Big Weed by Christian Hageseth Page A

right? We talked about this. We’re finished. We can’t pay our rent next month.”
    He started to say he was sorry, but I heard it all as an excuse. I hung up the phone and sulked.
    â€œWhat happened?” my wife said.
    I didn’t want to tell her. I felt uncomfortable. After all, she’d been so ashamed of my new venture that she’d refused to tell her father about it.
    â€œIt’s nothing,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “It’s just . . . our numbers are down for the third harvest.”
    My mind was racing. What was I going to tell Mr. Pink? We had used up our seed money in nine months’ time. Now we were officially out of cash. I tried to calm myself, but it was tough. What I was thinking, but did not say, was We are fucked, we are fucked, we are fucked.
    â€œI told you so,” my wife said.
    I clenched my jaw, tensed the muscles across my back and shoulders, and ratcheted my blood pressure way up. My mind raced. My field of vision narrowed as I squeezed the steering wheel. We may have been driving in silence, but I was screaming in my mind the whole time.

4
    The Beauty of Failure
    So our initial entry into the legal marijuana industry was a financial failure.
    The only reasonable response to that situation was to try again.
    Contrary to what people think, having failures—yes, multiple failures—does not necessarily mean that your business will fail. All it means is that the course of action you took did not bear fruit that time around. It’s possible that that course of action will never bear fruit. It’s equally possible that that course of action could bear fruit sometime in the future, given a set of subtly different circumstances.
    I see this a lot among entrepreneurs. They all profess to accept that business, like life, is about trial and error, but then they take very few chances. Face it: Failure is etched into every strand of our DNA. It’s our human legacy. A baby takes her first few steps and falls. Does she sit there and resolve never to walk again? No—she gets right up and tries again. She’s determined to claim her birthright as a bipedal organism.
    If you are too risk averse, you will never learn anything. Failures are instructive. They force us to grow. If you could teach all there was to know about business in a business school, every new start-upwould succeed. But that’s impossible. Failures are the critical 90 percent—the stuff they can’t teach in school.
    I can say this now, with the aid of hindsight, as the founder of a business that makes millions a year growing and selling legal marijuana. But I assure you that I was not spouting such wisdom back in 2010, after my first attempts in the cannabis industry imploded.
    No. Back then I was pissed—but resolved to do better and ready to fight on.
    I knew we had to try again. I had to sit down with Mr. Pink and investigate our options.
    I had been around the block enough times to know that I was merely looking at Failure No. 1. There would be more. (You’ll hear about them, believe me.) People who were around me during this time sometimes found the courage to ask: How do you know you can make this work? Didn’t you recently preside over the failure of your own real estate company? You didn’t try to revive that failing business. Why redouble your efforts on behalf of this strange new business of weed?
    My answer is simple. At that point in time, there’s a critical element that weed had that no other industry had: opportunity.
    In 2010, the world economy was in near collapse. Existing industries, from real estate to banking to technology to consumer goods, were all being challenged by the largest market downturn in recent memory.
    Weed was wide open.
    Just because we had enjoyed our first spectacular failure did not mean weed had gone bust. Far from it. The profits were out there. We just had to get more creative and put into practice the