“Step outside your comfort zone.” - Simon Cocking

Over the past several months I have had the opportunity to interview several different people for this podcast. My mind has been pushed and educated by learning how people view failure and embrace it. I have been inspired to continually push myself and try new things. 

I enjoyed this episode with Simon.  He has had many different jobs and lived in several different countries. His diverse experiences in his career have been woven together to build an extremely unique story. He worked with TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), retrained as an engineer and now he is a writer at the Irish Tech News (just to name a few of his experiences). 

We discussed if failure is a boolean concept, meaning is it just  a 1 or a 0. Are there only two options in failure - either we fail or we don’t fail? He believes we need to adapt the mindset of failure from sports into business. Some of the best baseball players strike out more than they hit the ball, but they still have extremely successful careers. What if we adapt this to business? Many times the small failures along the way build a foundation for something to successfully form in the future. 

“Being a founder is one thing, but growing a company is another thing.” 

We need to not only learn to fail but we need to think about the people we want on our founding teams. People are extremely important for developing your business. Simon suggests finding a cofounder that compliments you and is on the same page. It’s much more difficult to go at it alone. Find someone who likes doing what you don’t. As you scale, outsource the tasks that you don’t enjoy so you can be freed up to do your best work. 

“Risk is often doing things you don’t feel completely comfortable about doing. But, you know that the potential returns are great enough that it’s worth stepping into an area that you’re not a master of.”

Moments of risk are uncomfortable. These moments look different for everyone. We don’t have the answers. But, we should continue to try new things. Try the things that make you uncomfortable. That’s when you will really learn. 

FAILSAFE PODCAST
Website: https://www.malindaallen.com/failsafepodcast
Twitter: @failsafepod
Instagram: @failsafepodcast

SIMON COCKING
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/simon-cocking-20540135
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimonCocking

IRISH TECH NEWS
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/irish-tech-news/
Website: https://irishtechnews.ie/

MALINDA ALLEN
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/malindaallen22/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MalindaAllen22
Website: www.malindaallen.com

Music:
Intro: "Wonton Soup" by Audiobinger is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License
Outro: "Out Cold" by Yung Kartz is l