Lessons from Failure: How to Learn, Pivot, and Succeed

Life doesn’t always go as planned. When failure strikes, it’s easy to feel defeated or question your abilities. But what if failure is actually a stepping stone to something better?

In this episode of The Underdog Protagonist, I get personal as I share stories of my own failures (as a creator/freelancer): product launches that didn’t work, creative challenges I couldn’t finish, and routines that fell apart. More importantly, I reflect on the powerful lessons I’ve learned from these setbacks and how they’ve shaped my mindset and approach to success.

We’ll explore why failure is never the end of the story, how to reframe setbacks as opportunities, and practical strategies for bouncing back stronger. Whether you’re stuck in frustration or looking for inspiration to try again, this episode is packed with insights to help you pivot, adapt, and thrive.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
00:58 Tackling personal failures
05:14 How to move forward and pivot
09:24 How starting small minimizes failures
12:42 Maintaining mental wellbeing
13:10 Question of the week


About Pk:
Pratyush has been a designer for almost 6 years. He started creating content to share his knowledge and establish a connection between design and business. He believes that knowledge grows by sharing and he wants to do just that. He is in a journey to help fellow freelancers and content creators make a profitable career.

Connect with Pk: LinkedIn | X | YouTube

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:58 Tackling personal failures
• 5:14 How to move forward and pivot
• 9:24 How starting small minimizes failure
• 12:42 Maintaining mental wellbeing
• 13:10 Question of the week

Transcript

Hello, everyone. I'm Pratyush, and you're listening to The Underdog Protagonist. This podcast is for those who want to take ownership of their lives. Today's episode is for anyone who had their plans fall apart. And let's be honest, we all have.

When things don't go as planned, we feel stuck, defeated, or even we question our own abilities. But what if I told you failure is not the end of the road? In fact, it can be the very thing that pushes you forward with more strength and resilience. Today, we are talking about how to pivot and thrive when a plan fails. And for this episode, we are joined with me.

We don't have any guests today. It's just me. So grab your favorite drink, settle into your cozy spot, and let's get this episode started. Just like everybody, I had a few plans that did not go as expected, and the strategies and the predictions just did not work out. There are a couple of failures that I can remember as of now.

Let me name a few to start with. There was one with, product launch failure. I lost the 75 hard challenge. I lost the 30 days challenge. I lost to produce content regularly and I lost to keep my podcast With all these failures at hand, I started questioning whether I am worthy enough to carry this forward and be consistent with my routines and posting content regularly.

And recalling all these experiences, every time I felt devastated, I start to question my worthiness and whether I am capable enough for the job. I know I have the skills. I know I have the knowledge. I know what strategies I need to implement. It's just that I was failing on the executional part.

And when I dug deep, I found out the reason. The reason was I was not allocating a specific time period or I was not taking the thing as serious as I should have. Now designing and sharing content for me is like an escape, which is why I doubled down on being a designer and I started learning all those skills. If you don't know, I'm a self taught designer. I have never gone into a design school.

I have never been tutored. All I have learned is from YouTube and seeing other people do the stuff that I have been doing, which is the crux or the source of my knowledge and I was able to do that just because I was passionate enough for this particular industry. Now I feel like everyone's listening to this podcast can relate that what it feels to feel lost. Let's try to dig in deeper and find out what were the emotions that were felt at the moment and what ways I had adapted to tackle that. And if at all you're faced with one of those scenarios, what you should do to be able to recover from those and bounce back with more energy?

Now every day I sit on my desk, try to design stuff for my clients, work on my content calendar, or produce content so that I'm able to post that later on social media. There's always a pressure that I have felt which just keeps me from going all in and holds my complete potential from flowing out. And at this moment the doubt creeps in. The questions in my mind start to come up on the surface and the insecurities I've felt quite instantly. Now there are a couple of things I have learnt by dealing with these scenarios.

The first one is to declutter your brain. It shifts your focus from work and lets you enjoy something else. You can have a drink. You can have a coffee. You can go for a walk.

You can read a journal. You can write a journal. Or you can just take a power nap. Anything that works specifically for you to be able to shift your focus from work and start focusing on something else. The second thing is is very difficult but you have to deal with your emotions.

If this is something that is happening quite often, you have to train yourself on how you should be able to deal with this. If there's something that is inside you which is deep underneath the surface? You have to identify that. Spend time with yourself. Think about the core of the emotion.

Where it is really coming from? Is it really the quality of work or do you think after posting this is how people will perceive of me or I'll be judged in a different way than I am already seen in their eyes? So really think about these aspects. Try to tackle that in your own way. This is how I have tackled.

These may or may not work with you, but give it a shot. A lot of people, when faced with failure, don't know what to do next. They don't know how to move forward. To be able to say that you are searching a way to pivot is easier than to actually move forward. For me, I reimagined the situation and created a new site plan but I did something that a lot of people frown upon and that is to take advice from others.

Advice from others meaning that creators from the social media world or YouTube. Most people say that if you are stuck somewhere and you're looking for advices, the worst place can be to take advices from a motivational guru or someone who has seen a huge success and has forgotten about the steps from his early career days. Now taking tips from someone who has seen massive growth is a no brainer but you really have to think and try to understand the perspective of the person where he or she is coming from so that the things that he or she is saying is relevant to your niche and to your business or, like, your failure. After seeking a lot of advices, if there was one thing that helped me was my own research. Having worked in the marketing department with a lot of individuals, really skilled individuals in the space and learning all these tactics on what are the reasons responsible for a product's success and why do people choose that in the first place.

Having dabbled with so many different questions in the same industry and have tackled that successfully, I tried to retrace my steps to the first one to check what I was doing wrong, whether the things that I had done with my clients have been implemented in my own product launch. And if yes, where did I get wrong? Now the market is the same. The people are different. Now you need to figure out the mindset and the perspective people have for a particular product, service, or business.

And then you need to figure out how you can make your product as favorable or as enticing for that particular audience so that they choose you from the other competitors. Now looking back at these analysis, I try to formulate a strategy that would work best for my case scenario and would eventually not make my product a failure. But what I really want to discuss with you is not about a product's failure but a failure of my own commitments. Whether it is work, life, or your personal well-being, everything is tied to your mental health and your diet and how you tie mental and physical health together. I keep on saying one thing over and over that you need to be consistent and you need to be at something for a longer period of time to be able to see some sort of return in the future, but you cannot expect anything in the short term.

Even though I try to practice what I preach, in some way, I was leaning more towards this short term gains rather than focusing on this long term success. And if there's something that this experience has taught me is to think more passively than actively for any sort of returns that I want in my career and trust the process. Really, trust the process. Now I approach my new plans a bit differently. Even if the strategies are mostly the same, I'm trying to stick at it for the long run.

I'm willing to experiment more with more pieces of content, more tries to really see if what I have been doing does really not work. I can only be sure after trying it multiple times but I can never be sure if I just try for once or twice and just give in after a couple of attempts. Every time I try to start something, I always feel like there's some sort of problem waiting for me in the future. And evidently, that just keeps on popping up and makes me fail over and over. But over time I have learned that these setbacks are a blessing in disguise.

They come into my life, ruin my plans, make me fail over and over but they end up teaching me something. Those learnings are very valuable because you only learn by doing right and if you don't fail you don't learn and if you don't learn you don't grow. Right? So in a way these failures have helped me grow and looking back at all of these failures I don't feel this remorse but I feel happy that I tried. I failed but I still learned a lot from that experience.

Now if you are someone who has been failing at something quite often or are someone who is quite frustrated at everything and you feel like everything you touch goes to waste, then there's one piece of advice that I can give you is to start small. Take baby steps. If you have a goal in place, try to break that into actionable steps and try to take one step at a time. Even if you fail at step 1, 2, or 3, you have only failed the particular step, not the whole objective. So you still have time to bounce back and retrace your steps to the previous one so that this time you don't feel at it.

And if there's one thing that you can adapt right now is to shift your mindset. Try to see these failures as opportunities instead of setbacks. If there is one piece of advice I would have known when I was at that stage is this is just the beginning. Anything and everything you try to do will take a lot of effort, lot of failed attempts, and you'll never gain success in the first couple of attempts. Let's say you're trying to go big on YouTube.

Right? You can try recording 10 videos, 20 videos, 30 videos, but none of those will work unless you try that 100 times. And I'm sure in the 101th video, you'll get to see some sort of success. Which is partly why people have all these challenges about 100 days, 100 x challenge, 75 hour challenge, 30 days challenge. And the objective for taking these challenges is not to fulfill a goal rather than to train yourself over and over doing the same thing so that you get better at it on day 30, day 75, or day 100 and you stand out from the 90% of the crowd.

Now for someone who has done the thing consistently for 30 days will definitely stand out from the one who is trying hard to make the best piece of content for 30 days straight and has put out only one at day 30. But imagine the amount of growth the person trying out the challenge would have got if he did the one thing for 30 days consistently. I love the fact that failure is not the end of the story. It never is really. And if you're someone who is more stuck in the failure, don't beat yourself up because there's always time to bounce back and do the one thing you love the most so that you get the return you so much crave for.

Now before we part our ways, I want to ask you this one question. How has overcoming any failure in your life impacted or shaped who you are today? And what is that one message or one thing that you have learned during that time when you failed at that certain thing and what helped you to bounce back to who you are today. You can write me on this podcast or social media. Anything works.

Thank you so much for tuning in. This was something very personal to me. I had shared about my failures in the past but I had never reflected on how those failures had shaped me to who I am today and the mindset shifts that I have faced. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend. Really means a lot!

You were listening to the Underdog Protagonist' and I'll catch you in the next one. Until then, take care!