This session would be “real talk” about moments of failure in career. Dealing with that. Emotional suckage and coping. It’s a bit more of a round table discussion among all who attend. A “Fail Camp” where people can openly talk about moments where they lost, failed, didn’t reach their goal, etc. But most importantly – a conversation about what happened next. How did we move on. How long did that take? In an industry that is choke full of schadenfreude, it becomes hard to discuss these things. We often give “failure” a lot of props. “It’s okay to fail” – but we hardly ever address it head on and talk with folks who are comfortable discussing moments where things went wrong. Why is this and how can we rectify it?

Diversity:

We are ready and happy to talk about success. Panels can sometimes feel like pitches "We are soooo awesome!" But we avoid talking about the downers that happen in our careers. But this is part of professional development. Unfortunately it's a topic we rarely address.

I would love to create an open forum kind of space where people in the audience can talk about this openly as well. I wouldn't want it to be "war stories" from a select few. How we can accomplish this might be tough - but I imagine it would involve some "ringers"

Note: As for diversity of speakers - I haven't reached out to anyone about this, so I can imagine creating a very diverse panel. I wonder if Lauren Amico would be interested? Maybe Jared Keller, Marc Luckie, etc. Of course - it would require them to be comfortable with talking about some of their failures - but I'm confident we could find a diverse group of people to talk about this stuff.

Speakers:

David Cohn | AJ Plus | @digidave

Ethan Zuckerman | MIT (if we can get him) | @ethanz