Depression is a luxurious response to failure | Bob Tuschman '79

Bob Tuschman ‘79 is the General Manager & Senior Vice President of Food Network.

Q. Tell me about a time you failed.

A. There are so many times I failed because in TV about 70% of the shows that you launch don't work out. We went through a period here at Food Network a few years ago where our ratings for the first time since I’d been here started declining. We had been in an upward arc for years and years and years and they started going down, and went down pretty steeply. I was devastated by it because I'm the head of programming. So I get our daily report card of how our programs did last night. I was taking it too personally. I was actually really depressed because our ratings were down.

My boss called me into our office and said, “You're a senior leader of this company. You can't afford to be depressed. You need to lead people out of this. You can't get sunk down into it.” The minute she said that it woke me up. I realized, “You know what? Depression is a luxury. It's a luxurious response to failure.” It's nice to think, “I want to go and have a drink and be depressed and to be dressed in black and to be a romantic about it.” You can't afford that in business. You have to be above failure. So you have to look at failure with very clear eyes and say, “Ok, let's analyze why it failed. What didn’t we do right?” Not let it get you down, but let it get you to the next level up. And say, “I'm going to learn from that, and never do that again, and correct those flaws, and give a better product next time.” Unfortunately it took me a long time to realize how to react to failure and how to not be brought down by it.

Find Mr. Tuschman's full interview here: https://careerservices.princeton.edu/...

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CAREER & LIFE VISION CONVERSATIONS is a video series by Princeton Career Services highlighting lessons learned by inspiring Princetonians. For the whole series visit: https://careerservices.princeton.edu/...
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Produced by Lisa Einstein '13
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