Link to podcast: Learning From Failure
Welcome to DPC Pediatrician. We’re Dr. Phil Boucher and Dr.
Marina Capella,
two DPC pediatricians who are on a mission to share our love of direct primary care with you.
Welcome everyone to another episode of DPC Pediatricians. Today, Phil and I are going to have a conversation that hopefully you will learn something from about failure and specifically about learning from failure. If you are human, which all of you are, hopefully, you have experienced failure in your life,
whether it was the little failures as a child or in college or at some point in relationships or whether it was big failures in other ways. If you’re human, you’ve experienced failure. And I certainly have. Phil, have you? Are you human?
Yes. I mean, I imagine there are chatbots listening in that have never failed to, but yes, loads of failures. I was talking about on the last episode, how I wish I had a list of all the things that I ever tried that didn’t work out or that failed at,
because I think that that would help paint the picture of all the things that I was okay with trying that didn’t end up being something that worked out in the end.
Yeah. And the reason we’re talking about this is that in the world of entrepreneurship, it’s really important to learn how to fail, but learn from that failure and not let it stop you from achieving your goals. Some people say that entrepreneurship is the art of learning to fail fast.
but failing and then saying, okay, what did I learn from this? How can I pivot? How can I change my approach, my strategy, and then continuing forward and trying the next iteration of your business, right? And so failure can happen in the business world in terms of like marketing.
We try advertising our services in a certain way and it doesn’t work. And so we don’t have to say, well, I tried, I throw in the towel, I give up, I guess I’m just not meant to be. a DPC physician, right? We can say, well, that didn’t work.
What other options are there and what will work for me and for my community and my local economy, right? So it’s really important to have this skill of being okay with failure in some ways. And I think as pediatricians, we specifically understand this from a unique perspective because we see babies grow into adults and on that path,
Kids are learning constantly through failure. So the first time they learn to sit up, they’re toppling over. First time they learn to crawl, they’re maybe falling on their belly. When they learn to walk and run, they’re falling a lot, right? And so it’s a completely normal part of development and of the human experience to fail.
And in order to get good at something, you have to be willing to be bad at it first, right? In our medical culture, in the culture that we’ve been sort of raised in, in order to become physicians, failure is often seen as a terrible, terrible thing. Because if we failed organic chemistry, or if we failed the MCAT,
or if we failed a rotation or a board exam, that had really big consequences. And even worse, if we failed to administer a medication properly or perform a procedure properly, the patient’s life was at risk. And that particularly has ingrained us with this very deep fear of failure.
We don’t want to fail.
Yeah, exactly. It has big consequences. It has had big consequences historically for us. So we have to kind of reacquaint ourselves with this ability to fail in a realm that is not as risky as patient care, right? In this realm of entrepreneurship. So Phil, give me an example of somewhere where you failed.
It could be earlier in your, you know, as a pre-med or in your earlier life or in your DPC practice or anywhere.
I mean, I think I’ve had so many that I don’t have to go back very far. I think in the big picture, I want to just relate to what you said all there. And I think that the hardest thing is that… There’s a lot of risk involved in entrepreneurship and it feels like the risk is so
high that I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing because it’s safer. But if we’re willing to get in there and then be okay with, oh, that didn’t really work out or that didn’t really go as I thought, that those are ways that we can learn and then iterate from there. Like, okay, this didn’t work.
but this is a different way so a recent example is last fall i was like we should have a virtual membership option because the blueberry pediatrics is huge and popular and parents love being able to text well obviously everyone would love to
be able to do that and so we took the time we set up the websites we came up with the ideas we said this is how we’re going to do it and then never really followed through and it was all me like i know that I could have pushed it harder and I could have tried more.
And then just a million other things came up and a million different other both opportunities and challenges. And so that one is like on the back burner right now. And it feels a little bit like a failure because it didn’t take off the way that I had hoped.
And I don’t think that it would take off right now if I tried to launch it because it’s summer and people don’t need all of the help with fevers and rashes and those sorts of things to the same degree. So that was a temporary failure. And I think there’s still an opportunity for it perhaps in the future.
But we put a lot more time investment in than we’ve gotten out of it to date. And yet I think it’s given us an opportunity to learn what do our patients really need? What do people really need to understand about our practice model for it to be the right fit for them?
And one of the things that it did open up is it helped us to realize, okay, if, if patients are moving to somewhere else in the state, or they’re saying, we’re really not using your services as much. So we’re going to leave and go to another pediatrician. Well, well, well, well, well, before you go,
we have a virtual option. Maybe that would be a good fit for you. And so that was something that wasn’t intended, but it was a way to retain patients that were thinking of leaving or moving somewhere or something like that. So it has actually benefited us in a way that we didn’t expect,
which is now we have this virtual option that we can essentially downgrade patients to or sidegrade them to of here’s what’s available to you. And so that was an example of a failure. another one is a pharmacy we wanted to start a pharmacy in our clinic in nebraska
you can physicians can prescribe and there’s family practice offices that do that and and we went through a lot to get there i mean i had the idea and then i’m on panda or andameds like ordering medications the same day i’m My team is like, okay, so you do know that you can’t just give it out.
You have to get a pharmacy license from the state and we have to have bottles to put it in and we have to get graduated cylinders so that you can pour it out here, slow your roll a little bit here. And so we have a cabinet full of them. And honestly,
then we were going through some EMR struggles and challenges and transitions and the label printer that we got and the system that we set up. it just collapsed in on itself. And we had other things on our plate. And so we have a nice glass graduated cylinder set and a bunch of dry amoxicillin
and triamcinolone and Zofran and things like that in a cabinet that we don’t use. And that might be something that we will explore again. I think one of the learning points from that was Patients don’t come to us because they can get their amoxicillin, which is only $4 just down the street.
Like it’s a nice thing that we can do, but it’s not like people are going to be like, oh, They got my amoxicillin and ceftonir that I need three times per year. Maybe I’m going to switch to them. So it was kind of a good learning point for me of like,
what do patients really need versus what do I think would be cool to be able to say that we can do? Because it would be cool to say, Hey, it’s one-stop shop, but nobody is expecting that anyways. And so it was a failure. Like it didn’t work out. We tried it.
We might try it again in the future, but it, it, kind of burned and how much it took and like working with a vendor to set it up with our emr blah blah blah blah there were lots of reasons it didn’t work out we learned from it we have a bunch of amoxicillin that
we will not be able to unload.
Right. Yeah. And that’s so interesting because the in-house dispensing is definitely something that’s like heralded in the adult DPC community. And I can understand why, where you have most of your adults who are on at least one chronic medication and dispensing in-house really ups the convenience and the value that you give to your patients.
With pediatrics, when most of our kids are… Rarely taking medications, it’s a harder sell and it’s a harder value proposition. Also, I had the same experience of just experiencing the pain of like label printers and like the inventory and all of that stuff. I imagine that I wonder you’re in a kind of smaller town, relatively speaking.
if you were in like the middle of the Bronx or something where like transportation is difficult, like I think that that would be different, right? Or the middle of any crowded city where transportation is more difficult, getting to the pharmacy is more difficult. So yeah, it’s interesting. I’m curious, Phil.
So because you are such a dominant force in the world of social media, you have like a gajillion posts out there have you ever like created a post that you just felt like just flopped or got criticized or it felt like a failure i’m
curious all the time tons yeah tell me well and and to protect myself against that i don’t even look at them once i put them out and so i don’t really like keep track of how good posts do and i can usually like retrospectively be like, okay,
this is why that one flopped or my message didn’t come across very clear here. I can’t think of one where I had to like walk it back and be like, I said the wrong thing or I misspoke and I don’t like delete things that I made that reflect my opinion. because I wouldn’t want, like it’s out there.
Like I need to own that and that sort of thing. Most of the posts don’t do as well as I would like, but usually I’m just like, oh, that’s probably why this one didn’t land. Or I kind of stumbled when I was starting And that’s probably why this one didn’t land.
So all of those, like I expect them not to do well. And then I kind of just, I don’t know, I’m not explaining very well how I approach that, because I do put out a lot of stuff on social media.
But essentially, every time I put it out, it’s just me testing to see, can I get away with this? And does this resonate with people? And how can I make it more easily, more easier and more streamlined? And so that’s kind of always my approach online to post on Instagram and Facebook and those sorts of places.
And so I don’t really, I like it when a post does well, but it doesn’t bother me when it doesn’t because I just take ownership or blame the algorithm and then move forward. Yeah. So I guess I think a lot of them flop because if they flop,
it’s usually because I’m trying to get them to join my practice or something along those lines. And most people are not going to, most of my followers are not going to do that or they already are in my practice. And so it just doesn’t reach people and educate people the way it should because
it’s too me focused and not them focused. So I guess that’s a very circuitous route to how I fail on Instagram every day.
Uh-huh. Yeah. I mean, I can imagine that some people would have the experience of like posting something about the importance of the MMR vaccine, for example, right now we are in the middle of a measles outbreak. So, and then having some crazy mom somewhere stitch your video and criticize it or talk about something.
There are a lot of people who do crazy things on social media, right? Yeah. So that is a possibility. But I love your approach. First of all, that I just don’t look at it because then you’re just opening the door to all the craziness that exists.
Oh, right. Like I already know what people are going to say to a measles post, which I just did have a recent measles post that got a lot of traction and like a lot of people saw it and commented on it. And maybe 1% were negative and you remember those negative ones. I mean,
you remember every failure much more than the fact that you had all these successes that brought you to where you are. You remember those failures. And so, yeah, I try not to even look back. And I like feel good about my pediatric knowledge and experience and expertise that
a mom or dad on Instagram isn’t going to rile me up because I already know what to expect.
Uh-huh. Yeah, I remember early on when I was playing with social media, when I first opened, I did a post that just kind of advertised some of the procedures that I do. And circumcision was listed on it. And some random mom posted, I can’t believe you’re… an integrative pediatrician and you do circumference. Okay.
So I learned something from that and I was like, okay, I guess that’s probably something I don’t need to talk about on social media because I don’t really want to open the door to that portion of the population.
So yeah, those are two things that I don’t talk about that. And you will never see me a picture of one of my kids in their car seat on social media because Those are the things more than vaccines. If you post a picture of a kid in their car seat and it’s not perfect,
you will get more messages than ever.
You’ll get tarred and feathered for it.
Totally, yes. Okay. Can you share with us a failure that’s on your mind?
Failure. Well, I have a lot too. Well, and it’s kind of funny because when you say Phil, I think most people think of you as wildly successful, right? And so when you say, oh, I have too many to count, it’s kind of funny. And then I also have too many to count.
And probably the perception by some people is like, how can that be? But it’s it very much is. And I think that points to how we as people are just so much more complicated than what you see on the surface. Right. And the current version of ourselves is because of all those past experiences,
including the good and the bad. So I think I will be a little vulnerable and share that. I’ve shared it in other places publicly and with my mentees all the time, which is actually really helpful for them, that I actually failed as a pre-med pretty horribly.
So I went to Stanford University and I was suddenly a very, very tiny fish in a very big pond. And I did not come from… background where I was really well prepared for college I did well but it kicked my butt and so I wanted to major in biology and the very first day your sophomore year
you’re supposed to take what’s called the bio core and it’s this series of three quarters of just all of the intensive foundational biology and everything from cell biology to plant biology gotcha And it kicked my butt. I actually got two Ds and an F in those courses, which was really, really devastating and embarrassing at the time.
And I refused to go see any counselors or advisors because I thought they’re going to look at these grades and they’re going to say, you should choose a different career. And I’m pretty sure that’s what would have happened even now. Totally. The thing is, I didn’t let that define me. And I didn’t, I mean,
I was pretty depressed about it, but I said, I’m not going to let this get in the way of me accomplishing my goal to get to med school. And so the next year I retook all of those courses and I started taking other, all the other pre-med courses too. And I did much better.
I still didn’t get straight A’s because if you want to know a gunner, you be a pre-med at Stanford. I mean, those gunners are like just a different level, but, and it’s a combination of factors, but yeah, I ended up getting much, much better grades, good enough to continue on the path towards medicine.
And I took a gap year because I knew that that affected my GPA, but I kept going, I kept trying, I kept improving my study skills and everything. And it was good enough. And then I ended up doing well on the MCAT and got into med school.
And so that I think was sort of my like really earlier in life foundational failure. But the thing that I’m really grateful for now about now is that I think that that failure taught me a lot of grit. It taught me at a pretty early stage of my life that just because I fail,
it doesn’t mean that I can’t accomplish my goal. It just means that I have to maybe take longer. I have to be more creative. I have to figure out ways that work for me, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the road. It can be a lesson. It can be a growth experience.
It can be a part of my evolution as opposed to just, well, and there’s so many like mentees that I work with that they fail organic chemistry or they get a C in biochemistry, whatever it is, and they want to give up. And because of that experience, I’m able to help mentor these students now and say, Hey,
like I’m an example of someone who did not let that to find me. And if I can do it, you can do it too. And so as much as that really, really sucked at the time, I’m really grateful in retrospect for that experience because
it helped me to realize my potential and to just develop more, more resilience in life. And yeah. So, and then actually med school was also hard. I had to take an extra year. I was pretty depressed and even a little suicidal in med school. And once again, it was like, am I going to let this stop me?
Am I going to let this define me? And thankfully the answer was no. And I just, I took a break. I took a pause. I resumed my studies. And once I got into clinical medicine, thank God, I think my weakness was just sitting in classrooms and taking tests all day. I just don’t thrive in that environment.
But once I was on the wards and I was actually seeing patients and working with people, that’s where I really blossomed and thrived and, and residency, which was a much more positive and smooth experience. But yeah, Yeah, those were big, I mean, kind of big failures in my life. But I’m grateful because they taught me that perseverance,
that grit, that resilience, and what I was capable of overcoming. And I think that in part, I’ve been able to do what I do now in the world of DPC, because I learned those lessons early and have been able to continue to build on them and build on them and build on them. So,
yeah, I think, I mean, it’s so kind of you to share those very vulnerable failures that you had and how you learned and grew from them. And I think that’s the thing that physicians are often unwilling to do is like be well, one, be vulnerable and just share what our weaknesses and failures have been. But two,
put ourselves out there in a way that we might fail again, and then we might have to pivot again. And I think the thing that I always try and impress upon physicians when they’re like, no, no, I could fail is like, yeah, but what happens if you fail?
Like, what would be the worst thing that could possibly happen? to somebody that has the credentials that you have the experience and the contacts that you have and the ability to pivot in like 17 different directions that you have well if this failure happens like it’s not like you have to go back to the
start you just kind of go that direction then and then go that direction then go that direction exactly like you can do all of those things because you’ve done all of these really hard things before that like you can do a bunch of hard things again as you go
Absolutely. There’s this really fantastic cartoon called XKCD. And one of my favorite cartoons from them shows like a little graph with an X and Y axis. And it says what we think progress looks like. And it’s just like a straight line, diagonal line from A to B.
And then it has another one that says what reality looks like. And it’s all of these like little like ups and downs and ups and downs from A to B. And I think that that’s so true that when we think of accomplishing the things that we want to accomplish in life, in business, in our career,
often we just want the straight path, right? We want someone to give us the magic formula that will just set the yellow brick road in front of us and just lead us to our goal. And that’s not the case for most people’s reality, right? Is that
Accomplishing what we want in life really takes trial and failure and creativity and pivoting and iterations of things. And that’s okay. If we go into it with the mindset that this is what it’s going to be like, like as much as I would like it to be perfect, it’s not going to be perfect. Yeah.
And I’m probably going to experience some barriers and I’m going to have to jump over some hurdles and I’m going to try things that don’t work in order to find things that do work. If we go into it with that mindset, it’s so much easier emotionally, psychologically, because when those things happen, then we’re like, oh, yeah,
I guess I was expecting that. This is what I was told. would happen. And this is just part of the process. It doesn’t mean that I’m a capital F failure. It doesn’t mean that I’m never going to reach my goal. It just means that I have to be creative. I have to try something else.
I have to pivot. And that is a very liberating mindset to adopt.
Right. Yeah, I think that that really frees you up when you can say, well, I’m going to try this. I’m going to give it my all. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll just do this. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll do this. Or if it doesn’t work, I don’t know what I’ll do,
but I know that I’ll lean on my intuition and my gut and my experience and expertise and training and all those sorts of things and figure out the next little iteration from there and keep going. So I think that’s huge. And I think that hopefully this whole conversation has just been motivational to those that are
either on the fence about going to DPC to like jump in and don’t let the fear of failure stop you. And those that are in the midst of it and feeling like a failure in some aspects of it to keep going or to keep pivoting or to keep iterating. And you don’t have to do it by yourself.
there’s a whole community that can surround you and give you more ideas and talk through those things with you so that as you’re going through and you’re feeling like i kind of ran into a brick wall here and then i turned and there was another
brick wall that like there’s a way to get past all those brick walls and you don’t have to do it by yourself so hopefully that that yeah this conversation has been
motivational in that way yeah i hope so too and for those of you that don’t know phil and i offer one-on-one consulting you can find more details on dpcpediatrician.com You can talk to us, set up a time to meet with us for 30 or 60 minutes, whatever you need.
One-on-one, if you need just an extra level of support, like we’re here. We’ve gone through hard things. We’ve failed in our own ways. I didn’t go into details, but during my first year in DPC, I failed a lot at trying different marketing techniques and different offerings and different pricing structures and things like that.
And I’ve modified along the way and I’ve found things that work better for me. Marketing is still… my weakest point probably but i’m doing well enough i’m growing i think the word of mouth finally just helped with that so thanks all for listening and hopefully you found this conversation enlightening and motivating as well until next time
