Micah Baldwin is the sort of speaker with which  audiences can truly connect.  Listening to Micah speak about “Failure is Job One” at the first annual Wordcamp LA is like having a pint of beer with him.  He served-up his topic with 2 parts sincerity, 1 part off-the-cuff and zero parts  BS.

Micah (”mee-hah”) is best known for creating “Follow Fridays” on Twitter in addition to his work with Lijit .  He was quick to set the record straight by declaring, “Follow Friday’s was the result of my failure to connect friends via Twitter.”  He had my attention.

He went on to talk about how to fail and the rules of blogging, but his overarching message still rings in my head:

Failure is a process.  A failure is an event.

Losing is an ending.  A loser is a person.

Take a second to think about that.  His point was that failure is part of the journey to success.  It’s just an event in one’s personal or professional trek.  It doesn’t define us.  Rather, it helps season us with wisdom to help us better achieve our goals.  Ah, that’s the catch!  We have to have goals clearly defined before we can chalk-up any events as a “falure” or “success”.  Do’h!

This point is relevant to brand managers, marketers, mothers, entreprenuers, employees and any other human.  If we’re not setting goals and willing to experience failures, then we have eliminated any possiblity of success.   That sounds pretty grim, huh?  I didn’t think so either.

Are you setting goals for your personal life?  Are you setting goals at work?  The reality is that most of us don’t set and measure our goals, failures and successes.  You need to start if you want to experience real success as an individual and/or as part of a team.    What does this have to do with a blog or social media or you as a person?

It means that we need to screw things up once in a while.  We need to drop the ball with a loved one, feel the sting and learn from it.  We need to insert our feet in to our mouths in a social network, feel the the sting and learn from it.  We need to write crap blog posts that people hate, feel the sting and learn from it.

At the end of the day, if we are not evolving, then we are devolving in our jobs and in our lives.

Have some stories about a major screw up from which you gained a tremendous of wisdom or “never going to do that again”?

Leaving a trail of energized bloggers and speakers in its wake, the 1st Wordcamp LA, hosted by Wordpress, has come and gone like a toothless, sweaty caravan of carnies.  Austin Passy and the crew at Wordcamp LA couldn’t have selected a better venue for the kickoff to what attendees hope will be an annual event.

It was my first time visiting the LMU campus in Playa (Playa del Rey), though I’ve driven by it no fewer than 500 times since I’ve been living in LA.  Once I arrived it appeared to be a bit of a challenge to locate the registration table, but I quickly saw the Wordpress balloons and coffee table (not like the crappy Ikea table you have in your apartment) and was ready to get into the mix.  For what appeared to be a modest, grassroots event, Worpcamp LA packed a lot of punch.  So high was the caliber of attendees, speakers and organizers that I’d be remiss if I were to try and stuff all of its goodness into a single post.

I’ll follow this post with three successive articles about the sessions I attended (Ben Huh, Co-founder of FAIL blog and Icanhascheezburger.com; Micah Baldwin, of Lijit and Follow Fridays fame; Jim Turner, founder of One By One Media).  Though there were other panels that people raved about, I was only able to squeeze in a whopping three.  In the meantime, I think its worthknowing who was there and about what they spoke.  Check out the list of speakers below:

#wordcampla #benhuh #Genuine #brendon