Tito Beveridge Eight Lessons on How To Fail Better

Don’t get me wrong. I hate to fail. I always say that I am not very competitive, I just hate to lose. That about sums it up. So why am I writing this about failure? Because I believe that there is no other way to succeed. Honestly, I believe if you want to succeed you have to come up with a way to fail gracefully. Is that going to make it any less painful? Hell no. Failure hurts. But it may keep you from being a quitter, or blowing your brains out, or just giving up on this great opportunity called life with all its ups and downs. Hopefully by sharing with you what I have learned about failing and how I have dealt with it, you will have a better understanding of it and maybe even conquer your momentary fear and take a chance to do something great. Something that you love to do that you are good at, that gets you excited about being alive. Your passion. It is not for everyone. It is not easy. But I believe it is a great way to be aware of, interact with and experience life.

So let’s get started with my favorite quote. “Success is meeting each an every failure with equal enthusiasm.” Life is dirty. Entrepreneurship is like steer wrestling at a rodeo. Some people never enter. Some people never get off their horse onto the steer. Some people jump off their horse, grab the steer by the horns and it flips over on them a few times, some jump off their horse, grab the steer by the horns, plant their feet and wrestle it to the ground and win the prize money. Either way, once you leave your horse, you’re going to get dirty. You’re going to get up, look for your hat, be covered in dirt, slap your hat against your jeans, wave to the crowd and start looking for the gate all disoriented. That to me is entrepreneurship. Whether you win or lose you are going to get dirty, trampled, disoriented. It is a ride. An experience. A way of life. Any time you try to do something out of the ordinary, extraordinary, you are taking a chance and you will have failures. No doubt about it.

I know that these days a lot of kids are raised that everyone is a winner and everyone gets a trophy. Believe me, in business, and in life, that is not how it works. Most of the time your competition is trying to cut you off at the knees, if not the neck. It is dog eat dog. If you are scared someone is going to say something mean on social media, or lie about you in the marketplace, you better stay home and don’t bother getting out of bed. In the real world, if your competition isn’t talking shit about you, you are not even relevant. When you start taking a chunk out of their sales, you just wait. After a while it is just a way of life. Every knock is a boost. Every time you hear something ugly said about you, learn to smile, knowing it is only because you are succeeding. That is real life.

Let’s start with little failures. I was running heliportable dynamite seismic crews down in Venezuela and my country manager gave me this sage advice. Delegate everything you can so that you have time to deal with the extraordinary problems that come through the door. Don’t worry about making a wrong decision. Make the best decision that you can with the information that you have. But make a decision. Making no decision is a decision in itself, so make a decision. If you later on find out you made a bad decision once you have some more information. Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t dwell on it. Just make another decision with the new information. Keep moving. Just keep making decisions.

To me there are different types of failures, critical and noncritical. A critical failure is one in which you die or are permanently incapacitated. Say you torque your wing too much hang gliding or you forget to put your blasting caps in a metal box and drive under a high voltage line with a truck full of dynamite. Or you walk home drunk in a bad part of town and get stabbed. Or fall asleep on the highway and drive off a bridge. Or take Xanax and let someone shoot you full of heroin because you have no anxiety about it. Or eat LSD and jump off a balcony 10 stories up. Or you are doing a handstand at your fraternity Christmas formal on the second floor balcony railing and falling off. All of these are critical. All have happened in real life. These types of failures, since we live in a physical world, must be avoided at all cost. The failures I am talking about are non critical. They might feel critical when you are experiencing them, but you won’t die and you will recover. They only feel like you are dying. But you’re not.

Things like being fired, not getting in the school of your choice or the job that you want. Having a failed business (or a few of them in my case). Having failed relationships or marriages or careers. Getting in trouble with the powers that be. Dealing with the death of loved ones. Being publicly ridiculed. These are the things I am talking about. General all around, where the rubber hits the road, life’s hard knocks.

First of all, besides having a child, there is no other time when you feel so much energy as when you experience failure. You get a lot more energy from failure than success. I have experiences a great deal of both. It must be some preservation technique to keep us alive. I have had so much energy going through me at times, albeit all negative, that I couldn’t sleep for days. I never felt so successful that I couldn’t sleep for days. I think that is why people are so scared of failure and why failure is such a great doorman to the success party. Just for some street cred, let me go through a few of my personal best (or worst) failures.

 When I was 4 years old I went to kindergarten and did not know that my name was Bert. Everyone had always called me Tito so I had no idea that Tito wasn’t my name. I spent the whole day in the office and ultimately when my Mom picked me up from school, I broke down and said “couldn’t you have at least told me what my name was?” She responded by saying “wipe those tears off your face or I will give you something to cry about. I just did you the biggest favor, from now on everything you do in that class will be an improvement.” No big deal you say? I’m still talking about it 50 years later.

LESSON ONE: THERE IS NOTHING LIKE PERSPECTIVE. REMEMBER, YOU ARE STILL ALIVE AND THAT IN ITSELF IS A GREAT OPPORTUNITY. ALSO, LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER. SHE MIGHT GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT IF YOU DON’T.

I moved on to being an entrepreneur in high school. I had a landscaping company with a buddy. He had his driver’s license and we scalded yards with my grandfather’s lawn mower, planted plants that subsequently died. Over fertilized grass and burnt it up. But I learned from my mistakes and learned how to do things right. Call it old fashioned trial and error. Eventually I got my own driver’s license and ended up with 77 yards and 12 apartment complexes. I was a cash printing teenager and got to go to all sorts of great concerts and live the good life. All because I didn’t quit even when I got fired from ruining someone’s yard and persevered in the end.

LESSON TWO: PERSEVERE. YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE SOME MISTAKES. ROLL WITH THEM AND KEEP ON GOING.

I applied to 14 universities, the best in the country. I got in to Vanderbilt on the waiting list. The rest of them turned me down. I went for a year, made good grades, thought I wanted to be a doctor and my classmates asked me what kind of doctor did I want to be? I told them I didn’t know there were different kinds. I thought either you were one or you weren’t. They advised me to go to the Vanderbilt hospital and go around with some doctors and figure it out. I took their advice and after 3 days of hanging around a hospital between classes I decided I hated being in a hospital, didn’t like being around sick people and am a mild germaphobe. I switched schools after being a roughneck on an oil rig for the summer and became a geologist and geophysicist.

LESSON 3: YOU HAVE TO ATTEMPT THINGS IN THE FIRST PLACE. DON’T BE SCARED. MISTAKES ARE PART OF THE LEARNING PROCESS. HOW WOULD YOU EVER LEARN WHAT YOU LOVE TO DO IF YOU DON’T ATTEMPT IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. OR, AT LEAST, LEARN WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO DO. IT CAN GUIDE YOU TO WHAT YOU DO.

 I graduated from University of Texas in 1984 with degrees in geology and geophysics just in time for the end of the oil boom. I sent out 186 resumes and did not get a single interview, only rejection letters. I ultimately, got a job as a geologist with a friend of my cousins who had recently gotten divorced and was trying to make some money back. It lasted a year before I was laid off of my dream job. There were no other jobs and so I started Uno Oil Co. I was the uno employee of Uno Oil. I put together a bunch of prospects and tried to sell them. No one bought. I started margining what money I had and traded stocks. I made some good money until October 19, 1987. Black monday. I got sold out of my stocks as I helped my stepfather plant plants. I went broke. I will never forget the 11 mile run I took that night having lost all my money. I had a lot of energy that night. All of it bad.

LESSON 4: YOU MIGHT DO EVERYTHING RIGHT AND JUST HAVE BAD TIMING. DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP ABOUT IT. EXERCISE HELPS

 I moved to Houston and got a job as a seismic data processor. I hated it and after 4 months was having dreams of floating down a river in a body bag. I was so miserable I resigned. I was offered a job as a field clerk on a seismic crew in Venezuela. After a year and a half I worked my way up to Jefe Del Grupo. Running a 350 man heliportable dynamite seismic crew. I was trained in explosives, built dynamite magazines, did AFL CIO labor union negotiations in Spanish and dealt with generals and judges. I got transferred to Colombia and ultimately to a place where there had been no gringos for 3 years out in the llanos. The ELN freedom fighters wanted money, pharmaceuticals and dynamite which I could not give them and they told me they were looking at a dead man. My company wouldn’t get me out of there and since I was driven in there by jeep at night through riverbeds and dirt roads for 11 hours I couldn’t drive myself out. The cleaning lady’s 3 year old son came up to me crying one day. I asked him what was wrong and he said he was scared for me. I told him I grew up in San Antonio Texas and could take care of myself. The boy then told me that they were going to kill me. He had heard them at lunch that day. Oh, through the mouths of babes. I couldn’t sleep for 5 days. I retraced every decision I had made that got me to that place. I decided that I had more energy then, than I had at any time in my life. All of it negative.

That’s when my physics background came in handy. I decided that the mind is a wonderful transducer. That energy cannot be destroyed. But maybe I could take all this energy and use my brain to change it into something positive. And then throw a multiplier on it. In the end, I decided that I had to be in the worst place in the world and asked myself then what was the best place. For me it was the top of the hill on Scenic Drive in Austin Texas. I threw a 4 times multiplier on all that energy, 6 days later a small plane landed bringing us parts for our seismic line booster boxes and I jumped on the plane before it left. I lived. I went back to work in Venezuela and then when the oil business got better I moved back to Texas and started a drilling company. Before the year was up, George Bush senior did Desert Storm One and oil prices plummeted. I had to close down my business. I was really low. I moved to Austin where a depression was going on and bought the house on the top of the hill on Scenic Drive. The house I had thought about when I thought I was going to die in Colombia, in South America. They were going to knock it down so I got it real cheap. It was so much nicer than the tents and trailers I had been living in.

LESSON 5: WHEN THE CHIPS ARE DOWN, USE YOUR BRAIN TO SWITCH THE FREQUENCY OF THE ENERGY TO POSITIVE. THEN THROW A MULTIPLIER ON IT. IT MIGHT TAKE A FEW YEARS TO COME INTO THE PHYSICAL PLANE BUT HAVE FAITH, SOMETHING POSITIVE ALWAYS COMES FROM A FAILURE. IT JUST MAY TAKE A FEW YEARS TO SEE WHAT IT IS.

 I then decided to make a career change to the environmental business. I researched and decided on a company I really wanted to work at. I interviewed and a week later they informed me I did not get the job. I told the owner “I could not believe it. His company was perfect for me. I’m usually right about these things. No one would work harder and do a better job. If it didn’t work out with the new guy please call me. I know I will do the best work.” I was devastated. He called 3 weeks later. It didn’t pan out with the new guy. I got the job.

LESSON 6: IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY, STAY POSITIVE. TELL THE WORLD WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO ACHIEVE. WHEN PEOPLE LIKE YOU THEY WANT TO HELP YOU. REMEMBER: SUCCESS IS MEETING EACH AND EVERY FAILURE WITH EQUAL ENTHUSIASM.

I worked there for a few years coring, soil sampling, setting monitoring wells, working with the EPA and state authorities. I did sales for them when times were slow. I got tired of living in municipal and industrial landfills, sulfur dioxide ponds, mines and power stations, wearing Tyvek suits in the summer sun with rubber gloves and boots on. That is when I came up with my Safety Net philosophy. You know how as life goes on you kind of cycle. Sometimes everything seems to go wrong. The car won’t start. Your shoes come untied. The refrigerator goes out, etc. Other times everything seems effortless. The lights are all green, you find a $20 on the ground, and everything is going your way.

When you are going through a positive cycle, make one change in your life, a change that affects the most hours of your day. It could be your job, who you live with, where you live, getting a dog, the car you drive, maybe even getting a new bed. But look at your life and pick just one thing to change each positive cycle, the thing that needs changing that affects the most hours of your day. After a while you will find yourself with a safety net when you are beating yourself up in a down cycle. I remember driving up the winding road on Scenic Drive, in my Alfa Romeo Spider, with my favorite dog in the whole world in the passenger seat, beating myself up, feeling sorry for myself, as I was driving to my favorite house in the world to see my favorite girlfriend (at the time). I suddenly went from feeling sorry for myself to laughing, thinking how funny it was that I was beating myself up.

LESSON 7: BE FLEXIBLE. LIFE IS AN ADVENTURE. MAKE A SAFETY NET. NEXT TIME YOU FALL YOU WONT GO DOWN SO FAR.

A friend was killing it in the residential mortgage business and offered me a job. I switched careers, bought a couple of suits, and became a mortgage broker and then a mortgage banker. I loved it. A couple of years later, rates went up a couple of points and it killed my business. I needed a new career, again. I made my resume. It had oil, environmental, mortgages. No real path developing.

I saw a guy on TV say that if you are trying to make a career change you need to discover your passion. He told the studio audience to take a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle, and on the left side, list what you love to do, on the right side, list what you are good at. I did the experiment and as I looked at it I decided that I was going to get in the liquor business. I had been making vodka infusions for my friends for Christmas presents and strangers had started coming up to me at parties calling me the vodka guy. I thought that spending my days in a distillery didn’t seem like work to me. I enjoyed sales. I was good in science and engineering and project management and I liked meeting people, traveling, and bars, restaurants and liquor stores. A match made in heaven. Everyone thought I was crazy.

LESSON 8: AFTER A WHILE, YOU START TO VIEW YOUR FAILURES AS LEARNING EXPERIENCES AND OPPORTUNITIES. SUCK ALL THE INFORMATION AND WISDOM OUT OF EACH FAILURE. REALIZE THEY ARE LEARNING AND GROWING EXPERIENCES THAT WILL MAKE YOU THAT MUCH WISER AND STRONGER IN THE FUTURE.

I started a one man distillery. The first legal distiller in the history of Texas. I blazed the trail through the distribution channels for the American Craft Distilling Movement and created a national and now international vodka brand with no investors and very little money. Was it easy? Hell no. Did I have failures and setbacks? Hell yes. Did I ever give up or give in. No way. How did I do it? I did it with the wealth of knowledge I had learned studying geology and geophysics along with the can do oilfield spirit I had developed as a roughneck and running seismic crews. I learned from my failed businesses about cash flow management and employee expense. I learned how to deal with bureaucratic red tape and regulators in the environmental business, and I learned from the mortgage business about finance and credit. Had I not have had all those failures under my belt I would not be successful today. Period.

In summary, no one wants to fail, but life is an ever changing experiment. If you are scared to fail you are paralyzed. If you are willing to wrap your arms around your failures and accept all the responsibility, it becomes your foundation. If you look at life as a scientific experiment, you come up with a theory, a procedure, you do the experiment, analyze it and come up with your results, then it becomes learning. You may start a business to do one thing and once you are out there doing it, your customers will be telling you what they want and you may end up doing something else.

I know a guy who started off selling soup and ended up being the largest hot sauce maker in the world. Even Bill Gates had a bankruptcy before he started Microsoft. If you ever feel like you can’t shake a failure, read about Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford, Albert Einstein or Thomas Edison. Google FAIL YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS, or, SUCCESSFUL FAILURES. You will soon realize that anyone who is considered a great success has built that success on failure. By deciding you are a participant in the game of life, that life is a celebration, that you are not going to just let the winds of life blow you around but rather you will forge your own path based on what you love to do and what you are good at, you will hit adversity. You will be challenged, you will be confronted, you will be tested. Just lean into it. Keep moving forward, sooner or later you will know what you love, you will have the experience to perform and your timing will be right. Have faith, grow some tough skin, and be thankful for your failures. It just means that you are still trying and haven’t given up. Great luck!

Tito Beveridge, Founder and Master Distiller, Tito’s Handmade Vodka

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