The ROI of Failure

Spend enough time with successful entrepreneurs and high earners trying to understand their journey and you will notice that the conversation often makes its way to what did not work. What is interesting is that these stories tend to be shared with something closer to gratitude than regret, because those experiences are usually where the real education happened.

If the best investment you can make is in yourself, as almost every guest on the Building Wealth Without Borders podcast has said in some form, then it follows that the highest-return activities are the ones that force you to learn more about yourself. Failure tends to do exactly that. It is uncomfortable but what it reveals about your instincts, your strengths and your blind spots is something that years of playing it safe rarely can.

When I did not get the A* in maths I needed to get onto any of the courses I had applied for, the gap year that followed felt like a setback. It turned out to be what started my savings journey and sparked my interest in personal finance, which is now the foundation of everything I do professionally. By the time I arrived at university, I had a depth of real experience that made landing internships far easier than it was for my peers.

I applied to LSE twice, was rejected both times, and applied for the same course on each attempt. After the second rejection I finally stopped and looked at what I was actually chasing. The course I kept pushing for was not right for me. The course I eventually ended up studying was actually what I had been looking for.

Early in my investing journey, I picked stocks based on my own intuition. That process taught me fairly quickly that stock picking was not the right approach for me, and that ETFs were simply a better strategy for my investment strategy.

Landing my dream job at JPMorgan in my second year of university was supposed to be the beginning of something big. I had a vision of building a career in banking and becoming exactly the kind of visible, successful woman in finance I had always looked up to. The reality of the job dismantled that idea almost immediately, which turned out to be useful. It pushed me to look seriously at other ways to build income, and I am glad it did.

When I started creating content, I tried almost everything before I found what worked. Vlogs, sit-down videos, travel content. Each one taught me something about where my strengths were, and more usefully, where they were not. None of them quite fit until I landed on podcasting, which grew faster than anything else I had tried.

Building the business behind my content came with its own set of lessons. Creating content across different countries meant my audience was spread across the world, which made it difficult to work with brands that wanted more than half their reach concentrated in a single geography. That friction pushed me to build something designed specifically for a global audience, and that has since become one of the stronger selling points when it comes to brand partnerships.

I could keep going, and the list would only get more personal. What I have come to understand is that failure is not a detour on the road to figuring out your money and your career. It is part of it. The people who build well tend to have failed at something and, more importantly, they extracted the lesson rather than just absorbed the loss. If something has not worked out recently, the most useful thing you can do is sit with it long enough to understand what it is telling you. The return on that kind of reflection, over time, tends to be higher than most people expect. Seek out the experiences that will force you to learn about yourself, because those tend to be the ones that compound. That is the ROI of failure. The question is whether you are paying close enough attention to collect it.

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This week’s guest is Dr Wesley Ogude, a qualified accountant, former Finance Director, and CEO of Springwells Group, a wealth creation and preservation consultancy based in Toronto. Going from the bottom 1% to the top 1% in global wealth is no small feat, and this was the conversation that made me realise how little I actually understood about holding onto what you build.

The idea that stayed with me most is entropy. The natural state of any system, left alone, is to move towards disorder, and wealth is no different. What unsettled me was the realisation that the structures most of us put in place to protect what we have built, the wills, the inheritance arrangements, the vehicles we are told will preserve wealth across generations, are often not enough. In many cases, they actively contribute to the very erosion they were designed to prevent. What you think is protecting your wealth may actually be accelerating its decline. It’s a good one.

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