I’ve written about why failure is so good for the soul, painful as it is when you live through it.  Here’s one piece about part of one of my own business failures:  Werner’s Failed Business #2.

I was reminded of all this when reading Eldon Sarte’s excellent article on Maybe You Just Haven’t Failed Enough.

You see, Eldon thinks a lot like I do on this subject.  Failure is actually good for you, but only if you’re able to pick yourself up and give things another go.  Unfortunately, for many of us, we sink all of our hopes and dreams into one plan and, when it fails, we feel so destroyed that we just can’t move forward again. Read more »

Popularity: 33% [?]

Dream Jobs and how to find them . . . if you remember from an earlier post, I mentioned that there are several steps to go through in finding your perfect job.

And, it all starts with a passion.  That’s Step 1 — Finding that passion.  (You can learn more about the Dream Job Process by clicking here.)

But what if you don’t know what that burning desire is? Or, as my teenage daughters tell me: Dad, I don’t have a clue.

Well, there are many ways to get a clue (and we all have them, even if they are buried deep inside), and I’ll talk about several of those techniques in upcoming posts.

One of the best ways, though, is to try different things until something clicks.

Even after I’d left graduate school and was working full-time in my Climb-The-Corporate-Ladder world,  I knew that I wanted to work for myself.  I had absolutely zero idea what that meant, or what field it would be in, but I did know that I needed to be in charge of my own destiny.

So, let me tell you about my Big Failure #1 and what I learned from it.

No one likes to fail, and I’m a very competitive person, so it’s unusually tough on me when I don’t succeed.

Let me take you back to the 1970s and the waning years of the hippy era.  Ever hear of Andino Imports?  Nope, didn’t think so.

Well, that was my first (ad)venture at self-employment.

Back then,  handmade clothing, and especially embroidered shirts, was the rage . . . they were muslin (soft cotton) material with bright colored designs on the chest or shoulders.  Cool shirts.  Everyone seemed to have a couple and wanted more.

At any rate, I’d been travelling a lot in South America and had many contacts in Ecuador where the best of these shirts were made. So, a college buddy of mine, Jerry Jones, and I figured we’d just corner the market in our little part of the world, Indiana, with imported/embroidered shirts.

Sounded good.  We’d buy up these things, which were selling at retail for about $20, for about $2 each, and sell them to the retailer for $10. Yup, so far so good.

And, it was good.  We even, smart guys that we just knew we were, went out to solicit some orders before we made our first buying trip to Ecuador. That even went better than we could have believed . . . not only did we get several boutiques to pre-order a few dozen shirts here and there, but we got the kahuna of kahunas (The Ayre Way chain of discount stores — sort of a forerunner to today’s Target) to take an order for 5,000 shirts.

I don’t recall our initial buying quantity, but I believe, including the Ayre Way order, it was around 6,500 shirts.

So, at $8 profit per shirt, we were looking at bringing in around $52,000, just from one trip . . . that was more than my pal and I would make in our day jobs for the next three years — combined.

We were pumped, practicing our Spanish, and ready to begin on the journey to the next great international fashion empire.

But, come back next time where I’ll tell you how and when this thing started to head south . . . literally.

Popularity: 17% [?]