Jamie
Speaks
On Failure
“People always ask me, ‘What’s your biggest failure?’ Even talking about failure is the wrong way to look at it. Life is about long-term success; it’s a marathon. If you’re a marathoner and you have one misstep at mile seven, you don’t call it a failure— you just make your next step better. If your shoe comes untied, you tie it, but the marathon is not over. It has nothing to do with the overall race.” “When you make a product that’s not working well, you try to use that information to make it better next time. You just keep iterating.” “It’s important to not get into the microcosm or the myopic side of this failure. Keep sight of what you want to achieve in five, 10 or 20 years. That lets you kind of blow through all these other things along the way.”
On Success
“You should be trying to do what motivates you every day. It’s about trying to find that thing that’s going to satisfy you.” “Money and starting a business are not fulfilling on their own. I think it’s really doing the thing that fulfills you that is going to allow you to be successful, because success is you being happy. We’ve all seen people who have achieved things that you would think would make them happy, but they don’t seem to be.”
Photo by: Jordan Stead/Amazon
On Self-Discovery
“When I think about what I have learned about myself through the years, it’s really that I liked building things to make people’s lives better. If I look at the core of me—which I think would be labeled as an inventor—I think what drives me more than anything is the ability to see something that someone doesn’t have… like a missing part, and to give them something that fills that need and makes them happier. Once I realized that, that’s when things certainly started to go better for me.”
Crimson Fall 2018
23