First published 1 August 2022 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
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Nigel was waiting for the theme tune at the start of this one. It had already played. He just couldn't hear it at his end, so after 192 episodes of me doing the intro and the jingle, there he was dancing to nothing and waiting for it to kick in. We never did work out why.
That little mess-up took him straight to Rob Law on Dragons' Den. Rob invented Trunki, the ride-on suitcases for kids. He was pulling one along, Peter Jones had a go, and the strap came off. No funding. And Trunki went on to be huge anyway. Nigel had been sent Rob's book a couple of weeks before.
His line is that if you've had no setbacks, you haven't taken enough risks. He wants you to look back at five things that felt like failures at the time and see what they actually taught you. Then look at the stuff you thought was brilliant, because some of it wasn't. His friend Reg Attwell has a name for the forward bit, an ought-to-biography. The things you ought to do.
I cut across him with the Steve Jobs line about only joining the dots looking back. Our memories don't help much either. We lump similar things together into one story and make big generalisations off the back of it. I'd read about researchers telling people made-up stories from their own past, and before long they believed them.
The bit I kept coming back to was the people watching at home. The Dragons said no, but plenty of viewers wanted to know where to get one, especially anyone who's dragged kids and bags through an airport. Nigel reckons some of it was sympathy. I don't. Then he went off on a motorised suitcase you can sit on, which he reckons fits about three pairs of pants. I'm not convinced the video's real.
What I took from this one
- If you've had no setbacks, you probably haven't taken enough risks.
- Write down five things that felt like failures and see what they taught you. Do the same with the wins.
- Your memory edits things. Don't trust it to tell you exactly what happened.
- Getting a no? Check you're asking the right people. The Dragons weren't Trunki's market, parents in airports were.
- The strap broke, not the product (Nigel made me correct that on air).
You will have setbacks, and if you don't have any setbacks, you've not taken enough risks.
Nigel Risner
There is a market for just about everything. You've just gotta find the right one.
Neil Martin
