This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings and welcome. You are listening to Side Hustle School, the daily podcast all about creating freedom through the form of a money-making project without putting your job. Now over the years, five years now, going into our sixth season, we've been telling all kinds of stories, case studies, reports from the trenches. They're not really trenches. It's just like a phrase, you know.
And a lot of things we talk about are, you know, success stories, right? That's just the nature of it. But last year I had this idea to focus on failure a bit. We created this new segment called Failure Friday. It is a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure.
Like what goes wrong, not just what goes right, but what goes wrong. Oftentimes, a lot of things go wrong on the road to right, if that can be said. I guess it can be said since I just said it. Now these stories tend to vary, but often they start with an idea or an assumption, and then there's a bit of an exploration, an adjustment perhaps, and often a regrouping. You know, of like, okay, what do I do now based on this experience?
So it's been really fun. I've learned a lot through this process, and I hope you have too. Or if you're just not tuning in, I hope you enjoy the series. There's a whole bunch of them in the archives as well. Today's short story features Brian Quoklei, and we told a bit of his story before on episode 1632.
Food scientist cooks up juicy profits. Brian is a scientist and food writer. He does a bunch of different things, kind of like me. So let's hear from him directly about a major failure point along the way. I think it was towards the beginning of his journey, and among other highlights, it touches on a vegan frozen banana ice cream operation that he tried to run from his dorm room at Stanford.
Now that sounds pretty cool. I would love to have some frozen vegan banana ice cream, but as you'll hear, that didn't quite work out as planned. So over to Brian. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
Hi, my name is Dr. Brian Quoklei,
and I'm the owner of a food science consulting business. In 2012, I walked 2,000 miles from Los Angeles to New Orleans. On that journey, I discovered that everything I did revolved around the food I ate, from the calories I needed to take in for the energy to keep walking, to the nutrients that kept my muscles strong and motivation high. After coming back for my walk, I was inspired by the importance of food on my journey. So I started looking into a vegan ice cream recipe that was taught to me by someone that I met while couch surfing through Louisiana.
She had shown me that you can make ice cream from one ingredient and one ingredient only, frozen bananas. I thought that was so cool, and that if I could figure out how to stabilize it and improve it, it'd be awesome to see a vegan banana ice cream on the market. Remember, this was 2012. We were a little behind in our plant-based offerings back then. Dr. Pat Brown was still hanging around Sand Hill Road,
looking for investments for Impossible Foods. So anyway, I started buying ingredients, experimenting and testing my recipes on my friends. I did this for about a month until I had to head up to Stanford for my dual graduate degree program in chemistry and medicine. But once I got there, I was still so interested in this vegan ice cream idea that I started selling some of it to the med students in my program. And I started reading up on research papers about ice cream and flavors.
Of course, my tiny dorm room was not really a great place for making ice cream. And at the end of the day, I realized I couldn't exactly scale while simultaneously taking a massive workload of graduate courses. But I really loved the whole concept of producing food from plant-based ingredients. And I thought that even if this whole banana ice cream thing didn't pan out, I'd love to get involved in that world. After a couple of months of dragging this whole project along, I was overwhelmed and ended up making the decision to leave both Stanford programs and shutting down the whole banana ice cream side hustle.
From the outside, that was probably the biggest business, professional and academic failure of my life. The perfect trifecta. I came back home in defeat and was quite depressed for nearly a half a year. But in that time, I also started reading books about personal development, entrepreneurship and business. And I started reading up about the world of food science technology.
I figured that if I was gonna sit around moping anyway, I might as well try to use up that time well. That experience opened up the opportunity to start over. And 10 years later, now I'm exactly where I envisioned myself to be, supporting the plant-based food industry as an author, food scientist and consultant. The most important lesson I learned from that experience was that you can always hit rock bottom and always find a way to climb back up. Failure isn't forever.
[Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is in fact, the theme of failure Friday. And maybe to that, we should add failure isn't forever, as Brian put it so well. Thanks so much, Brian, for sharing this transparent and truthful story. We learned so much through what has gone wrong and how someone adjusts or recovers to the process.
I totally agree with, I think he said something as well about starting over is so undervalued. That's absolutely correct. Starting over is undervalued. If you have failed at something or if you're struggling with something right now, please don't hesitate or don't be afraid to start over. It really is worth it, absolutely.
So check out Brian's website, brianquoklay.com. B-R-Y-A-N, so that's Brian with a Y. Q-U-O-C-L-E.com. I'm gonna link it up on the show notes page, of course, sidehustleschool.com/1882. If you've got a question or an update for us, you can also send us a message there.
You can follow me on social media, or you can just tune in every single day for a new episode. All right, that's all for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
