Hi,
This is Room To Fail, a newsletter about learning strategy and how to let ourselves fail, just to only get things right the next time. Or the next.
I’m Irina. Welcome and buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Hopefully.
Today’s read takes less than 10 minutes. I haven’t counted.
🧠⚡︎BRAIN FAILURE
As you maybe noticed, I don’t prepare this stuff with much time in advance. The reason is that I want this to be a true learning exercise, with all the good and bad, the poor time management and failure, with lots of reading one week and none in another, with breaks and periods at full speed.
This is not great, but it’s honest. And one of my Irina-brand core value is honesty. For me honesty means transparency in all my processes, openness and simple words to explain what I want to pass over, recognising failure and searching for that state of gratitude when things turn out good.
This is one human value I try to plant inside the ground of all my clients. When we’re talking and building a brand around their business, honesty is key. When we’re creating for communicating, honesty is key. When we’re responding to criticism and “haters”, honesty is key. When we’re failing at delivering for the humans we call consumers, I believe honesty is key.
I haven’t always been honest so I understand why honesty is hard and when it’s hard. It takes a lot of courage to be completely honest. Especially for businesses. But one way or another, if you manage to create an honest context for your employees, and honestly communicate with your customers - I’m super-sure you are building a close-to-heart brand that everyone will remember (and buy from). That’s what we want, right?
And, with all this honesty overdose, I want to say that this became a busy-in-the-head time. So I’ll keep writing this newsletter, but I’ll make some changes in its length and content. Stay tuned.
🤯 “HOW DID THEY THINK ABOUT THAT?!” SECTION
One of my other passions beside strategy & psychology is narrative journalism. I love reading it and listening to it. I love a beautifully written piece which holds truth into each and every detail.
So I’m sharing with you today a timeless written piece of narrative journalism from 2016 by Gay Talese who never met Frank Sinatra but described him in such detail that they seemed best buddies. I read it like a fairytale.
Also, if you’re on the road, you can listen to this 8 parts podcast series, Rabbit Hole, about the internet and what it’s doing to us.
🍴INTERESTING TOOLS TO GET WRONG
Today - serving as a tool for writing this newsletter - I’m asking you a few questions about it. I’ve used Google Forms before and I love how easy it is to get some basic answers from clients or their customers when you send more than an email with questions. It looks pretty too.
Here you have a short form. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter so far, please take 5 minutes cu check it out and tell me what you think I can do better for it or fo you. Be honest.
I’m grateful for the time you spend reading it and I want to do it better - which means a way for me to be on time every week and a way for you to enjoy it as much. Thank you.
📚 THE STRATEGY BOOK CLUB
(How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up, Les Binet and Sarah Carter -
COMPLETED: Y/N, page 140)
On Saturday morning, after a long week, I left Bucharest for a short break off the city and some wandering around some parts of the country we’ve never set foot on before.
I forgot to take my book with me. And I guess that was a good, unintended choice.
So no reading happened this week.
That’s a wrap. Hope you are well and adapt better to so many changes.
It’s ok to fail at this too, because here we try to become better,
i.