My name is Stuart Byron Booker and I have failed many times in life. This is the begging of a book about many of the the lessons I’ve learned over the years. I must admit there isn’t a great sense of virtue that I have in writing this book. There isn’t some grand idea or optimism that anyone will even care to read it. Unlike most ventures I set out on I don’t have any expectations, predictions, projections or hopes attached to it.
All my life I was taught that having a goal and setting a date to it is the only way to go about achieving anything. I’ve always believed that success requires hard work, laser focus and lots of patience. This may very well be the only thing that I have every set out to do with absolutely no expectations attached to it.
This is a book about one of the most consistent things I have had over my 20 plus years as an entrepreneur, FAILURE. I can honestly say that I have always had the goal of writing a book but only after I achieved very great success. In my mind this success would have to be very grand. My hero’s growing up were the business titans of my day like Steve jobs, Bob Johnson, Oprah Winfrey and Warren Buffet. I set my mark to reach the status the legends of modern time including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and George Washington Carver.
I not only wanted to change the world but I wanted to change the course of human history. I fondly remember stories that my old basketball coach ,Coach Ingram, would tell about me always pretending that every game I played in was a NBA championship game. I don’t know where all this misguided ambition came from but it was most certainly in my DNA from conception.
Needless to say that after 40 years on this earth I have achieved a very far cry from the grand ideas I had of becoming a figure that would stand throughout the rest of human history. I guess my sole purpose in writing this book now is no matter what happens from here on out I want it to be known that I ventured and I leaned in this life. I hope that my having taken up all 5’ 10” of space wasn’t in vain because someone after me was able to gain from the one thing I’ve done more that anyone I have ever personally know and that’s failing.
My father died at the ripe old age of 54 and just about all my uncles were about that same age when they died. I know tomorrow isn’t promised and my mortality is ever before me.
Truth be known, I do have selfish motives behind writing this book. I have never been one that seeks professional therapy although I personally believe that practice is not only helpful to many but also necessary in this broken world that we live in. I, like so many others have many hardships and scars from my past and present. Music and songwriting has served as excellent antidotes for me in the past as a means of coping through times of difficulty.
Writing Mastering Failure is my personal therapy session on an entirely different scale. In writing this piece I hope to be even more transparent and candid than ever.
FAILURE IS A GOOD THING
Body builders know that failure is a good thing. They understand that you can’t grow without consistently breaking down their muscles. What makes a professional body builder different from the rest of us is that they have mastered the ability to recover and then continue to bring their muscles to failure at even greater heights over and over again.
Mastering the ability to recover fast after failure and then having the courage to continue on knowing that its impossible to grow further without failing again makes a champion.
So how do we learn to cope and take control of our negative thoughts that are inevitable to creep up after we have suffered some form of defeat? Life is some time gracious and gives us gifts of relief that allows us to get through these periods.
Growing up I lived with an abusive father that would often beat my mother severely. My mother would from time to time escape in the night to avoid being beaten and often need time to heal both physically and emotionally.
If my mother wasn’t able to find a safe zone in a hotel room, my grandparent’s house or my Aunt Kathy’s, she would have never made it through the night. These were temporary moments of grace. It wouldn’t be too long until Gary, my stepfather, would find us. I remember one time my mother had reached her end and she spoke of ending it all by taking her life. The truth is I thought about ending my life all the time as well. Even in times of brutal mental and physical abuse perpetrated on my mom, brother Noble and I, I believe there was an invisible hand that protecting us.
We had our faith in God, our family support system and friends that helped us cope recover and make it to the next moment of failure. The traumatic experiences of my childhood have followed me throughout my life. In my adult years I have experienced many more times of failure as well.
There are times I have said “God can I get a break from these trials even for a season so that I can recover”. Now I have learned that failure is apart of the life of a champion. If you have experiences great challenges and even great failure its because you have the ability to be a champion. There is a scripture in the bible that say’s “God will never put more on you than you can handle”. It takes a lot of faith to believe that when all hell is breaking loose.
I think its ok to say God I can’t take this anymore, can You please take this away from me? Even Jesus said this in his own words. Trusting that scripture to be true, Jesus went forward even unto death knowing he would rise again even stronger.
Failure on some level is the best possible tool to refine us as long as we don’t allow it to define us. Rising above failure and becoming stronger is how we should be defined.
The great Mohamed Ali could never have been considered the greatest without haven’t lost three time in order to regain the belt as many times as he did. Many people know that Babe Ruth hit more home runs in his heyday than any single player but most don’t know that he also had the most strikeouts.
I can certainly relate to striking out. Many times in my life my home runs turn out to be strikeouts at the some time. In 2008 I gave myself a 90-day goal to secure a co-publishing deal for a talented writer named Rob Allen. I had been working with Rob for several years. Ninety days to the day I, along with his attorney, was able to secure the biggest single publishing deal of 2008. It wasn’t long after that I would go through a very difficult breaking of that business relationship and experience some pretty harsh failures.
That experience was very embarrassing as it involved some pretty famous artists that I hated to lose face with. After that experience I had to start over from scratch. I didn’t want to be defined by the fall out of the business relationship but rather the building of another one that would be even greater. I was very upset at the thought that I was hurt trying to help one artist. I decided to double down on that experience I guess. In 2009 I formed the Recording Artists Guild and have helped thousands of artists since then.
Trying to avoid failure would be like a baby not attempting to crawl. I think subconsciously we often don’t go after our goals because of the fear of failure. When we are young we are fearless, then we learn that the unknown means that there is eventually pain.
Remember that scene from 8 mile? The most profound scene of the Eminem biopic was when he was going into a rap battle at the height of the drama. He did the one thing that I think we should all do at some point in our lives and that run towards our weakness. What I mean by running toward weakness means facing head on the painful parts of ourselves, past and present. By facing the music, pun intended, we take the power that it has over us and are then able to master it.
In some way that is what I am attempting to do with my writing. I’m attempting to take the power away from my failures.
In Dec of 2013 one of the most devastating things happen to me, I had a bad reputation. The truth is that I didn’t have a bad rep to the people that meant the most to me in my life. In fact in the community I lived and worked I still had a pretty good reputation but for the first time ever I had a bad name online.
Someone posted an anonymous complaint about my company and me on a slander website. This person obviously knew some private things about my company and I but made the post as a disgruntled customer. This person called me a womanizer, crook, incompetent fraud, and that’s the short list. The point is it was very hurtful and I had no way to defend myself against this anonymous stranger. Over the course of the next year this post rose to the top of all the search engines. Out of the blue I would get calls from friends of mine asking me “is it true, are you a scam artist?” Every time someone would ask me I would get angry and feel ashamed about it.
I wasn’t until I got a threatening call and letter from a business competitor named Jay Warsinske, who owns Indie Power and IES, fifteen months after the incident that it all came together. The letter that was written to me was in the same BOLD text them little TEXT style as the slanderous post.
Suddenly I recalled that when the post was written an employee that worked for me also worked for him at the same time. Many of the details about my personal life as well as my business that I told this employee was in this post, but I didn’t put 2 & 2 together until I got that letter.
I did feel a sense of relief finally knowing who did it but the fact remained that this fake post was still at the top of Google. I think for the first time in my life I had to be defensive minded. It dawned on me that this thing would never go away unless I attacked it with every fiber of my being. Through lots of research I found out that the best way to push negative things down was to have more positive things out there. In the age of cyber bulling the best way to tell your side of the story about you is to tell it each and every way you can.
To make a long story short in 2015 I complied evidence against Jay Warsinske that proved he was the one behind the fake post against RAG and me. Jay was found guilt of fraud, slander and defamation against me in the California courts. I am now submitting that judgment to Google and other search engines so they will take it down.
My name is Stuart
Byron Booker. This is me telling my truth, and facing my blemishes head on. This is me facing my pain and mastering failure.
