Do you write about your failures as part of your content marketing?
It might feel counterintuitive particularly when a lot of business communications are about success but it can really help you stand out from the crowd.
And here’s why.
Not everything goes to plan. Not every plan is successful.
For every success, there is a history of things not quite going to plan. I was listening to an interview with Jamie Oliver yesterday and he reckoned his failure rate was at around 40%.
What made it a really interesting listen is in how he talked about his failures – he talked about what he learned from them.
Learning from failures
No one gets everything right the first time – or the second. We learn from what doesn’t work.
We figure out why something wasn’t a success and we adjust our approach, our strategy, our thinking. And we try again.What we learn from when things to wrong is valuable knowledge and experience.
It’s useful insight and it’s something you can pass on.
But not only that, how you handle things that don’t go to plan is a great measure of who you are. It shows that you are adaptable and a problem solver.
Being human
And it shows that you are human, not a portrait of perfection.
And that is compelling.
It can make you more relatable and helps to invite engagement – ‘that happened to me too’, ‘I also struggled with that’.
Success only part of the story
Celebrating success is great, it can be inspiring but it’s only part of the story. It is only part of your story.
Writing about your failures and what you learned can make you stand out.
It certainly hasn’t held Jamie Oliver back.
How do you feel about writing about your failures?
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