Chelsea Francis:<\/strong>\u00a0I got really interested in the idea that you can be famous in a field\u2014that someone can be incredibly well-known to a small group of people while at the same time being completely unknown to another. My husband works in the Austin coffee community. There are people we know through his job\u2014some of the most well-known names in the Austin coffee business\u2014who make a huge impact on the industry, but you wouldn\u2019t know them if they walked into a coffee shop.<\/p>\n This notion broadened my idea of what success looks like. In a way, it made it more accessible to me. I started studying what it takes for people to get to the pinnacle of their career, where they\u2019re at their most successful, and the common thread is always failure. It\u2019s how you perceive your failures and how you move past them. When I tried to find a publication online about success and failure and how they sort of intermingle, I didn\u2019t find anything that wasn\u2019t like, \u201cSheryl Sandberg talks about one time when she didn\u2019t answer an email for two weeks.\u201d It was all micro-failures stacked against huge successes. I\u2019m sure Sheryl Sandberg failed at a ton of things before, but we don\u2019t talk about it. That\u2019s where I wanted to focus.<\/span><\/p>\n\t Chelsea Francis, editor of the website Pass\/Fall, is fully committed to the fact that your outlook can change everything.<\/p>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n\t\n DO:<\/strong> What do we miss when we don\u2019t talk about failure?<\/span><\/p>\n DO:<\/strong> What have you learned about mindset that drives you forward in your endeavors?<\/span><\/p>\n CF:<\/strong> A big lesson I\u2019ve learned in my work, in therapy, and with Pass\/Fail is that in friendships and in business relationships, people don\u2019t do things to hurt you. You have the power to interpret what people say and do to understand that it wasn\u2019t personal. Does that make sense?<\/span><\/p>\n DO:<\/strong> It does. It\u2019s about understanding intention?<\/span><\/p>\n CF:<\/strong> Understanding intention, but also understanding what that person might not even know about their intention. What I\u2019m trying to say is that your outlook can change everything. The lens through which you view things can vastly improve the experience of dealing with client work, launching an online publication about failure, handling friendships, or everyday life.<\/span><\/p>\n “Your outlook can change everything.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n DO:<\/strong> Do you think you\u2019d be able to do the work you do if you weren\u2019t as much of an optimist?<\/span><\/p>\n CF:<\/strong> I think it would look different. I don\u2019t think I\u2019d be able to write about failure and not internalize everybody\u2019s failure. Because I\u2019m also deeply empathetic, so when I read things about people going through hard things or when a friend tells me about something awful, I feel it as if it was happening to me. It physically hurts. I think life would be harder. I\u2019m very grateful for my optimism in that way.<\/span><\/p>\n DO:<\/strong> You\u2019ve only had Pass\/Fail since June, but it\u2019s growing very quickly. Did more people share their stories of failure in response to you posting stories of your own?<\/span><\/p>\n CF:<\/strong> Definitely. I started out with a bunch of letters. Like a letter to your younger self, or a letter to someone in your shoes, or what you\u2019d tell someone that has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or General Anxiety Disorder. Something really helpful for people to connect with. Now, we\u2019re having conversations about sharing your failure and how not having shame around it can put you on the path you want to be on. Now every piece has a \u2018This is what I\u2019ve learned!\u2019 component. It\u2019s much more optimistic.<\/span><\/p>\n DO:<\/strong> When I was looking you up, I noticed we have the same shirt. It\u2019s a Chipper Things shirt that says, \u2018Making it up as I go.\u2019 Why did you get the shirt? What does that mean to you?<\/span><\/p>\n Part of what I\u2019m doing with Pass\/Fail is demystifying this idea of success\u2014the idea that success is for someone who isn\u2019t me and that this person is some figure on a pedestal because they have succeeded, when in reality, they\u2019re a very normal person who wakes up the same way I do and makes decisions the best way they know how to help them get where they\u2019re going. And that\u2019s it. That\u2019s the only difference between us. There are so many other things in play, but once you get to adulthood and you\u2019re making a life for yourself, there\u2019s nothing that separates you from someone who\u2019s very successful besides working toward understanding the decisions you\u2019re making.<\/p>\n DO:<\/strong> That\u2019s why I gravitated toward the shirt myself, because as you become an adult you realize, \u2018Oh, all the adults I looked up to growing up didn\u2019t know what they were doing.\u2019 I wish they\u2019d been more up front about their failures and mistakes. I think it would have been a lot more helpful than to grow up with the idea that, \u2018Oh, you\u2019ll just know when you\u2019re 25,\u2019 because that\u2019s not how it is.<\/span><\/p>\n CF:<\/strong> Most people who are told that kind of assume it will happen at 25. It doesn\u2019t. There\u2019s nothing that automatically turns you into an adult, so there are a lot of 30-year-olds who act like they\u2019re 18. And there are a lot of people who have the emotional intelligence of an 18-year-old because they haven\u2019t worked on it, they haven\u2019t realized that they don\u2019t have it all figured out\u2014and that\u2019s okay\u2014as long as you\u2019re moving toward figuring it out for yourself. That\u2019s why I got the shirt, because I truly am making it up as I go.<\/span><\/p>\n DO:<\/strong> Yeah, same. Because we all are.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Doyin Oyeniyi and Chelsea Francis talk about optimism + outlook. Francis launched Pass\/Fail, a website that looks at failure as a critical part of success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":526,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conversations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paid.texasmonthly.com\/texas-optimism-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paid.texasmonthly.com\/texas-optimism-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paid.texasmonthly.com\/texas-optimism-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paid.texasmonthly.com\/texas-optimism-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paid.texasmonthly.com\/texas-optimism-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paid.texasmonthly.com\/texas-optimism-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paid.texasmonthly.com\/texas-optimism-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paid.texasmonthly.com\/texas-optimism-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paid.texasmonthly.com\/texas-optimism-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paid.texasmonthly.com\/texas-optimism-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/txmosponsored.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/TestConvoHero.gif\")
\r\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"http:\/\/paidpost.texasmonthly.com\/sponsor\/frost\/texas-optimism-project\/assets\/images\/success@2x.png\")
CF:<\/strong> You convince yourself you\u2019re the only person in the world who\u2019s ever failed quite the way you have, and that\u2019s not true at all. More than likely, someone, somewhere has failed exactly the way you have; someone has gotten fired from a job they really liked; or someone has knowingly screwed something up just because they got apathetic. Feeling like you\u2019re the only one who\u2019s ever gone through that makes you feel bad, which in turn makes you not learn from the process and sets you up to repeat it. What I\u2019m trying to do with Pass\/Fail is make a safe space for people to talk about failures in a way that doesn\u2019t just say, \u2018It\u2019s OK,\u2019 but instead says, \u2018This is part of the reason that I was able to succeed at this other thing.\u2019 A lot of times failing at something literally sets you up to succeed in different ways. It was really important to me to make Pass\/Fail a space to talk about failure in those terms.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/paidpost.texasmonthly.com\/sponsor\/frost\/texas-optimism-project\/assets\/images\/chelsea-outfit@2x.png\")
CF:<\/strong> Occasionally I get invited to speak on panels. I always make a point to say, \u2018No one knows what they\u2019re doing. Everyone is just as confused as you are. If they [aren\u2019t], they have been at some point. Everyone\u2019s faking it. No one knows what the hell is going on. Maybe they do, but they\u2019re leaps and bounds ahead of the game for the rest of us.\u2019 And I think that\u2019s fine.<\/p>\n