Merch Drops & Pumpkin Parties

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In this week's edition of Food with Friends we'll cover:

1) Tastebase's Merch Drop

2) Tastebase & Produce Parties present Pumpkin Party on Oct. 27th

3) How to Fail Successfully: A Beginner's Guide to Growth

Announcing Tastebase's Merch Drop 👕

After rounds of testing, I'm thrilled to share Tastebase's first round of merch is live 💥 Designed by the amazingly talented Heejung Kim, Tastebase's merch is just as delicious as the snacks you'll be snacking on while wearing them.

What's tasting, tasting club? Available in both black and white, be a part of tastebase's tasting club and show the world what you're tasting! And for a limited time only, use code: FREESHIP for free shipping on your purchase!

Tastebase & Produce Parties Present Pumpkin Party 🎃

Tastebase is teaming up with our friends at Produce Parties, a seasonal veg-centric supper club, to present Produce Parties # 6 on Thursday, October 27th where we'll be celebrating Fall's most iconic produce - pumpkin!

In celebration of the pumpkin theme, the Tastebase team will be curating an incredible line up of partners for the event including Mai Vino wine, snacks from ffups, dessert from Raaka Chocolate, and more! RSVP today before tickets run out 🚨

How to Fail Successfully: A Beginner's Guide to Growth

With a number of businesses going under over the last 6 months (ie. Haus, WanderJaunt, Ugly Drinks, and dozens of others) and a slew of founder friends currently on the fundraising track (or contemplating next steps with their businesses), a topic that's been top of mind for me this past month has been failure.

After reading "How to Fail Successfully: Finding Your Creative Potential Through Mistakes and Challenges" by Brandon Stosuy, it dawned on me that while failure is more widely accepted within the creative realms, it remains largely faux pas to discuss within the world of business. For every one 'successful' business or brand that you hear about, there's thousands of brands that fail whom you never hear about (let alone the countless failures from the successful ones).

As such, for all of you that struggle with failure, here's the framework I've been thinking about of how to better fail successfully. Hopefully by building your own framework for how to deal with failure, you'll have a better guide for personal and professional growth.

1. Failure is How You Learn. It's Just a Lesson. If you see it as anything else and project it onto your self-worth, you will crumble. Differentiate failure from your self-worth. Failure is an opportunity to learn and grow. It's nothing more, nothing less.

2. The Zone of Proximal Development: In educational psychology, the zone of proximal development describes the space between what a child can do on their own and what they can do with help from a teacher or parent. Getting acclimated to fear and failure is necessary to take the next step outside of your zone of proximal development.

3. Dealing with Disappointment. Disappointment stems from expectations. You've decided that a project is a "failure" because it doesn't meet the standards or vision that you initially set for yourself. Remove or reframe your expectations by remembering that what you're building is an ongoing experiment.

4. Reject the Success / Failure Binary. We've been bred within systems that function around ideas of success and failure: a school system, a legal system, and an economic system. We should always take a step back to ask ourselves the questions "What is failure?" "Who sets the standards?" To overcome the fear of failure is to question and reject the very premise and standards of success.

5. To Fail Means to Be Human. Some people succeed, but everybody fails. If you never fail, success stops being important or interesting. Let's not forget that failure makes us more interesting and dimensional human beings. While success doesn't tell you much about yourself, failure can provide you some of the best and most honest feedback for you to grow as a human.

Food with Phil ☕️

Given that my friends frequently ask me what I've been reading, listening to, eating, and watching, here are some things that I've been consuming recently:

Reading 📚: Make Time for Creativity: Finding Space for Your Most Meaningful Work by Brandon Stosuy and

Listening 🎧: The Crazy Ones podcast hosted by fellow friends, founders, and builders, Alex Lieberman, Sophia Amoruso, and Jesse Pujji. It's a refreshing show of unfiltered opinions and advice on how to build businesses, and how the current state of the world helps or hurts founders.

Eating 🥑: Ghia's Ghianduja (hazelnut spread), Home Dough's frozen cookie dough (best frozen cookies I've EVER HAD), Shottys (jello shots), Parch (non-alcoholic agave cocktails)

Watching 📺: No shows recently

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