The Success Cycle

Outside of the office window, water planes streaming across the sky to land in the beautiful Vancouver Coal Harbour. This picture of flying planes against the mountain back drop reminds me of the money I lost in a eVTOL venture.

A few years ago, when the climate change theme was in full swing, I thought, little could change its trajectory. With confidence, I invested six figures of my own money into one of the electric-vertical take-off airplane venture. As impeccable as the technology along with many promising letters of intend to purchase across the world, a shortage of money and an unexpected change in government funding priority grounded this highflyer permanently.

When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me stories about successful investors losing money prior to achieving great fortune. Though I am not looking for great fortune, I am working toward being a successful investor.

According to Gemini, “Li Ka-Shing's (famous H.K. billionaire) most widely cited early investment misstep was his early entry into the mobile communications market in the early 1990s. His company Hutchison Whampoa launched a mobile business called "Rabbit," which consistently lost money in its early years before eventually being restructured into Orange in 1994 and sold at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 1999. [1]

While Li Ka-shing successfully avoided major personal investment disasters, his private technology fund, Horizons Ventures, inevitably experienced early-stage venture capital write-offs in high-risk tech and internet-linked assets during the bursting of the dot-com bubble. [1, 2, 3, 4]”

This week, I finished a new book by John C. Maxwell: “How to Get a Return on Failure”. Never thought there could be so much to learn about failing.

Today, I apply these lessons in my everyday practice. But like John said in his book, the only thing that is sure is not success but the cycle of success:

1. Test
2. “If silly things were not done, intelligent things would never happen.” – Tom Peters
3. “Finding a better way usually requires going many ways.” – John C. Maxwell
4. Fail
5. Be intentional to fail in the right place at the right time.
6. Evaluate
7. “Experience is not the best teacher, but evaluated experience is.” – J.C.M.
8. Learn
9. “Your only guarantee that tomorrow is better than today is your commitment to learn from it.” – J.C.M.
10. “The idea you have today, is not sufficient to solve the problem of tomorrow.” – J.C.M.
11. Improve
12. “Learning alone without improvement is overrated.” – J.C.M.
13. “If we get better, our customers will demand we get bigger!” – Truett Cathy, Founder of Chick-fil-A

Fortunately, after the big loss, I continue to learn, improve, and invest. Today, I have made my money back and some more.

Here are some of the important points on investing I learned from my biggest loss in personal investing:

• Diversify to protect against the unforeseeable
• A strong balance sheet is crucial
• Cutting losses is not a sin
• There are always other opportunities
• When the founder(s) is being sidelined, maybe it is time to sell the company

To highlight the importance of the success cycle, I like to end with Sarah Blakely’s, Founder of SPANX, story of success: “My dad encouraged me to fail.”