What's up everyone, this is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team or a new product. You probably heard an ad before the show. That's something we're going

to be doing going forward as we prepare for our first sponsorship that kicks off next month.

I'm excited to share more great information going forward about what it means for the growth of

the show. Now onto the episode. In a recent episode, I talked about my reading around stoicism.

And in that episode, I shared how I had a conversation with my girlfriend and in that conversation,

I said that I would feel like a failure if Morning Brew was the only business that I built in my life.

After that episode, I reflected on that conversation and asked myself,

why would I feel like a failure if I didn't build another business? And is failure even a bad

thing? This led me down the rabbit hole of reading all about failure, what it looks like,

and how we can reframe it to motivate us rather than scare us. Let's hop into it.

During my research on failure, I saw this great quote by Shane Parish on Twitter. He said,

quote, failure is the cost of ambition. I think this is so well said. That said, I also think it

misses part of the picture, but I want to first talk about where I agree. The good type of failure,

the what I would call the misbranded type of failure, which isn't at all bad, is the failure

that is driven by ambition, like Shane Parish referred to. It's the failure where you want to

grow yourself or your business, so you decide to try something with a certain outcome in mind.

You decide to make the leap and go full time on your side hustle. You decide to sell an idea

internally to senior stakeholders at your company. You decide to raise venture money and try to

build something massive. And what ends up happening is after trying that thing, the outcome

...