[four-minute read]
Whether or not you consider yourself a perfectionist in aspects of your life, consistently meeting your own expectations can feel like an uphill battle. From the way you conduct personal relationships to your professional growth, there’s a boogeyman in the closet that we ought to address outright: failure is a fact of life.
Many of the greatest artists, scientists, and leaders have grappled with feelings of failure. They persevered with courage and in doing so created art, discovered trusts, and advocated for solutions that did not exist before their efforts. But how can we turn our shortcomings into a tool for future growth?
This month, we invite you to join us as we explore the theme of innovation. At Oats Overnight, we’re no strangers to failure. But we’ve learned to make friends with our missteps as much as our successes, and reframe them in a way that encourages creative solutions that push us to new heights both as a business and as people.
What is Innovation?
There’s no how-to guide for leading a successful life (we checked). No matter the goals you set for yourself, there are bound to be learning moments along the way. The reality is, our failures tend to hang around in our minds much longer than our successes.
But when approached in the right frame of mind, failure can lead us to creative and innovative solutions to complicated problems that have no current solutions, or at least have no solutions that we are aware of. That's what innovation is. According to Robert Tucker, it's "finding better ways to add value, to get new things done, to be entrepreneurial, to energize and motivate people around you (or yourself!), to build buy-in and gain consensus to move forward.”
Let’s say you set a goal to walk 10,000 steps a day, but between work and your other daily commitments, you lack the time to get out on a long walk. To hit your daily step count, you have to take an innovative approach to the problem at hand. Maybe you can add steps incrementally by making a few small changes to your routine:
- You build 15-minute breaks into your workday to go on short walks around the office.
- You park farther away from the entrance to the grocery store to add steps while you run errands.
- Instead of sitting down to read the morning news, you find a few podcasts you can listen to on a morning walk.
These might not sound like significant innovations to your day, but these little changes can add up and ultimately help you achieve your goal. Or maybe the solution is to reevaluate the 10,000 step goal altogether, to ditch it and find a new one that solves your need for movement and health.
Why Do We Care About Innovation?
At Oats Overnight, we’re no strangers to missteps and failures. As a business, we see them as learning moments that can be applied to make our processes and our product better.
When we made the decision to set up our own manufacturing and flavor development in-house at our facilities in Tempe, AZ, the team knew it would be a massive challenge. But this innovation gave us greater control over the quality of our ingredients, the safety of our food, and ultimately helped us deliver the best possible product to our customers.
We continue to ask ourselves every day, not “did we succeed?”, but rather, “why did we succeed?” The same goes for our failures.
It’s true, much like in our personal lives, we still make mistakes as a business. But we don’t see our failures as more than an opportunity for growth and innovation so that we can continue to serve our customers with the healthy, protein-rich breakfast you know and love.
Join Our R&D Team
Our company’s story began around our founder’s kitchen table when he asked himself a simple question, “Can overnight oats be even more convenient than the make-it-yourself version?” What emerged after many rounds of experimentation was our mold-breaking Overnight Oats Shake. This spirit of innovation infuses everything we do, especially our collaboration with customers who help us develop flavors. We’d love to have you on our team and fuel your personal innovation with a nutrient dense breakfast, too.
If you need to restock your supply, check out some of our new flavors.
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