Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Failing My Way to Success: Life Lessons of an Entrepreneur
    Failing My Way to Success: Life Lessons of an Entrepreneur
    Failing My Way to Success: Life Lessons of an Entrepreneur
    Ebook119 pages1 hour

    Failing My Way to Success: Life Lessons of an Entrepreneur

    By Steve Lobel

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Failing My Way to Success: Life Lessons of an Entrepreneur tells the story of Author Steve Lobel , sharing how he turned defeat to his advantage and ultimate triumph. Over the course of dashed dreams, faulty judgement and headstrong pride, failure becomes Lobel’s most effective teacher. Equal parts memoir and guidebook, Failing My Way to Success is full of practical lessons and inspirational advice for the business student, young entrepreneur, mid-career seeker, and anyone confronting defeat on the way to prosperity, stability, and peace of mind.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateApr 1, 2016
    ISBN9781483565668
    Failing My Way to Success: Life Lessons of an Entrepreneur

    Related to Failing My Way to Success

    Related ebooks

    Personal Growth For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A ‘Numbers’ Girl

      Dec 17, 2019

      A ‘Numbers’ Girl
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Making Of A Man

      Jun 5, 2022

      The Making Of A Man
      16 min read

    • Article

      Steven Pinker

      Oct 24, 2022

      Steven Pinker
      5 min read

    • Article

      Tim Campbell

      Jan 16, 2023

      Tim Campbell
      5 min read

    • Article

      Crying Shame

      Oct 2, 2022

      Crying Shame
      3 min read

    • Article

      Shanda

      Mar 1, 2024

      Shanda
      2 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Apr 12, 2024

      As is often with our aged hobby, a telephone call informed me that Edwin T. Hoffmark, Jr., (1935-2024) had passed away. His son called me saying that his father died peacefully while sleeping. Numismatic News readers would not know who “Ed,” or “The

      4 min read

    • Article

      To Cause a Deep Stirring: The Millions Interviews Debra Jo Immergut

      Jun 14, 2018

      Like most writers who meet young, Debra Jo Immergut and I have been talking about writing our whole lives. From Iowa City’s workshops and bars to NYC, where we struggled to raise kids and pay rent, to opposite sides of Massachusetts, where we live no

      9 min read

    • Article

      Sir Kenneth Branagh

      Jan 17, 2022

      Sir Kenneth Branagh
      5 min read

    • Article

      LONGEVITY club BOOK

      Nov 24, 2017

      Have you ever spent your salary in a couple of weeks and had nothing to show for it? While some women seem to know how to stretch every cent they earn, others seem to be forever drowning in debt. The difference between the two is a simple: one is a “

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Woman’s Work

      Apr 29, 2022

      A Woman’s Work
      9 min read

    • Article

      Dirty Thirty

      May 3, 2022

      Dirty Thirty
      4 min read

    • Article

      Love. Loss. Weakness. Shame.

      Feb 9, 2023

      Love. Loss. Weakness. Shame.
      7 min read

    • Article

      Penny Pritzker

      Sep 14, 2019

      Penny Pritzker
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Friend Connection

      Sep 11, 2021

      The Friend Connection
      9 min read

    • Article

      Crisis Climate

      Dec 15, 2019

      Crisis Climate
      7 min read

    • Article

      Words to Live By

      Jun 25, 2018

      Words to Live By
      6 min read

    • Article

      The friend connection

      May 10, 2022

      The friend connection
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Friend connection

      Jan 10, 2023

      The Friend connection
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Friend Connection

      Nov 1, 2019

      The Friend Connection
      8 min read

    • Article

      Jazzie B

      Oct 16, 2023

      Jazzie B
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Failing My Way to Success

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Failing My Way to Success - Steve Lobel

      Acknowledgements

      INTRODUCTION

      When I was in my mid-forties, at a time when peers were hitting their mid-career stride and building their fortunes, I was the stereotype of a failure. I had no income, no job, no career — and, it seemed at that moment, no future. The worst of it was, I had brought all this misfortune on myself. Against the advice of my accountant and others, I’d bought a business I knew nothing about, and watched it dramatically and miserably fail in a mere twenty months. In that time, I borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars from relatives, friends, banks, and credit cards, and sank so deeply into debt I had to look up to see the ruins. My folly forced my wife and me to declare personal bankruptcy, endangering the family’s stability, destroying our security, threatening our home, and jeopardizing our children’s education.

      All of this came in the aftermath of my having built a gourmet food market literally from nothing into a regional phenomenon with $3.5 million in sales — only to lose all share and control of the business that bore my name, along with a six-figure income and my public identity. This collapse had also occurred, at least in part, through my own hubris and miscalculations. These two business defeats laid me low professionally, financially, and emotionally, and the damage took more than a decade to reverse.

      As I write now, life is good. At the age of sixty-seven, I am blessed with good health, a thriving family, and loyal friends. My business prospers and affords me the time and resources to contribute to philanthropic causes. I have the good fortune to live in a country and society of stability, peace, and abundance. I have everything to be thankful for, and that gratitude underlies the lessons of this book.

      A Zen saying tells us, Fall down seven times, get up eight. Over the course of my life, I have had a number of significant failures, or hardships that felt like failures at the time. As I have looked back at them in the course of telling my story, I have come to see how these dark days sowed the seeds of my eventual well-being. At crucial times of my life, failure has been my toughest coach and best teacher. It taught me not only what I needed to know about being a successful entrepreneur, but also important lessons on how to lead a better life as a husband, father, friend, and neighbor.

      It is no exaggeration to say I failed my way to success.

      Life is a process of overcoming setbacks by transforming them into lessons. Like everyone, I have the battle scars of bad breaks, missed opportunities, and soured deals. But what I have found most helpful to myself and others is not to dwell on external circumstances, but to look at myself — why I acted as I did, whom I was trying to please, where I thought I was headed. Deeply buried motives are often the strongest barriers to success, until we are able to unearth and understand them.

      Hardship is common to us all. As human beings, we are susceptible to bad judgments, errors, blunders, oversights, recklessness, impetuosity, and vanity. But we can also call on our innate capacities for courage, good humor, intelligence, love, and continual growth. What matters is not how many times we fall, but how many times we get back up.

      This book has been a labor of love, a cathartic act, and a learning process. The origin of the telling of my story dates back to 1983, when Tom Dandridge invited me to speak to his undergraduate class in entrepreneurship. Though still in my mid-thirties, I had already opened two retail stores, closed one, and experienced significant ups and downs in the process. The response from Tom and his students was enthusiastic and convinced me I had something worthwhile to share. Little did I know then how many more mishaps I would add to the tale! The presentation was subsequently refined over years in Bob Schwartz and Fred Buse’s MBA class on entrepreneurship. I have since taught marketing and entrepreneurship myself, and spoken in seminars, lecture halls, theaters, and on radio and television. In every instance, others have approached me afterward to share stories of their own hardships and compare notes on how to overcome adversity.

      I write for the young entrepreneur just getting started, for the mid-career worker seeking to improve his or her future, and for anyone struggling against the uncertainties of life. The book is called Failing My Way to Success, but the spirit that permeates every page is one not of defeat but resilience. In the words of motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, Failure is an event, not a person. We may fail, but no one who learns from life’s mistakes can be considered a failure. I believe the lessons of failure have made me kinder, wiser, more generous, more empathetic. This too is a definition of success. Maybe the best one.

      — Steve Lobel

      September 2015

      1

      PHOTOGRAPHS AND MEMORIES

      One of my favorite photographs of my father shows him as a young man with a group of Merchant Marines in a club called Sloppy Joe’s in Havana, Cuba. He’s sitting at the bar in a white suit, white shoes, and wide-brimmed Panama hat, looking like a million bucks and feeling it too, judging by the satisfied look on his face. The date is sometime in the late 1930s, before the beginning of World War II, which my father spent as a tail gunner in Navy fighter bombers. I grew up eavesdropping on the tales he’d recount whenever he got together with other veterans. Those war stories and that Cuban snapshot combined in my boyhood brain to form a single, heroic image of my dad. Years later, when my view of him grew considerably darker, that picture served to remind me of the man he had been, and of how, inevitably, life has a way of changing us all.

      The story of my many failures and eventual success begins as a story of life with my father. This is not to discount the influence of my mother, who played a profound role in my life. I owe much of who I am today to four amazing Jewish women (my grandmother, my mother, my mother-in-law, and my wife), but I didn’t appreciate the influence they had until later in my life. At the beginning was my father, Marty Lobel. The happy-go-lucky adventurer luxuriating in the tropics was a world away from the father I grew up with, just as far from me as he was from his own boyhood growing up poor in Brooklyn, New York, in the shadow of his own father. My vague childhood impressions of the man I called Pop are of an aloof figure, an immigrant from Romania who worked long hours repairing toys, fixing dolls, and metalsmithing to feed six children. My grandfather never developed an intimate relationship with any of his children, certainly not my father, who referred to him only as the old man, without a hint of affection. In 1929, at age seventeen, my father left home and never looked back. After a stint in a San Francisco hardware store and then on a ranch, he signed on with the Merchant Marine, sailing to ports around the world. He joined the US Navy after Pearl Harbor and was placed in the ball turret of a bomber, returning fire from enemy attacks. After the war, like so many ex-servicemen, my father wanted to settle down. In 1946 he married my mother, and sixteen months later, I came along.

      I was born on January 2, 1948, in the midst of a blizzard that brought New York City to a standstill. After all his years at sea, a little thing like impassable streets wasn’t about to stop my father from getting his beloved Louise, my mother, to Lenox Hill Hospital. In the early hours of the morning, he led her through the snow drifts to Fort Washington Avenue and hailed a cab. She was already in labor, but the story ends without much more drama. They arrived safely at the maternity ward, and some hours later my father became a family man.

      Military veterans returning from Europe and Japan were streaming into New York City, creating a housing shortage and driving up rents. My father and mother lived with my mother’s parents, the Sauls, in Washington Heights, in sight of the George Washington Bridge. Doubling up allowed my parents to save enough for a down payment on a house outside the city, in the Long Island village of Franklin Square, a subdivision built after the war on a one-time potato field. Franklin Square is part of the megatown of Hempstead, a Nassau County amalgamation of villages that more or less defines the stereotype of suburban life on the Island. If Hempstead were incorporated as a city today, it would be the second largest in New York State, behind New York but way ahead of Buffalo. We moved there when all that sprawl was just beginning, as Long Island became the bedroom community of Manhattan doctors, lawyers, and business executives — men with big incomes and growing families. It was an ideal place for my father to establish himself as a portrait and wedding photographer.

      I learned early in life that whatever a man’s calling might be, his job is to support his family. My sister Nancy was born two-and-a-half years

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1