Fear of Failing Publicly 1: NUST Winter Invitational

This will be a series about my institutionalized fear of failing publicly. I am using the series to share the businesses and opportunities taken and dropped, failed and succeeded. I am sharing these because failure is not something we should be ashamed of even if society ridicules those who try and fail. You are not the first to fail. Read Part 2 and Part 3 here.

I learnt at a school where failure wasn’t much of an option. If you failed you would always prefer to fail in private. It was a mission school an odd 18km outside of the capital (so in essence not much of a mission school). Our school had a history of providing achievers, that they were good at. Looking back though, the bulk of our achievers seem to have been school achievers, with very few achieving anything of note outside of school. Those who did succeed exceedingly by my standards were in areas our school didn’t prepare us for.

Failing wasn’t an option because that was the stuff legends were made of. Nicknames that lasted an entire 6 years were built on small failures, slips of the tongue and literal slips. As a result, we didnt’t try much. The comfort zone was home and we loved it there. After all, why try if you may fail? If you decided to be daring and different student all eyes would be on you. If you decided to TRY all eyes would be on you. Not to support you, but to watch you fail and to ask you why you even tried. When you succeeded we only acknowledged after years…when we were sure you had succeeded. I have seen this affect me in a few ways over the years.

In my final year of college, together with my two best friends, we set out to create an amazing debate competition that would be the pride of Zimbabwe. Intending to make it big enough to bring regional competitors and our country’s finest Invitational…a show worth being a part of. The vision was clear, and it seemed fairly easy enough. So we sat for days, Onai (the best debater I have had the pleasure of watching) and Jerry (the sage, mostly silent but speaking the wisdom of 10 men over 80 years old when he spoke) coming up with the perfect debate tournament. A business plan would be the first thing we needed to do. We had never done such, although Jerry and I were Business Management majors, Onai was excused as a sciences student. That was our first test, exciting, scary and we had no idea what we had to do.

The NUST Winter Debate Invitational. That’s what we would call it. It was inspiring because even though we didn’t need to, we were serious about it. We created a mental picture of what it was supposed to be, who was going to be there, where they were going to stay and what they were going to do while they were in the city. We would light Bulawayo up, bring in a different type of excitement, a week of activity in different shopping centres. Attainable and still huge.

Our group COO likes to say something: BIG HAIRY AUDACIOUS GOALS. In short, don’t aim for something easy and that’s exactly what we did. We put the business plan together, pretty detailed and it was the result of several online templates put together. Pretty detailed for three kids who had never been part of decision making in any organization. Though I would like to praise our efforts, I think our education system has us mentally at “child” stage at 23, in other countries we would be on our 5th startup, failure or not. We are sheltered bunch. The average Zimbabwean graduate does not know how to do a business plan at age 23. Not that necessary right?

Soon we had completed the business plan. The event would hold just under 150 people and would last for 5 days. Our goal? To organize the most attended invitational tournament in the country. We budgeted for the full event; at the time it would cost us just under 12k and between registration fees and other planned activity we could make a little over 9k in revenue. No profit unless we had a sponsor. So we thought of who best to sponsor the event and we picked out two main possibilities. Standard Charted Bank as well as Delta Beverages. Delta, we thought would be easy. After all these events were always primed with alcohol and the only thing the participants did more than debate was drink. We created sponsorship proposals for both these sponsors, if it was 2019 we’d say we were in the endgame now.

Before we could approach the corporates we realised we needed to make sure we had the colleges buy – in. After all, despite all this planning and the fact that the event would be held at NUST and named the NUST Winter Debate Invitational, we hadn’t approached anyone in the school. This is a lesson in stakeholder management. We failed at this. Not because we didn’t get the college’s buy-in because we got it but because it took us long to get it. See, we knew the dean of the Commerce faculty was a big fan and avid supporter of debate but we didn’t approach him because it “wasn’t his domain.”

Instead we approached the dean of student affairs. It took us weeks to get an appointment with him. I don’t remember if we actually got to meet him. His secretary was very nice to us: an amazing gatekeeper. What do they say is the definition of diplomacy? Telling them to go to hell in a way that makes them look forward to the trip. The idea for NWI was a great one. Despite all the gatekeeping they couldn’t ignore it. Unfortunately the time it took started weighing in on our insecurities. One detail I forgot to mention was that at some point all three of us were at Mazowe high, the school that breeded our insecurities and fear of failing publicly. So we got scared, wondered if it was a good idea after all or if we could pull it off. An event where over 100 people would leave their cities (and about 30 their country) to come and debate with us.

The school eventually gave us the go ahead. We had a signed proposal. Victory! That’s what it felt like. It shouldn’t have. It should have felt like the start. We started polishing our proposals; we would have to pitch them soon. The plan was solid: Onai the talker would charm them with his obvious love for debate; I would defend the business model, and Jerry would defend the numbers and make us seem wiser than we were.

The fear of failing publicly came. Several people knew what we were trying to do, but only from the Debate society. No one in our classes knew because what if we failed. This is a lesson in networking. If more people had know we could have brainstormed greater opportunities for sponsorship. Not just the handful of companies we had spotted. Also, the more people who know what you are doing the less likely you are to give up. In our fear of failing, we decided to approach classmates who had interned at the companies we wanted sponsorships and then made 1 fatal mistake: We asked them to take our proposals forward.

Crickets. We didn’t hear back for any of them. To be honest we don’t even know how many of them got where they were supposed to. Did we know what to do? Yes, we were supposed to get up and go around with the proposals ourselves. I think in our minds by not taking the proposals ourselves we had transferred the failure to whoever took the proposals. It was them who was rejected and not us. This was stupid.

The NUST Winter Debate Invitational did not happen. We failed. I failed. Until today no more than 10 people knew this. I have made this decision to fail publicly and hopefully the community I share to will not wait for my failure and make a spectacle of it. Actually that’s not realistic. The world has optimists, pessimists and people who just want to see you fail.

The idea is not that if we had taken the proposals around we would have succeeded. The results could have been the same. The results could have been different. This year could’ve been the 7th NUST Winter Debate Invitational tournament, possibly with 1000 individuals and a budget ten times what we wanted and sponsorship to pick from. The lesson is you don’t know if you don’t try. Don’t just plan, DO. Do not leave room for regret.

Failing is not a problem. Keep trying. Try something else. Fail fast so that you know when it’s time to move on to something else. Maybe someone else will try to do the NWI and do it well. I hope I help someone by sharing. You are not the first nor are you the last to fail. When you fail it doesn’t mean you will continue to fail and it doesn’t mean you will learn enough to never fail again. All you have to do is continuously improve. #kaizenYou