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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
In the in the life cycle, like, when we think about the soil, which I love to think about everything in relationship to a metaphor about soil, the most important ingredient for quality soil is compost, meaning dead waste material, like organic waste material, is the most important ingredient for fertile soil to make new growth possible. So to me, failure is just compost. Welcome to Plenti. I'm your host, Kate Northrup. And together, we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level.
Kate Northrup:Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty. Let's go fill our cups.
[voiceover]:Please note that the opinions and perspectives of the guests on the Plenty podcast are not necessarily reflective of the opinions and perspectives of Kate Northrup or anyone who works within the Kate Northrup brand.
Kate Northrup:So the other day, we posted a reel on Instagram about my museum of failures from the past 15 years, and it was inspired by a post my friend Amy Porterfield had done that I really resonated with. When I read about some of Amy's quote, unquote failures, it instantly made me feel connected, not alone, like there's nothing wrong with me, and I was like, let's make one of these folks because if it was helpful to me, it'll be helpful to other people in our community. And it really was. And one of the questions that I got afterwards was, yeah, but after looking at all your failures, and some of them were you you can go we'll link the post in the in the show notes, but, you know, one of them was, like, the time we went into the hole by a $125,000 by accident because something had gotten off track with our email tracking. Another one was how I invested $30 in developing an app that never saw the light of today.
Kate Northrup:So many others, just really a joyful list, and people somebody wrote, like, after I read all of these things, I'm just really wondering, like, how do you get back up after failing like that, which I think is, like, a funny question because I sort of read some subtext into it, which is like, wow. That's really bad. How did you recover? Maybe she wasn't thinking that. But the thing is I just don't relate to things not going the way I expected as failure.
Kate Northrup:My friend, Liz, was one of our Maven Masterclass back in the day when I had my origin membership, and she spoke about failure in a way I just absolutely loved that I wanna pass along to you. And what she said is she actually keeps a failure log, which is so hard. Liz is one of my absolute best friends, and she's very nerdy and organized like that. So she actually keeps keeps a Google Sheet of moments of failure and what happened kind of beforehand, what led to potentially that outcome and what she learned from it. And then she goes back and she revisits and it really helps her to integrate the lessons because they're I don't really think about things as a failure.
Kate Northrup:I just think about them. I mean, I'm not the first person to say this, but I just see them all as, oh, I tried something. It the outcome wasn't what I expected. The outcome was something different, so I learned. And this idea of failure proposes that there's some kind of way things should go that they didn't go.
Kate Northrup:And I don't actually believe in that. I mean, yeah, I do I have preferences for the way I wish they would go? Do I have desires? Do I have goals? You know, when we run a launch, do we have a particular number of people we wanna have registered so that we get a particular conversion rate and a particular number of students?
Kate Northrup:Of course. But I'm not in control of the universe. I'm only, you know, the agent, the the person in charge of my tiny corner of the universe. And my tiny corner of the universe, the only thing I have responsibility for and the only thing I can control ever, is how I show up. And my best arbiter for how I show up is how safe my body feels.
Kate Northrup:The thing is, when we're relating to something as a failure, we're then oftentimes relating to ourselves as a failure. And what that's signaling to our psyche and our body is that there's something wrong with us or that we've done something wrong. And as long as I'm out there doing my best, showing up, I don't believe I did anything wrong. I just was like, maybe I was new at it. You know, a couple years ago, we launched a program and I wanted a 100 students to sign up and we had 38.
Kate Northrup:And I could certainly have related to that as a failure because we didn't hit our goal, but we had 38 incredible students. And when I looked at it, you know, and I when I looked at the messaging of the launch, when I looked at the program promise, quite frankly, it was unclear. Like, it was unclear what we were offering. It was unclear what the result was that people were gonna get. It was kind of unclear what the problem was that we were solving and what the transformation was that people would receive, and it was a great learning experience.
Kate Northrup:One, I learned, wow, we have 38 people in our community who feel so connected to the work in our company that they'll just sign up even when I'm not clear. So I took that as a freaking win. And then secondly, I learned a lot about messaging, and I learned a lot about message clarity, and I have never gone out there with a promo where I wasn't super clear on what is the problem we're solving, how are we solving it, and what's the transformation people are gonna experience. So that learning experience has impacted probably 5 or 6 launches since, and that lesson has made us 1,000,000 of dollars. And so to me, that's not a failure.
Kate Northrup:That was a really, really valuable lesson that if I was relating to that experience as a failure, what happens in the body, so if I'm in the old programming, the wounded nervous system of I've done something wrong, I failed, there's something wrong with me, or there's something wrong with my behavior, or it's wrong, or I'm bad, or or this is bad, or this is wrong, like anytime we're in resistance to what is and we are labeling it as bad and wrong, that can lead to dysregulation because that doesn't feel safe to my body. It doesn't feel safe to my body to say that was a failure, I failed. That kicks up all kinds of freeze response in me, and it might make it might cause anxiety in someone, which is a flight response or all sorts of things. But essentially, like, if we're relating to something even in the paradigm of of fail failure or success, first of all, it's a false binary. There are a lot of other choices other than failure and success, and it's a huge spectrum.
Kate Northrup:And there's no such thing as like something going the way it was supposed to go or something not going the way it was supposed to go. There's just the way things went and then learning from it. And so when we relate to things in the paradigm of failure, we're not able to remain open to the lesson. So for example, if I were to have related to that launch as a failure, or even, you know, maybe that's not the best example because we still, it was still a a quote, unquote successful launch. We still had 38 people sign up.
Kate Northrup:There was 1 years ago where we promoted an event. We were gonna do this event in LA, and Mike and I were so excited about it. We promoted it to our list, which I think at the time was, like, at least 15 to 20000 people, 0 sign ups. Not one person signed up ever. So some people might be like, well, that was a failure.
Kate Northrup:I don't know. I mean, it I just looked at it, and I was like, oh, I did x, y, and z, and this is the result I got. So what can I learn from that? We don't need to label things as a success or as a failure. And if we do, I believe we shut down our capacity to receive all the lessons that are available because as soon as we've labeled something, even quite frankly as a success or as a failure, we kinda put our blinders on.
Kate Northrup:And now we're looking through the lens of binary, good, bad. It's either good or it's bad. And we're missing out on all the beautiful spectrum of colors in between, all the rich gray area, where we can be like, oh, that little nuanced Oh, so interesting. So when I say this to my email list, nobody signs up. Cool.
Kate Northrup:How can I apply that next time? What what do I wanna do about that? What ideas does that spark in me? And so when I look back over my quote unquote museum of failures, I don't I don't know. I'm just kinda like meh, water under the bridge.
Kate Northrup:Like, every single one of those times that I went into massive debt or put in a bunch of time and energy for something. Oh, another one we did that I didn't even put in the post, We invested, I don't know, 5 or $6,000 in, to produce this this this book, this ebook, and I started reading it. And I was like, we can't put this shit out. This is terrible. Like, we paid somebody to write it.
Kate Northrup:It was it was terrible. And so we just deepsixed the the the project. Like, to me, I think of those things more as fertilizer. So in the cycle of life, you know, in the in the life cycle, like, when we think about the soil, which I love to think about everything in relationship to a metaphor about soil, when we think about the soil, what we know is that, actually, one of the most important ingredients to high quality soil, nutrient dense soil that will make incredibly healthy, juicy crops that are going to feed people and feed animals and plants and be beautiful, all of that, the most important ingredient for quality soil is compost, meaning dead waste material. Like, organic waste material is the most important ingredient for fertile soil to make new growth possible.
Kate Northrup:So to me, failure is just compost. Right? Like, when I make dinner and there's some onion peels and, like, the part of the green beans that I didn't put into the soup and the weird part of the chicken that I don't wanna eat all that stuff. I'm not like, oh, my god. I failed at making dinner.
Kate Northrup:No. It's like a normal byproduct of creation. There's just gonna be parts that you didn't end up needing to use along the way, and that stuff goes in the compost bin, and it goes back to the earth to fertilize new growth. It's part of a closed regenerative cycle. So in our businesses, in our lives, as it relates to our creativity, our productivity, if we can really see how we are our own creative cycle is a closed ecosystem where nothing is ever wasted.
Kate Northrup:And if we can treat it that way, our supposed failures or the stuff that didn't turn out the way we thought it was going to turn out, which is, like, pretty much all of life, right, or most things, that stuff can fertilize the stuff we do next. If we treat it as compost as opposed to I screwed up, there's something wrong with me, I did something wrong. Because when we're in that paradigm, we get immobilized. We get stuck because then we've set up, again, a losing game for ourselves where we either win or lose, which is just false. There is no binary of success and failure.
Kate Northrup:And if we're treating our past experiences in the binary of success and failure, that's going to create more stress in the body because now there's an added layer of pressure of, like, ah, I'm going out here again, but that time I failed. So now I'm dysregulated. So now I'm not in my full creativity. Now I'm not in my full capacity. Now I'm not fully problem solving the way I need to, and I can't even freaking remember the lessons I learned from the last time because I'm in a false paradigm of win and lose, failure and success, where I've now so massively narrowed my awareness because I'm dysregulated, and so I can't even show up as the fullness of who I want to be.
Kate Northrup:So I would just say, let's rename failure as compost. Let's let it re nutrient our new growth. Let's let it fertilize what's coming next by infusing what's coming next, our next project, our next round with the lessons from the past experience that we learned from. So I hope that was helpful. That is how I relate to things that didn't go the way I wanted them to.
Kate Northrup:I call them compost, I recommend you do too. And you will have the most fertile creative productivity if you do. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Plenty.
Kate Northrup:If you enjoyed it, make sure you subscribe, leave a rating, leave a review. That's one of the best ways that you can ensure to spread the abundance of plenty with others. You can even text it to a friend and tell them to listen in. And if you want even more support to expand your abundance, head over to katenorthrop.comforward/breakthroughs, where you can grab my free money breakthrough guide that details the biggest money breakthroughs from some of the top earning women I know, plus a mini lesson accompanying it with my own biggest money breakthroughs and a nervous system healing tool for you to expand your abundance. Again, that's over at katenorthrop.comforward/breakthroughs.
Kate Northrup:See you next time.