My Favorite Mistake: Business Lessons from Failures and Success - Will Hurd Lost His First Congressional Runoff Because He Didn’t Listen to His Consultants - Just the Mistake

Will Hurd Lost His First Congressional Runoff Because He Didn’t Listen to His Consultants - Just the Mistake

02/06/23 • 7 min

My Favorite Mistake: Business Lessons from Failures and Success

Former U.S. Representative Will Hurd (R-Texas)

Welcome to My Favorite Mistake.

I’m Mark Graban. This is “just the mistake” — a continuing experiment. Today we’ll hear the “favorite mistake” story shared, in episode #2, by then-U.S. Representative, Will Hurd from Texas. Sept 2020 before he left office. Here, he talks about the mistakes he made that led to him losing his first runoff election when he first tried running for Congress. He takes responsibility for that mistake instead of blaming others — setting a great example for all of us. To hear the entire episode with Will Hurd, go to www.MarkGraban.com/mistake2.

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Former U.S. Representative Will Hurd (R-Texas)

Welcome to My Favorite Mistake.

--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/favorite-mistake/support

Previous Episode

ADHD Expert & Entrepreneur Kristen Carder Regretted Spending $10k on a Mastermind Program

Host of the "I Have ADHD" podcast

Episode page with video, transcript, links and more

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My guest for Episode #197 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Kristen Carder. She is a serial entrepreneur and mindset coach for adults with ADHD. She's the host of a podcast: “I Have ADHD.”

In this episode, Kristen tells her favorite mistake story about spending $10,000 on a “mastermind” group that was not at all what she expected. Why was there a gap between her expectations and reality? When did she realize there was a problem? What did she do and how did she learn from this, as a coach-ee and a coach? We also talk about mistakes related to understanding ADHD and living with it — at work and in our personal lives.

As she always says on her podcast, she's “medicated, caffeinated, and ready to roll.”

Questions and Topics:

When did you realize it was a mistake? Did you ask for a refund? 3 reasons why not...
When should somebody join a “mastermind” instead of getting 1×1 coaching?
Lesson learned: explicitly lays out WHAT a mastermind is when she sells one
Red flags that you’re getting bad info about ADHD?
Why ADHD is not simply a “gift” or a “superpower”?
How do you define ADHD?
The inability to direct attention
Trouble regulating impulse – attention and emotion?
You were diagnosed in college... I was diagnosed last year at age 48... what led to you getting diagnosed?
Causes? Differences in the brain?
A mistake to tell people at work that you’re ADHD?
Explanation not an excuse
Her FOCUSED coaching program

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Next Episode

CTO Kevin Goldsmith on Leveraging Failure to Drive Success at Spotify and Distrokid

My guest for Episode #198 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Kevin Goldsmith, the chief technology officer at DistroKid, the world’s largest distributor of digital music.

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Kevin is an experienced leader of high-profile, high-performing product, research, and shared technology engineering organizations. An often-invited speaker on building strong engineering teams at conferences internationally – often talking about learning from failure. Has extensive experience building products using Lean, Kanban, Scrum, and Extreme Programming methodologies.

In this episode, Kevin tells his favorite mistake story about the launch of “Spotify Now” when he was an engineering leader at Spotify. Why was there pressure to launch? What mistake did Kevin and team make regarding data from a small group of initial users? How did Spotify leverage its culture of “handling failure well”? What did Kevin learn?

Questions and Topics:

How do you balance the cost of lost customers vs. the cost of embarrassment?
Being surprised by the results of experiments
Was Spotify Now a problem of a bad concept or bad execution? Or Bad design?
Losing customers as “the cost of learning”
Organizational learning to not get into this situation again?
Doing retrospectives on EVERYTHING to remove the stigma?
The Forbes article that Kevin was quoted in
People who strongly believe in “accountability” — punishing failures — can you change their minds?
Failure vs. mistake? — how would you compare those words?
Tell us a little bit more about DistroKid – strengthening this culture of learning from mistakes?

Video and Blog Post by Kevin: