Disclaimer: this one is not a success story.
It is a story about all the businesses and projects I have set up and failed at.
Well, with a few exceptions.
What I notice is that not many people openly talk about the ones that went nowhere, and I think that creates a completely distorted picture of what building something actually looks like.
So before I continue this series with what I am actually building right now (a kind of a lifestyle brand in Zürich and Nov-Era), I want to reflect on everything I tried and very much failed at during the years.
And honestly, I have never even listed all of these myself as one complete picture before. Never really stopped to analyse what I actually did over the years on the side of studies and work, and what all of it taught me.
So in a way, this is about connecting the dots - even for myself. This is about understanding the bigger picture, because at the time of doing these things they did not always make sense, especially alongside the more “serious path” I was following.
If anything, this is about making clear that creating anything is a nonlinear process and failure is inevitably part of it. But the silver lining is that there is always something worth taking from each attempt, even when the project itself goes nowhere.
Every Sunday I publish a piece of The Build, a series following my journey of building from scratch and more than anything trying and learning. In the previous episodes I shared the story of how I got to entrepreneurship and what the reality of running a side business alongside a full time job actually looks like. In this one I reflect on the challenges and the failures that are unavoidably shaping the path when you are trying to create something that feels like you.
On Wednesdays, I write about creating your path, style, mindset and career wise.