around 30 years ago i lived with this englishman ,,,

named j zneimer. people refered to him as jonny zed. he was ultra confident, i was not. what we shared was a girl named liz that we had both dated, and our jewish heritage. when he arrived in the states to do a masters at columbia, he and i moved in to an apartment in the 100s that i liked very much, until one day i was stabbed in the ass by one of the many adict customers of drug dealers who worked the corner. after having not said so much as a word in probably 20 years, i contacted him to talk about my thesis on how companies learn from failing. and it turns out, my proposal of a workshop within a comapany, he asked, you mean a consultation? turns out this is pretty much what he does for a living. he studied something called sports phychology, but it seems that over the last 20 years, he has shifted to a motivational expert. i can just picture him wallking into a room full of ceos and having them jump through hoops. i cant think of anyone more perfect for this type of work. totally cocky. and if he was ever less than confident, he would nver admit it. anyway, we spoke for a good hour and a half, and asked if i was tryring to get a job working for him. really, i had no idea what he did, bt yeah, id jump at the opportunity. so now ive got my expert interview, but man is it long and im only halway through transcribing it. so the next question is how to include interviews in my thesis. i should have a look back at my understanding people paper to see how i handled it there, but i guess i need to include a small bio exlaining who it is, and why they are significant. sumarize the nature of my questions and the gist of their reply. then pull out a few juicy quotes. i dont see why each interviewee cant get a full page. i should definitely look at other students to see how their research papers tackled this.
i kind of wish we kept in touch. now i recall that when he left new york, he owed me money, and every time i showed up in london, which i guess was relatively often back then, he would come up with 20 pounds, or some piddling amount that was considerably less than he owed. i dont know wy he was resistant to pay for whever bills he had left on me, but i think at some point, i resented being a collections agent. that was a long time ago and water under the bridge, hes got 3 kids ive never met, including a 17 and 18 year old. time certainly has a way of getting way from you.

Comments

my story needed a bit more drama

There is no doubt that failure adds drama and as such, creates value. Just how often do chase films resort to the the old cliche of the driver choosing the wrong road, failing to acknowledge the sign reading "DANGER, works in progress", and ultimately flying off the side of a cliff. Just imagine how lifeless that scene would be if the road had just lead to a perfectly usable road. BORING! Of course the Hollywood version, airborn vehicles land on their feet and carry on, leaving those in pursuit scratching their heads, but in reality, I can imagine a far less opportune ending. So whereas the Feedback Toolkit I was gunning for might be extremely useful for a wide range of companies, I picked the wrong company, like choosing the wrong fork at an intersection. For the purposes of this study, it set off a panic because I was not so certain that I could land my a new concept in the small window allotted. Admitedly, thats my fault for not approaching my case study until the end of

oy, it just occured to me that my solution might not match my paper.is feedback a solution for learning from errors? did i mean communication, or reflection, that might be closer to what i was going for. oops. a bunch of interviews talked about peoples unwillingness to share about failure, but now im thinking that i picked the wrong solution. if the definition of feedback is to help someone improve, then thats not the solutuon for people sharing problems. oy, i guess it was psychological safety after all, and no, i never got around to researching that. honestly, i could probsbly knock that out in a couple of days. but this is soooo late in the game to be , wait, these two dont meet up

running a startup

brian sent me a text mesage saying i could interview him on his way to work. in a nour. sure, right, whatever. the only guy i know that runs a startup, this was pretty exciting. oh shit, no questions written, so i put some down quicjk so i wouldnt be fumbling when we spoke. good thing, his walk to work is just 15 min, and while he let me go over by around 8 min, by the end, i could tell he was in the office and had to attend to far more important stuff. so this is what i got. this is his first vc backed startup, the business he grew and sold in austin was bootstrapped. hes doing a kind of bio engineering biz to grow meat from cells. theyre on the 3rd round of funding, and i think i recall that it was some millions of dollars. so thats pre-seed and seed and then whatever comes after. they have just moved from dontown SF to berlkley, as they needed a bigger space. the team has grown to 16, and hes very confident speaking about all the stages of development like hes a pro. i just kind of

on failing

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