My Dad Lost an Investor Because His Hands Shook

My dad lost an investor because his hands shook during a pitch. That failure is the actual reason Decker Communications exists.

Before he started DCI, he was pitching investors on a documentary. He knew the material cold. He believed in it. He still lost the deal, because he came across nervous in the room, and nervous reads as unprepared even when it isn't.

Around the same time, he was producing a different film, Speaking Effectively — to One or One Thousand, and needed real before-and-after footage of people learning to communicate. So he put together a two-day course and filmed participants at the start and the end, just to close the film on a strong note.

The course worked. And the two things landed at once: he'd just lost real money to exactly the skill his own course was teaching people, in two days, on camera. Decker Communications was born in 1979 out of that combination, not the win. The loss, plus the accidental proof sitting right next to it that the loss was fixable.

It's still a family business. My brother and sister-in-law run it today, at Decker.com, still built on that same realization.

I think about this every time a failure and a half-finished side project show up close together in my own work. The instinct is to treat them as unrelated. Sometimes they're the same signal, arriving from two directions at once.

What failure and what side project in your life might actually be pointing at the same thing?