Dealing with Disappointment: Highlight Reel | Rollin’ With the Dolans

This episode is a highlight reel from our recent podcast on dealing with failure and disappointment. We share real stories from our own lives—Patrick’s marathon setback, the lessons of entrepreneurship, and how we help our kids process tough moments.

The big takeaway: failure isn’t the end, it’s a course correction, a building block, and a chance to grow.

We hope this short highlight encourages you to keep going, brush yourself off, and see setbacks as opportunities to learn.

Join the conversation with us at rollinwiththedolans.com

Don’t miss an episode—subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform. Find more at rollinwiththedolans.com or search #rollinwiththedolans on social media to join the conversation.

Transcript

Welcome to Rollin' with the Dolans. I'm Patrick Dolan. And I'm Tamekia Dolan. Our podcast focuses on the joys and challenges of blending families, our interracial marriage, parents and children of multiple ages, and the journey of entrepreneurship.

We share our daily life experiences with a positive but real perspective. Today we are gonna share some highlights of a recent podcast, uhoh. Okay. And today's topic is dealing with failure. So there's a couple of different ways you can deal with it, and we will get those at a high level. That is basically be paralyzed by it or motivated by it.

A lot of times as entrepreneurs, you have to change your mindset and you don't look at those failures as a failure, you look at it as research. A lot of times people are like, oh my gosh, I failed, and then they don't get up and recreate things because they're so paralyzed about the failure, when really it's not a failure. It was just God showing you.

And then all of a sudden, one day I heard a saying of “done is better than perfect.”

So I've run hundreds and hundreds of races, and last October I ran a marathon and I can give you about five excuses as to why. But nonetheless, I did not finish the marathon. The biggest thing is, you know, I just shook it off and it was like within a day I planned the next marathon and I did the next marathon. And the shortest turnaround of that time than ever wasn’t like a month, less than a month. It was like 27, 28 days or something like that.

I would say course correction because you learn from your quote-unquote failure.

I think that at a young age, it's good for them to understand and see that things are not gonna always go the way that they want it to, but I think that you have to follow that with a conversation so they don't see themselves as a failure. Because if you don't have a conversation about it, they're gonna think about it. There's so many different variables, whether or not you're an entrepreneur or if you work for a company or if, regardless, there's a lot of things involved that you can't control.

Focus on the positives as much as you can. It's not always easy. Brush yourself off and get up the next day and something's gonna happen.

I think my huge takeaway from this is don't look at it as a failure. Look at it as a learning opportunity or learning experience.