Your biggest failure

PDLProfit

PDLProfit

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Share your biggest failures in your work, digital marketing. Any failure that can be useful to someone is welcome
 
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bvwaalderij said:
Hmm over the years i have failed many times but i was also successful many times. Failing is just part of the process,
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This statement cannot be over-emphasized.

When I was very young I studied history a lot and that was one of the first thing(s) I realized about successful historical figures. They planned to lose. Every time -- All the time. They made plans for winning and they made plans for losing. The crazy thing was that when they found themselves in competition with others, they would succeed even if they failed.

Julius Caesar fought in hundreds of battles all across Europe. When he lost a battle, he would pull his troops back and rethink his strategy. But when his enemies lost a battle... they would lose their minds, blame each other, throw a tantrum, give up the war, flee the country. They didn't plan to lose and didn't know what to do. They could defeat Caeser dozens of times and he would keep coming back, but all he had to do was defeat them once and it was over.

That is the secret.
 
Investing time and money in traditional education.
 
I posted about my biggest business failure in my 10 year BHW anniversary thread.
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/zwielichts-10-thousand-years-on-bhw-thread.1525786/
Zwielicht said:
#5: 2017 - Failure
At this point in time, things were going well, that is until they weren't. 2017 was a very bad year for me.

I've mentioned a couple of times in the past on this forum that I have PTSD. I was diagnosed with it when I was around 13 years old. I used to not talk about it or tell anyone as I was ashamed of the diagnosis.

However, not getting help sooner was a massive mistake on my part, because I didn't want to consider that the symptoms might get in the way of my business or my life.

You see, in 2017, I suddenly found myself in a position where I was financially caring for others. I had to spend more money to keep things afloat and take on more work as a result. I was only sleeping a few hours a night because of how much I was working.

The burden became too much for me, and the stress caused my symptoms to become significantly worse (I mean, it's called post-traumatic stress disorder).

I felt myself become useless. I was unable to think straight, and I could no longer serve some of my clients. Because I couldn't serve them, I had to let them go.

Unfortunately, I saw an ugly side of business that year when one of my clients actually tried taking advantage of my condition. He used the opportunity to low-ball me by making me accept a deal where he paid me $50/month for SEO. You read that right. A pittance, but he thought I would be desperate enough to accept this. I declined the offer, but it was difficult seeing someone I had worked with for a while do that to me.
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Needless to say, I don't take clients like the ones I had back then on these days.
 
Sure this is a little personal but my biggest one has to do with some chick, I fell in love and ended up proposing. Things were going well until I guess reality started to sink in maybe I got scared whatever it was. I ended up going out more with my friends, drink, party hard, hooking up with other people. So eventually all I did just created a rift between me and this person, I stopped caring about all those years and I focused on anything else maybe it was just to escape the fact of marriage. Anyways nothing ever really came out, It wasn't like that, just the rift I created was too strong and I ended up realizing after everything was over what I had lost. She just got married a couple weeks ago and now I wont ever have the chance to make things up, for some reason all the years later I still regret not growing up and putting someone else's feeling first for a change. Maybe it doesn't do good to dwell on the past but we can all learn from it.
 
bvwaalderij said:
Hmm over the years i have failed many times but i was also successful many times. Failing is just part of the process.
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Well said! It's like Yin and Yang, you could also say in the style of the movies, whoever doesn't fall down never gets up.
VisualA said:
This statement cannot be over-emphasized.

When I was very young I studied history a lot and that was one of the first thing(s) I realized about successful historical figures. They planned to lose. Every time -- All the time. They made plans for winning and they made plans for losing. The crazy thing was that when they found themselves in competition with others, they would succeed even if they failed.

Julius Caesar fought in hundreds of battles all across Europe. When he lost a battle, he would pull his troops back and rethink his strategy. But when his enemies lost a battle... they would lose their minds, blame each other, throw a tantrum, give up the war, flee the country. They didn't plan to lose and didn't know what to do. They could defeat Caeser dozens of times and he would keep coming back, but all he had to do was defeat them once and it was over.

That is the secret.
Click to expand...
From every defeat you can either learn from it, or regret and despair. And it is up to you whether you will become stronger after a defeat, obviously realizing the mistakes and eliminating them, or whether you will give up and it will “kill” you

1SEOWarrior said:
Investing time and money in traditional education.
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You mean university? I can say that traditional education did not give me applied knowledge, but it gave me invaluable life experience that helps me a lot now. I was sent to study in another country when I was 17 years old and I can say that from that age I started to take care of myself, an incredible experience that I advise every man to go through.

Zwielicht said:
I posted about my biggest business failure in my 10 year BHW anniversary thread.
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/zwielichts-10-thousand-years-on-bhw-thread.1525786/

Needless to say, I don't take clients like the ones I had back then on these days.
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I read your entire thread, you have a great path! I understand you, I too have sometimes had to do things for money that I didn't want to do, but because of the desperation and inability to take money from another source I had to forget about pride.

Junkie Panda said:
Sure this is a little personal but my biggest one has to do with some chick, I fell in love and ended up proposing. Things were going well until I guess reality started to sink in maybe I got scared whatever it was. I ended up going out more with my friends, drink, party hard, hooking up with other people. So eventually all I did just created a rift between me and this person, I stopped caring about all those years and I focused on anything else maybe it was just to escape the fact of marriage. Anyways nothing ever really came out, It wasn't like that, just the rift I created was too strong and I ended up realizing after everything was over what I had lost. She just got married a couple weeks ago and now I wont ever have the chance to make things up, for some reason all the years later I still regret not growing up and putting someone else's feeling first for a change. Maybe it doesn't do good to dwell on the past but we can all learn from it.
Click to expand...
Junkie Panda said:
Sure this is a little personal but my biggest one has to do with some chick, I fell in love and ended up proposing. Things were going well until I guess reality started to sink in maybe I got scared whatever it was. I ended up going out more with my friends, drink, party hard, hooking up with other people. So eventually all I did just created a rift between me and this person, I stopped caring about all those years and I focused on anything else maybe it was just to escape the fact of marriage. Anyways nothing ever really came out, It wasn't like that, just the rift I created was too strong and I ended up realizing after everything was over what I had lost. She just got married a couple weeks ago and now I wont ever have the chance to make things up, for some reason all the years later I still regret not growing up and putting someone else's feeling first for a change. Maybe it doesn't do good to dwell on the past but we can all learn from it.
Click to expand...
Interesting reasoning, I'm in a similar situation right now..... I can't write about it here, but believe me, I understand. I will try not to destroy what I have now, so that I don't regret what I can't get back or fix later on
 
It's probably worth describing my biggest setback.

When I finished university and got my bachelor's degree I moved to another city and started studying for my master's. I had some amount of money that I had made the entire previous year working as a bartender so I could live for a while in the new city without a job.

I had no experience in anything but a bar and therefore no one would hire me, I was 19 years old, I didn't know what to study or how to study, so for a while I just sat in a room I rented and didn't go anywhere and didn't spend money on anything so I could live on my savings longer. After a while, when I realized that my money was running out, I realized that I couldn't resist anymore and I was forced to go work at a bar. (When I left the city where I got my bachelor's degree, I promised myself that I would never go to a bar)


I found a job as a bartender, worked there for 3 days and got fired because COVID started and all the bars were closed..... I found an online job and was forced to work nights, it was a bad job and I lost a year and a half of my life doing a terrible job for which I got little money and no experience that I could use in the future. I lost a year and a half of my life
 
PDLProfit said:
It's probably worth describing my biggest setback.
Click to expand...
The poor will get poorer and the rich will get richer.

An elder told me that the poor don't have the cost of trial and error, and that one failed business venture will cost them everything.

My father was pretty much the richest man in my town from 2000-2010. Simply because he hijacked a piece of land and developed the mineral resources.

This made him instantly rich, but after that he couldn't continue the mineral resources because of various policies, he tried the wedding photography business, restaurants, gyms, resorts, health care products, liquor industry, and kept trying to make money.

When I became an adult, I stayed on to work at the university and my father went to prison. I didn't have any money and only had a 1000 paycheck a month, but I learned from my father's entrepreneurial spirit and I opened my AI company and in less than 6 months the company folded and lost $10k, I even used 2 years to pay that back.

In 2021 I switched cities to work for $800 a month and learn new fields and industries, my kids are getting older and I have more expenses. I don't know where to go from here.

The 2023 Google threshold was very loose when I joined this game. Google has become strict, and when I threw my hat in the ring, Google thresholds were unimaginably strict.

A lot of times I complain about my bad luck, but thankfully I'm sometimes brave, I'm young, we're young, don't be afraid to make mistakes. As long as we don't die, we can still fuck the world over tomorrow.
 
ChrisHasADog said:
The poor will get poorer and the rich will get richer.

An elder told me that the poor don't have the cost of trial and error, and that one failed business venture will cost them everything.

My father was pretty much the richest man in my town from 2000-2010. Simply because he hijacked a piece of land and developed the mineral resources.

This made him instantly rich, but after that he couldn't continue the mineral resources because of various policies, he tried the wedding photography business, restaurants, gyms, resorts, health care products, liquor industry, and kept trying to make money.

When I became an adult, I stayed on to work at the university and my father went to prison. I didn't have any money and only had a 1000 paycheck a month, but I learned from my father's entrepreneurial spirit and I opened my AI company and in less than 6 months the company folded and lost $10k, I even used 2 years to pay that back.

In 2021 I switched cities to work for $800 a month and learn new fields and industries, my kids are getting older and I have more expenses. I don't know where to go from here.

The 2023 Google threshold was very loose when I joined this game. Google has become strict, and when I threw my hat in the ring, Google thresholds were unimaginably strict.

A lot of times I complain about my bad luck, but thankfully I'm sometimes brave, I'm young, we're young, don't be afraid to make mistakes. As long as we don't die, we can still fuck the world over tomorrow.
Click to expand...
Your father must have had capital to develop minerals. He wasn't mining with a pickaxe, was he?

The situation I described earlier was in the past, I made conclusions and now my financial situation is much better, but the experience I have learned, do not sit in one place, jump like a monkey from branch to branch, when you feel that your branch you no longer like. BUT, you must always hold on to at least one branch.
 
I do fail every day, every time I try something new.. To tell you guys, whats my biggest failure, I took a break a decade ago due to my intrusive thoughts, it made me feel like internet marketing is no longer a good money generating source. I shoudn't have left a gap, and I stopped learning new things for a few months then.

People who were selling services in 2012-2014 along with me are making millions per month now while I am still taking a whole year to achieve what they make in a month.

I know I am better than many of them, providing better services than many of them but still I am not as successful as them. But I will try all my best to achieve it in coming years!
 
seoways said:
I do fail every day, every time I try something new.. To tell you guys, whats my biggest failure, I took a break a decade ago due to my intrusive thoughts, it made me feel like internet marketing is no longer a good money generating source. I shoudn't have left a gap, and I stopped learning new things for a few months then.

People who were selling services in 2012-2014 along with me are making millions per month now while I am still taking a whole year to achieve what they make in a month.

I know I am better than many of them, providing better services than many of them but still I am not as successful as them. But I will try all my best to achieve it in coming years!
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Good or bad, in our world the correlation between experience and profit does not always work.

I have examples from my life when worthless specialists earned more than those who know a lot about their business.

Such is life, a lot is decided by luck and sales skill.

There was even a proverb, the problem with our world is that smart people doubt, and fools are firmly convinced.
 
Going to school and then deciding to try college is a big failure of my life. College was same bullshit as school and I wasted lacks of Indian rupees of my parents in failing college. they teach you nothing useful if after all they teach you anything...
Only good teacher in our school was biology teach as school wanted us to m**der robots in future like they hated computers of those times. we use to get hardly 1 computer lab in 1 month in school.
anyways PC without internet is a piece of bul*s**it
 
seoways said:
I do fail every day, every time I try something new.. To tell you guys, whats my biggest failure, I took a break a decade ago due to my intrusive thoughts, it made me feel like internet marketing is no longer a good money generating source. I shoudn't have left a gap, and I stopped learning new things for a few months then.

People who were selling services in 2012-2014 along with me are making millions per month now while I am still taking a whole year to achieve what they make in a month.

I know I am better than many of them, providing better services than many of them but still I am not as successful as them. But I will try all my best to achieve it in coming years!
Click to expand...

A friend of mine got into bitcoin back in 2010. He was one of those 'new age', 'technophile', 'starry-eyed' optimists who loved to rant about complex socio-economic issues. But, you know, it was obvious that he just loved to play with math and make more work for himself. He mined bitcoin and told me that I should get into it. I think I looked at it once or twice.

I told him that "No one buys anything with bitcoin. If the market does not assign it value then it is worthless" and I think I was right, from a certain point of view. But he kept going, got into other forms of crypto and not only built expensive mining rigs but also got involved renting "mining time" to other people. To me, I guess it looked like he was just trying to farm Reddit karma. Just stacking those fake internet points so he could brag to his other crypto friends.

When the price of crypto exploded, he got rich. Seriously rich. Seriously rich, very fast. Of course I realized my mistake at that point but really I couldn't blame myself too much. Who knew this was going to happen? Surely not me. And what could I do about it then? Nothing, the price had already shot up. It was over. To get in "Now" would have been foolish. I wasn't going to buy in at the peak of a price spike.

Two years later the price shot up again and I ended up saying the same thing all over again. And again. And again. Now the price of a bitcoin is $63,000 and it may continue to increase. My friend has long since retired to an island paradise. I won't say which one but I think you can guess. We keep in touch.

Was that a failure? Did I fail?

Yeah, I think I did. At the very least I think I can call it a failure of imagination. We could say I was too lazy to involve myself in the crypto scene back when it was starting up, but that probably wouldn't be accurate. I wasn't lazy at all. I was just 100% dedicated to things that turned out not to matter. Crazy how that works.
 
VisualA said:
A friend of mine got into bitcoin back in 2010. He was one of those 'new age', 'technophile', 'starry-eyed' optimists who loved to rant about complex socio-economic issues. But, you know, it was obvious that he just loved to play with math and make more work for himself. He mined bitcoin and told me that I should get into it. I think I looked at it once or twice.

I told him that "No one buys anything with bitcoin. If the market does not assign it value then it is worthless" and I think I was right, from a certain point of view. But he kept going, got into other forms of crypto and not only built expensive mining rigs but also got involved renting "mining time" to other people. To me, I guess it looked like he was just trying to farm Reddit karma. Just stacking those fake internet points so he could brag to his other crypto friends.

When the price of crypto exploded, he got rich. Seriously rich. Seriously rich, very fast. Of course I realized my mistake at that point but really I couldn't blame myself too much. Who knew this was going to happen? Surely not me. And what could I do about it then? Nothing, the price had already shot up. It was over. To get in "Now" would have been foolish. I wasn't going to buy in at the peak of a price spike.

Two years later the price shot up again and I ended up saying the same thing all over again. And again. And again. Now the price of a bitcoin is $63,000 and it may continue to increase. My friend has long since retired to an island paradise. I won't say which one but I think you can guess. We keep in touch.

Was that a failure? Did I fail?

Yeah, I think I did. At the very least I think I can call it a failure of imagination. We could say I was too lazy to involve myself in the crypto scene back when it was starting up, but that probably wouldn't be accurate. I wasn't lazy at all. I was just 100% dedicated to things that turned out not to matter. Crazy how that works.
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back in 2016 I thought of investing in bitcoin but feared hitler govt of India
 
I once tried to run ads on too many platforms (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn) at the same time with a limited budget. The result was that all channels performed poorly.
 
cut your losses when its time. Many people get stuck on a sinking ship because they put so much effort into this that it feels wrong to give up at such a late stage (sunken cost fallacy)
 
raz2606 said:
not to buy BTC in 2013
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This can only be a mistake if you knew about bitcoin in 2013 and had the opportunity to buy it. I mean, you knew how to do it, because in those days it was much more complicated than it is today
eric968 said:
Going to school and then deciding to try college is a big failure of my life. College was same bullshit as school and I wasted lacks of Indian rupees of my parents in failing college. they teach you nothing useful if after all they teach you anything...
Only good teacher in our school was biology teach as school wanted us to m**der robots in future like they hated computers of those times. we use to get hardly 1 computer lab in 1 month in school.
anyways PC without internet is a piece of bul*s**it
Click to expand...

LOL, I studied in Ukraine, we had no computers at all in some schools. But I dare say you are wrong. What would you have done instead of school or universtity, worked? Would you have earned a lot as a child? Very unlikely. School is where you learn to live in society and that skill will be with you all your life. So you can't say school is a bad thing. Plus, if you look deeper, the subjects you learn in school pump up your brain. Math teaches you logic, history teaches you data analysis and so on. Don't see school knowledge as something that can be applied, see it as something that pumps and develops your brain so that it can work better in the future.
VisualA said:
A friend of mine got into bitcoin back in 2010. He was one of those 'new age', 'technophile', 'starry-eyed' optimists who loved to rant about complex socio-economic issues. But, you know, it was obvious that he just loved to play with math and make more work for himself. He mined bitcoin and told me that I should get into it. I think I looked at it once or twice.

I told him that "No one buys anything with bitcoin. If the market does not assign it value then it is worthless" and I think I was right, from a certain point of view. But he kept going, got into other forms of crypto and not only built expensive mining rigs but also got involved renting "mining time" to other people. To me, I guess it looked like he was just trying to farm Reddit karma. Just stacking those fake internet points so he could brag to his other crypto friends.

When the price of crypto exploded, he got rich. Seriously rich. Seriously rich, very fast. Of course I realized my mistake at that point but really I couldn't blame myself too much. Who knew this was going to happen? Surely not me. And what could I do about it then? Nothing, the price had already shot up. It was over. To get in "Now" would have been foolish. I wasn't going to buy in at the peak of a price spike.

Two years later the price shot up again and I ended up saying the same thing all over again. And again. And again. Now the price of a bitcoin is $63,000 and it may continue to increase. My friend has long since retired to an island paradise. I won't say which one but I think you can guess. We keep in touch.

Was that a failure? Did I fail?

Yeah, I think I did. At the very least I think I can call it a failure of imagination. We could say I was too lazy to involve myself in the crypto scene back when it was starting up, but that probably wouldn't be accurate. I wasn't lazy at all. I was just 100% dedicated to things that turned out not to matter. Crazy how that works.
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everyone has their own path. Would you have been as rich/successful as your friend if you had gotten into bitcoin earlier? Not a fact, he succeeded because it was his way, whether you would have succeeded is a question. Not because you are worse, but because it's not your way
eric968 said:
back in 2016 I thought of investing in bitcoin but feared hitler govt of India
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Couldn't you buy bitcoin through an exchange?
Breana said:
I once tried to run ads on too many platforms (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn) at the same time with a limited budget. The result was that all channels performed poorly.
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One of the rules of marketing warfare is to hit on as narrow a front as possible. This also applies to what we do, focusing on one thing we can achieve success. more likely than dispersing the potential
someonegreat said:
cut your losses when its time. Many people get stuck on a sinking ship because they put so much effort into this that it feels wrong to give up at such a late stage (sunken cost fallacy)
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Yes, you're right. Walking away in time and admitting a mistake is just as important as starting, not many can walk away from a battlefield where they haven't accomplished anything, thinking they've already wasted a lot of time and now how to back out of it
 
I've failed too many times, almost always bad, but everything gets better
 
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