My immediate defensive reaction [to the question] was to explain my 5 year plan, as I had rehearsed: “I’ll be [there] soon enough. I just have to sell this mobile shopping company for $200M and then I can actually pursue my dream of solving the world’s water problems.”

But my girlfriend challenged this: “How does selling a consumer app company help you disrupt the potable water market?” She was right, and I knew it.

McBride then decided to act brashly.

I knew that I was powerfully unhappy, that something was wrong, but I was powerless to do anything about it.

It took a piercing question from my girlfriend to wake me from that trance. I knew I was working on a startup where I had no empathy for my users and had no passion for the space or the problems we were solving, and I knew that was wrong. But what I had to realize was that I didn’t need to do that.

That revelation liberated me. The next day, I talked with my co-founders and transitioned out of the company over the next 4 weeks.

McBride says he’s currently researching for his next project: solving the world’s water problems.

After his Masters victory, Scott explained that his British Open experience didn’t shake his confidence. Rather, “it did give me more belief that I could win a major tournament. It proved to me, in fact, that I could.”

When we fail, there’s nothing we can do to erase the past. But we can manage our mindset and actions going forward. How we view the failure has everything to do with our ability to bounce back.

Scott’s mental approach to overcoming his British Open failure relied on reframing the experience. While critics wondered whether he’d ever again have the chance to compete in a major, Scott instead chose to view it as a stepping stone, a proof point that he was capable of winning a major. This reframing allowed him to tune out the critics and maintain, even strengthen, his confidence after the setback.

First, Scott convinced himself that the most important holes he had played at the British Open were the first 68 – the ones that allowed him to open up a four-stroke lead in a major championship – rather than the last four. Those first 68 holes demonstrated that he had the game to win a major.

Second, Scott appreciated that, once you are in contention, the things that separate winning from losing are often out of your own control. What other golfers do matters. So does the external environment. Sometimes, it’s just not your tournament to win, and that doesn’t have any bearing on your ability to win one the next time.

If you believe this kind of reframing is delusional, let me set down a few more examples for you. Michael Jordan’s teams lost to the Detroit Pistons in the playoffs three years in a row before winning the first of their six NBA championships. Lebron James lost in the finals twice before breaking through last year. John Elway lost three Super Bowls before winning two at the end of his career. Winning changes the past – the prior defeats are drained of meaning.

Adam Scott could have taken the critics to heart after his British Open failure. “What a chance I squandered. How my life would’ve changed if I could have just parred two of those holes! Perhaps I’m not cut out to win a major.”

But he didn’t ruminate. He didn’t view the failure as proof that he couldn’t win a major. He viewed it as proof that he could.  And he was right. He showed that to himself and everyone else.

It’s important to learn and improve from failures, and to do so requires assessing clearly and dispassionately what you need to do better going forward. But to triumph after a setback, it’s also important to put your own frame on the situation, a frame that describes the setback as part of a journey toward a future, even greater, success, instead of the end of the story.

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How about you?

How do you reflect on a failure and use it as fuel to move forward?

All photos by Dennis Kleiman.

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To see more work from Dennis and Stomping Ground, including their incredible school pictures for youngsters, visit www.stompinggroundphoto.com or www.denniskleiman.com.

Brault writes about diffusing the excuse mechanism by embracing ignorance. We often see notable creatives say their success happened because they had no idea what was and wasn’t possible. The next time you find yourself in over your head, don’t panic. Embrace the uncertainty as a chance to push your limits. As Brault writers:

You already are who you are and the very want for doing it is the only call you need to make it happen. You don’t need permission and you don’t need to “become” something first.

Biz Stone is best known as the founder of Twitter, but things weren’t always so rosy for him:

My first startup, an online reviews site called Xanga, was struggling, and, tired of being broke in New York, I quit. My wife and I headed back to my hometown of Wellesley, Massachusetts, with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt in tow. We moved into the basement of my mom’s house. I had no job. I tried to sell an old copy of Photoshop on eBay, but no one bought it.

Meanwhile Stone religiously kept a blog, and began to think of himself as an expert. On a whim he called Ev Williams who ran Blogger as part of Google and convinced him to bring him on. But even with Williams on his side, he had trouble getting the gig:

Larry and Sergey flat out said that he couldn’t hire me. Ev persisted. Finally, they begrudgingly agreed that Wayne Rosing—then Google’s senior VP of engineering—could talk to me on the phone. I waited nervously in my attic apartment. The phone rang, and as I reached for it something came over me. In that instant I decided to abandon all the failure I’d been carrying around. Instead, I would embody my alter ego.

…

It worked. Wayne told Larry and Sergey to hire me. Working at Google, my virtual and physical worlds collided: With the seemingly limitless resources, scientists, and secret projects, the place was practically Genius Labs.

Years later Williams and Stone would quit, leaving lots of pre-IPO money on the table to start their next project: Twitter.

Like so many other common sense maxims, the internet has challenged its validity. Today, before you meet a potential client or interview with a prospective employer, your whole digital life is being examined. You’re being searched on Google and being cyber-stalked on Facebook and LinkedIn. Your past employment, personal demeanor, and sometimes even your contacts are being rifled through and considered as a reflection on what it’d be like to hire you.

These days, you never get a first chance to make a first impression.

Fortunately, you can be in control of a lot of what people see when they search through your online presence. If you can invest a few hours working on your digital presence, you can build a platform that gives you control over your online persona that will quickly become the first thing everyone sees when they type your name into search engines. A few years ago, marketer Chris Brogan developed a simple presence framework that can help you take control of your online presence and make sure that your future prospects find exactly what you want them to find.

The key to mastering your online presence is to build a framework around two main elements: home bases and outposts.

Home Base

Your home base is the main place you want people to find when they search for you. In many cases, this is you or your company’s website. It should hold your biographical information, your portfolio and anything else you consider to be part of your professional brand. It can be a self-hosted site, or a professional-looking site with a personal domain that is hosted with a particular company. (Shameless plug: Behance’s ProSite makes a perfect home base for those who don’t want to host their own site.)

The purpose of a home base is to represent your brand in a place that you own and have full control over. Sites like Tumblr or Facebook may seem like enough, but in the end those sites get to decide how you appear and how people interact. You know your audience better than Tumblr, and only you can build a platform perfectly suited to interacting with them.

Outposts

Outposts are places where you have a presence that’s in line with your brand and that guides people to your home base. Outposts vary in how much information they hold, but are a place to share samples from your portfolio and to connect with others in your community, industries, and even potential clients. Outposts are where most social networks come into play.

From Facebook fan pages, to Twitter accounts and yes, Behance, everybody has a different preference for where and how they’d like to interact with people. You don’t need to be on every social network, but you should be on every network your target audience might look for you. You’ll need to analyze which networks you need to have a presence on. Outposts can also be the places where others are featuring your work or writing nice things about you. The purpose of all of these outposts should be to refer interested people back to your home base, where they can see the total picture of what you have to offer.

As you build up this two-tiered platform, and stay active on all your outposts, you’ll notice how your home base and these outposts move up in search engines rankings and social networks. Eventually they will become the default places where others seem to find you. In addition to finding new potential clients, or job opportunities, building an online presence using home bases and outposts will ensure that you’re displaying a consistent personal brand to the world and you’ll take back control of your first impression.

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How about you?

What works (or doesn’t work) for you when creating your online presence?

Far too often, I have seen peers cowed in the face of brilliance and, as such, failed to leave with any useful knowledge. Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure if sending checks to Americans during the recession was a good idea. But I bet that if I told Christina Romer that the economics taught in our ivory tower ignored fundamental tenets of human psychology, she’d have a profoundly interesting answer. [So I asked.] She laughed…then tore me to pieces.

Those 90 seconds taught me more about economics than two semesters of lecture, problem sets, and pretty graphs.

Read his entire essay here.

I have a couple of friends that I rely upon. They are very perceptive about the human heart. I’ll talk quite specifically about what isn’t working in a section of my book. I listen closely to what they think. I’ve done this many times. My wife Bonnie has helped me many times like this.

Here is the curious thing. Often her advice or the idea of a friend isn’t what I end up doing. But listening to the ideas engenders a new idea. The whole point is that you have to get moving. Movement begets movement. You need to get unstuck.

The principle is to do anything that builds momentum. For example, if it’s writer’s block, and you truly can’t write – then tape yourself talking/ranting/raving about a subject, then type it out in a word processor. Talk to a friend about your concept. Or, lay out the overall structure of the piece.

Defeat your analysis paralysis by moving. Just make a move.

Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins write about the issue for the Harvard Business Review, using a client named Jason as an example:

Jason often got mired in the details when communicating with higher level colleagues, and therefore missed opportunities to share his insights. To stop this from happening, he started to prepare two to three key messages before every meeting, and made sure to focus on how his group’s analytical work drove value for the organization. In essence, Jason conditioned himself for the expected, leaving his “thinking on his feet” energy for those situations that were least predictable.

Even if you’re the youngest person at the table, you’re at the table. Don’t be afraid to make your voice heard. Just make it count.

Manage Your Day-to-Day is not your typical “productivity” book. Based on our 5+ years of research here at 99U, we proceeded from a handful of counter-intuitive premises about what works—and doesn’t work—for creative professionals as we crafted this book:

Premise #1 – We aren’t just managers, we’re makers.

Most books about time management or productivity are targeted at managers, not makers. But everyone who has a creative career these days is both a manager and a maker. And playing both roles presents some unique challenges.

Those of us who make creative work on a daily basis need time and space to think deeply and for extended periods of time. These are the moments when we find flow and make real, productive progress on our creative endeavors.

The challenge of this type of work is that interruptions can be highly destructive. And we now work in an era where we can easily spend our entire day ricocheting from one interruption to the next: email, texts, tweets, client requests, etc, etc.

In Manage Your Day-to-Day, we address the specific challenges that this 21st-century influx of information presents for creative professionals, and offer solutions for how to build a daily routine, maintain focus amidst a constant stream of distractions, and keep your creative mind (and work) fresh.

Premise #2 – There is no silver bullet for productivity.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working with and interviewing creatives for over a decade, it’s that they hate rules. Interestingly, the majority of books that purport to help us work better/faster/smarter, typically offer one single, topdown system for improving your productivity. The so-called silver bullet.

But creatives are unpredictable: We all have our own idiosyncratic work habits, clients demands, and quirks, which means that a single top-down system rarely works for us. Not to mention that we naturally resist the rules such a system imposes.

Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, Manage Your Day-to-Day provides a playbook of tried-and-true best practices for producing great work. To accomplish this, we recruited 20 of the smartest creatives and researchers we knew—from Stefan Sagmeister to Seth Godin to Gretchen Rubin to Tony Schwartz to Dan Ariely—and asked them to share their road-tested insights on what helps them do great creative work. See the full contributor list here.

Premise #3 – Great design matters.

As with everything we produce at Behance and 99U, design was central to the creation of this book series. Manage Your Day-to-Day was meticulously planned—from an editorial and a design perspective—for a creative audience.

On the editorial side, the essays are concise, compulsively readable, and insightful. You can read the book cover to cover in just a few sittings, or dip into it by topic as the mood strikes you. In between each of the essays, we’ve included bite-size wisdom—in the form of beautifully typeset quotations—from creative greats ranging from Ray Bradbury to Man Ray to John Cage.

On the design side, every detail was considered by the Behance design team. Packaged in a neat 5″ x 7″ format, the book is sleek, sexy, and highly portable. From cover design to paper stock to fonts, we hand-crafted every component of the book to make it a beautiful reading experience for you.

Our hope is that Manage Your Day-to-Day will empower you to shift your mindset, recalibrate your workflow, and push more incredible ideas to completion. Here’s to doing more great creative work!

Get the book - www.amazon.com/99u

Get the book - www.amazon.com/99u