WBW 39: Failure is Shitty especially when You Don't Learn from It with Louie Montalbo

Everybody makes mistakes at one point or another in their lives. It is a fact and no one can ever escape making mistakes – both big and small ones. Shit happens. However, the worst part happens when you get stuck on the big mistakes and haven’t really learned your lessons from it. It could reach a point where it prevents you from enjoying your life, where the past, present and even the future all seem unbearable. In this episode, Louie Montalbo shares with us his experience of encountering this failure and tips on how to make sure you don’t make these kinds of mistakes and that you know what opportunities to grab when you see them.

Who is Louie Montalbo?

After graduating from the Ateneo with a degree of Philophy in 1983. Louie pursued his Masters in Philosophy and then went on to work in the President’s Committee on the Bases. After this, he went on to work at the Dept of Health, ChristoffelBlindenmission Change Consultants and Leaders for Health Program and did a lot of consulting work at the time involving major companies and instututions such as PLDT, ABS-CBN, Toyota, World Bank, USAID, the new Medical City Hospital.

As of the moment, he is part of the faculty at the Ateneo Graduate School of Business and Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health, passing on his knowledge and wisdom to the next generation of leaders.

Show notes:

What do you consider your greatest failure / challenge?

• Failure will be considered as such if you’ve not been able to surpass it, meaning the episode or the event in your life basically killed you – killed your spirit, your enthusiasm
• That’s the greatest failure that any person can ever experience
• In that regard, he felt that he practically lost everything three times in his life.
• During those three moments, everything that was very dear and important to him, he practically felt like he lost them. That he’s here still talking to everyone about it – means that he was able to overcome it.
• In terms of failure, there wasn’t really a greatest failure in the sense that he was able to survive all of them

What do you consider your greatest success?

• Greatest success was that he was able to survive all of them and not just survive but thrive despite those events in his life.

What do you mean by you lost everything?

• The sense that the present was unbearable, the past was too dark to go back to, and the future was almost hopeless
• You can’t stand where you are now, there is nothing to go back to and the future doesn’t hold any promise

What did you learn from this big booboo?

• It took him around two to three years to get out of debt
• He remembers the time when he and his friend would go to a burger joint, and they would not have enough cash to buy a burger because they were saving up to pay their debts
• Do your homework before you enter into something. You have to do your homework well! Just because you’re passionate about it does not mean you are going to be successful with it if you don’t do your homework well. Scope the business. Scope the enterprise. Do your due diligence very very well.
• Get the right people. People that you can really really trust and who you know you can entrust the business to.
• Just because the opportunity comes your way does not mean that you have to grab it. Internally, you should know what it is that you are passionate about because that is the very thing that will make you push through the obstacles. The gap between recklessness and timidity is pretty wide.
• When do you know when to grab an opportunity and when not to? I think that’s something you learn internally as you move through the different mistakes in life. As you move through different times, at a certain point, you will already have a gut feeling that as an opportunity comes up, whether you should grab the opportunity or not.
• Some do not take this opportunity because of fear. Some do because of recklessness and simply because its there. Either way, you could lose. When to spot an opportunity that comes your way that’s something worth pursuing, that is something that you learn. Some people might have been born with that kind of instinct, but it seems highly unlikely.
• Even a Henry Sy most probably learned that along the way. Very important in terms of being able to recognize what opportunity you should pursue and when. There are times when the opportunity comes up and it already passed and we did not grab it because of our fear, we lose also in that sense.

From what has happened, how do you now approach opportunities that come your way?

• Just a few months ago, he and a friend set up a micro financing business for small entrepreneurs. People open a letter of credit with us and they give them loans on certain terms. There is a lot of pressure to speed up the process. Someone offered them one hectare for a fishpond. They should have done that first. They went straight for a SM, when they could not even run a sari-sari store.
• Knowing how to pace yourself in terms of opportunities and yet being persistent in doing your work so it produces results
• It took him awhile before he could set up another business because of that – internally, to gain enough confidence to do that as well.