How to turn setbacks into success | Amy Shoenthal

Elise Hu (0:04)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Today's episode of TED Talks Daily is presented by Walmart Business.

Most of us treat our biggest professional setbacks, the job that ended, the plan that fell through, the door that closed right as we reached for it, as detours away from success. Leadership coach and marketing consultant Amy Shoenthal spent years discovering the opposite. After interviewing hundreds of founders, executives, and cultural icons for a book on how people work through their biggest setbacks, she kept noticing the same pattern.

Amy Shoenthal (0:44)

In every interview, I saw a common theme. What they learned during their biggest setback, led them to their most successful venture.

Elise Hu (0:53)

In her talk from 2024, Amy shares the framework she built after three years of research, which she calls the setback cycle. And in a twist worthy of her research subject, 48 hours after she handed in the manuscript for the book, she was laid off from her full-time job.

The setback expert hit with one of the most common setbacks of all. But when she dug in to why setbacks work this way, the science surprised her.

Amy Shoenthal (1:19)

When we experience a setback, our brains undergo a dopamine dip. We think of a dopamine dip as a negative thing.

But dopamine is a plasticity inducer, which means it contributes to our mental flexibility and our resilience.

Elise Hu (1:34)

What Amy did next became the proof of her own idea. That's coming up.

Amy Shoenthal (1:42)

Think back to your biggest setback. Not an obstacle, not a mistake. A setback is defined as a reversal or check in progress. It's when you're on a path, you're moving forward, and you are unexpectedly bumped backwards. Through all my years as a journalist, I have interviewed hundreds of founders, business leaders, senators, celebrities, cultural icons. And in every interview, I saw a common theme.

What they learned during their biggest setback led them to their most successful venture. I wanted to know why. Perhaps if I could learn from it, I could understand it, and I could help others work through their next inevitable setback and come out the other side with a sense of resilience, creativity, and hopefully, success. So I spent three years doing a deep dive into research, interviewing psychologists, executive coaches, a neuroscientist, reading academic papers, every business book I could get my hands on, all to come up with the framework now known as the setback cycle.

I did all of this while holding down a full-time job at a marketing agency. Who does that? A lot of people, actually. Turns out, you don't make a lot of money writing books, so most of the authors you know and love are finding ways to earn an income elsewhere as well.

So at the end of that journey, I handed in my manuscript. I took a deep sigh of relief, and I was laid off from that full-time job 48 hours later. The setback expert finishes her work and is hit with one of the most common career setbacks.

Oh, I loved that job. I loved the camaraderie, the stability, the fact that I was able to look toward my family's future. We had just bought a house. We were finally feeling comfortable, and then bam, the reversal in progress.

But through my disappointment, I began to see, like many of the people I had interviewed, my setback was a green light. You see, this wasn't my first professional setback. Five years earlier, I gave birth to my daughter. And when I returned from my very brief 12-week maternity leave, I expected everything to be just as I'd left it. To go right back into the role I had always taken so much pride in, with nothing disrupted at all.

Every working parent will tell you that's a very unrealistic expectation. When I returned, I was told, the people who replaced me had done such a good job. Didn't they deserve these opportunities now? Shouldn't they continue doing that work? Not temporarily, but indefinitely.

I agreed they had done a great job, and I had all the respect in the world for them, and I wanted them to have every opportunity to succeed. But where did that leave me? Wasn't I still deserving of opportunities in the workplace? There was no discussion of what else I might work on now except that I had some availability.

Setbacks set the stage for reinvention. Your setback might look different than mine, but the cycle is the same. Because what happens when you sideline an ambitious person? An ambitious woman?

A mother? She turns her energy and ambition elsewhere. It is not a coincidence that my journalism career skyrocketed the same year I had my daughter. More writing led to more visibility, more opportunities to speak on stages, and being invited into more rooms where people started asking me, hey, would you ever consider doing marketing consulting on the side? By the time I was laid off, I had already formed my LLC. I had a whole invoicing system. I had at least one client on retainer, and I was getting ready for the biggest professional milestone of my career. The launch of my book about how leaders successfully work through their biggest setbacks.