reinforcing these values — like gratitude, simplicity and openness. Maybe some of our “best” mistakes and learnings can save you time or even help lead you to positive changes.

Make a gratitude adjustment

A customer named Regina once wrote a letter to my brother Bert and me that’s had a profound impact on us and our company. She shared how a friend of hers named Frank managed to flip every “have to” in life into a “get to.” “I get to go to work because I have a job”, he’d say. “I get to buy the groceries because I live in a land of abundance.”

We were astounded that one little syllable could shift anything from a burden or an obligation to a rock-solid foundation of gratitude. We realized that gratitude had been pushed to the way back. The weight of our “obligations” was crushing any ability we had to think about being grateful for how busy we were.

During our first decade in business, the day-to-day intensity of getting things off the ground would often have us sounding like martyrs on a mission. “We’ve gotta make this”. “We HAVE TO skip the party and work straight through again.” Those are standard exchanges in a startup phase, but we were failing to tap into gratitude’s power. When we shift our mindset to “get to” (wake up, breathe, walk, talk, work, play, etc.), it brings a more focused, positive energy to the moment. More carpe to the diem. Like a lot of our best learnings, this one came straight from a customer’s personal story.

Thanks to Regina, we all have an ultra-simple, no-nonsense tool to keep the ups and downs of life and business in clear perspective. Give it a try and see if “get to” can become your go-to as the ultimate Swiss Army knife of gratitude.

Simplify

In the early days of Life is Good, Bert and I came up with a long and somewhat chest-thumping company mission: “To have a greater positive impact on human culture than any brand in history.”

That mission fired us up, but it didn’t resonate with anybody else. It wasn’t memorable or welcoming, and therefore it wasn’t galvanizing to our little Life is Good team, or to our customers. This misstep in defining our company’s foundation taught us the power of simplicity. It spurred us to create a more succinct mission in 2004 that our customers could own and fulfill with us, and that’s been our North Star ever since: To spread the power of optimism.

How can simplicity be implemented in your life? What are you overcomplicating? Start by aggressively cutting down your media consumption, setting limits for yourself on digital communication, and minimizing meetings with people who light up a room when they leave it. In doing so, you’ll create more time for the people, projects and hobbies you love.

After simplifying our mission statement, we began to see how simplicity enhanced our design, writing, talks, planning, meetings and more. It can also lead us to a happier and more fulfilling life. Henry David Thoreau’s prescient 1800s warning to not become “the tools of our tools” powerfully resonates in today’s 24/7 access world.

It takes smart, intentional choices to avoid infomania while selectively enjoying the benefits of technology. Only when we say “no” to the extraneous clutter in our lives (excess stuff, calendar fillers, sensationalized news, etc.) can we say “yes” to the things that actually matter.

Stay open 24/7

Another life (and company) altering idea we’ve picked up along the road stems directly from the first two above. Once we realized it was a customer who helped us embrace and apply gratitude, and that a lukewarm response led us to the power of simplicity, it became clear that those two things only helped us because we were open to them.

What if we started embracing being open to other things as well?

About three years ago, we noticed certain T-shirt graphics going completely unnoticed by our online customers. How could this be? Art and message is what we do. We must have spent enough time debating the merits of each new design before it landed on a T-shirt, right? Well yeah, we had.

Our failure was in leaving the wisest voices out of the conversation. Who the heck would know in advance what’s going to resonate most with actual consumers? Hmmm. How ’bout actual customers?

Our entire design process for two decades had been based on gut decisions, but now the stakes were higher and the tools to evolve were at our fingertips. We needed to be open to listening to what our customers had to say. Some of it was hard to hear. Maybe a graphic we loved wasn’t something our customers wanted to buy. If we were going to ask their opinion, we had to be open to implementing what we learned from them.

We began utilizing some sophisticated survey tools and pretty soon we had real consumers inside and out of the Life is Good community weighing in on which new graphics they liked, disliked and which they’d be most likely to buy. Genius, right? We know: 101 for some industries, but for low-data entrepreneurs embracing more data, it felt like a breakthrough.

In our business evolution, we’ve seen openness lead to great ideas from friends, retail partners, and former total strangers like “Get to” Frank. It’s also led to an intense loyalty from our community and a two-way conversation that both fuels us with inspiring stories AND helps us course-correct whenever we go off track.

Twenty-five years in business has taught us this: If you’re good at making mistakes (we are), you’ll probably keep making them (we will). Just make friends too — and if you stay open to learning from them both, you will only grow stronger.

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