Some lessons I've learned a few times over. Sometimes, when I think I have learned a lesson and am practicing it to its fullest, I can, to my surprise, be caught re-learning it the hard way -- by making a new mistake.

One of the most powerful lessons is applicable to business as well as life. It is pretty simple.

Ready? Here it goes.

You are responsible for everything you do.

Okay, let me explain this with examples.

If you build something and it doesn't work, it's your fault.

If your life is not going the way you wanted it, it's your fault.

If you start a company and it fails, it's your fault.

You see where I'm going...

That's not to say that if you get hit by a bus while happily standing in your front yard, that that's your fault. No, I'm not saying this. Even when I say "if your company fails it's your fault", I'm not saying you're in full control of everything. Sometimes shit happens.

What I'm saying though, is that you're responsible for making sure that the best outcome you envisioned for yourself actually happens. And if it doesn't, there is no point in blaming others for it, because others probably don't care or won't fix it for you.

So, even if you do get hit by a bus, you can choose to be miserable about it or accept it and make the best of it. You're responsible for your own happiness, not others.

Why am I saying this? Why now?

I wanted to write this ever since I produced the first can of my energy drink, Entropy.

Let me go back to that day, in September 2010. It was an exciting day. I had done all the art work for the can with a top-notch graphical designer specialized in cans. I reviewed the art work several times. The design had been sent to an engraver for post-processing -- these things are carved onto metal so they can be spray-painted by a machine that produces the cans.

Once everything was ready, I went directly to the floor of the factory at Ball Corp, in New York, to supervise the production of the first real can. My product was going to take off.

(On the floor of Ball, with the very first empty can of Entropy)

Then, boom, I saw it. It was there staring at me: a spelling error. On the first real can.

Everything was done by professionals. At least four different people had seen the design before it went to production. How could it have happened?

Turns out, everyone, including myself, had missed it. But it was there, printed on the can, in the supplement panel: "daiily value". Double "i".

I actually had caught this error on the very first version of the design, still in time for fixing it. I had told the designer about it. But I failed to verify. Guess whose fault it was? Yep, not the designer's nor the folks at the engraving shop. Nope. Mine.

That day, my heart sunk. It was a terrible feeling. How could I possibly have overlooked this?

Turns out, months later, I would discover that this was not the only mistake I had made in conducting my business. It certainly wasn't the most important error nor one that contributed to Entropy's failure.

In fact, to this day,  no one noticed the spelling error. Not a single person  has ever mentioned it to me.

But it exemplifies the lesson very well: I'm responsible for everything. After all, everyone else got paid. They didn't have to live with this. I had. Daiily, if you will. So it's my fault.

And that is the end of the lesson. You're responsible for everything you do.

Why Entropy failed

Okay, but people still ask me why I stopped producing Entropy. And if this small typo is not the reason for Entropy's failure, what is it then?

There are many reasons. Reasons that are specific to the beverage industry. But they're all incarnations of this very lesson, one way or another. So, it makes sense to discuss them here.

And here are some of the main reasons. There are probably many others, including also timing and luck, of course.

1. Flavor and smell. Comments varied from "putrid stench" to "cold, rotten turkey flavor" and "acid pee substance". One of these was said by a Googler who tried it and answered an internal survey. I still get hate email from people who say they hated the taste or smell. Sure, there are the lovers too, and I'm very thankful for them. Many are my personal friends, many are strangers. But, sadly, Entropy didn't please the masses nor any specific niche that would support continuing production.
2. Can size. Only Red Bull still sells 8.4oz. Monster, Rockstar and everyone else have all given up on this size. The market wants it big (16, 24 or even 32oz) or tiny (2oz shot). I insisted on an 8.4oz can, because that's the perfect size for me.
3. Energy. No distributor wants to touch energy drinks anymore. Fuze was an energy drink. They removed the word energy and nothing else and now they sell like hot cakes. While Entropy can be an anti-aging or weight loss beverage, the can doesn't say this. And so people don't buy it for that, they buy it for the energy. Niche beverages still work, but the energy market is saturated. These days, it's better to focus on specific segments, like "all natural", "relaxing", "body building energy (protein)", etc. Energy alone is done.
4. Niche / Theme. Beverages are getting more targeted. A beverage for "latinos" or "women" or "skaters" or "computer geeks" is more likely to succeed than one targeted to everyone.
5. Price. A small company can't compete on price. And lowering only hurts the brand. Entropy was about the same price as others, but when it came to unknown brands, there were brands selling 32oz can for 99c, while an 8.4oz of Entropy would cost no less than $1.99 in retail.
6. Middle of the road on caffeine. I didn't want to shove a lot of caffeine into Entropy and I thought people would appreciate the right balance (and natural caffeine also, from guarana, not the synthetic caffeine that is more common). But the typical energy drink customer doesn't appreciate the moderation that much. Most people want either zero caffeine or tons of it.
7. Technically, not 100% natural. I wanted a healthy beverage and healthy means two things to me: no synthetic ingredients (colors, preservatives) and no sugar. So, I went out of my way to get no preservatives, which meant I needed a specific pasteurization technique, and the expiration date would be only a year, as opposed to 2 or 3 or more that artificial beverages can last. But when it came time to avoid sugar, well, I should have gone with stevia or a low-glycemic sugar substitute like agave. Instead, I used ace-K and sucralose (Splenda-like). That's artificial. So, it meant Entropy wasn't 100% natural. That meant WholeFoods wouldn't take it and so many other places didn't want it. I missed another important niche.
8. Lack of marketing skills. Enough said.
9. Lack of market research. This goes back to the flavor and smell above. What pleases me won't necessarily please a lot of people. My customers can't all be people like me, because, I found out, there aren't very many of them out there. But there were other things I could have gathered from more market research: what do people want in their drinks? Or don't want? In what sizes, flavors and shapes? Basic stuff that, in hindsight, I should have done.

Conclusions

I learned a lot with Entropy. A lot of the stuff I learned reinforced the same lesson I had learned a few times before: you're in charge of your life/company/career/happiness/etc. Go make it work. Find a way. Don't blame others. All my mistakes were solely mine, no one else's.  (I wrote a convoluted version of this lesson before, as an analogy where people are all floating in this ocean we call "life" and we have to find a way to our islands.)

When I see Rupert Murdoch saying he didn't know about the phone hacking scandal going on at his company, I say, WTF? He's the CEO isn't he? Guess who should have known about it?

Thanks for reading.

Peace.

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I recently came back from a 7-day cruise to the Caribbean. It was great. If you've been to one, you know what I'm talking about: lots of fine food, great weather, no worries (other than "where's my sun screen" and "will I have time to participate in all activities today").  This particular cruise started in Miami and went to the Grand Cayman (Cayman Islands), Isla Roatan (Honduras), Belize and Cozumel (Mexico). All these places are unbelievable.

Here are some of the many random things I learned on this cruise.

Sting rays are friendly animals.

The photo above is of me and our dive instructor holding a friendly sting ray, in Sting Ray City, Cayman Islands (by the way, this is in the open ocean, not a pool or any artificial environment). Turns out, sting rays are not aggressive animals. They don't use their stings (or "barbs") to attack. It wouldn't be very efficient, since they take between 6 months to a year to grow back. It's there only as a defense mechanism. And it's a last-resort mechanism, as they need to be under very specific attacks to use it: someone must be trying to eat them from above them, immediately in front of them. They don't go pointing their tails at enemies and following them in reverse. Sadly, Steve Irwin (the "Crocodile Hunter") was one of the only three reported victims in the world to have died due to a sting ray attack. He was unlucky that his heart was perforated when the sting ray attacked him. Why it attacked him is unclear.

Sting rays are generally friendly. These for sure were. They were used to tourists. They swam to us and played with us. In the photo above you can see the contour of another two rays in the water, circling us. They are very soft to the touch on their bottom and a little hard and bumpy at the top. The string is not at the end of their tails, but about half to two-thirds down from the beginning of the tail.

Cruise ships are not very Earth-friendly.

I kind of knew this, but I never stopped to think about it: these things pollute. Sadly.

Big ship. With huge, huge chimney.

For starters, cruise ships dump all your waste in the ocean. Perhaps that's okay, since that's where it would end up anyway if we still lived as cavemen. But maybe that's not the best option anymore. I don't know for sure. It's probably more complicated than a simple black or white choice. People say the ocean can take anything and recycle it. Maybe. What I found out is that all the food we don't eat also gets recycled in the ocean. About 15 miles outside of Miami, the soft food gets shredded and dumped in the ocean. On one hand, this attracts lots of fishes, which attract fishermen who make a living catching these well-fed fishes. On the other hand, a lot of this is poorly absorbed since it contains a lot of non-food items like condiments. There are reports of "clouds" of junk in the ocean outside of Miami, mostly attributable to big cruise ships.

Also,  these things have huge diesel engines. I forgot now how many they have (I think, four), and they're constantly on, if not to move the boat forward, to cool it and power everything in this "floating city".

Crew works their tails off.

There are about six thousand people on board. About 1,100 are crew.  About 500 of those are related to foodstuff -- waiting tables, cooks, mixing drinks, busing tables. They work for eight months straight with no weekends or holidays. Then they take two months off. The waiters, however, get no salary. We confirmed this by talking to two different waiters. They only get tips. Sure, tips are included in our bill, but it's not a lot: $10 per day per person. And this tip has to be split among three waiters per table -- a head waiter, a team waiter and an assistant -- and two cleaning crew, who clean the guests' rooms. Overall, the tip is split five ways, possibly not evenly (not sure about that).

We met a waiter who told us he still had two months to go for this vacation and this time he was requesting a four-month vacation. Reason? His wife was pregnant and was due exactly at the end of his eight month shift. He said he timed it carefully so he would be present when the baby was born. Maybe that's why they keep you away for eight months instead of nine or more.

Out of two waiters and another service person we talked to, only one of them had been to shore, and the one who did was there just for a little while. No wonder. They get two or three hours break twice during a 7-day cruise. And for the waiters it's always during lunch time, when there are fewer people on board.

Nonetheless, it must be worth their time. The two waiters told us they had been with the company for a long time: eight and eighteen years, each. That's a long time to spend away from your country, your family and solid land under your feet. It's definitely not for everybody.

We also learned how strict the training to become a waiter is. They may start at the bar, mixing drinks and then they go on to serve the crew itself (they must eat too -- and no, they don't eat the same stuff guests do). Two months of serving crew they move on to shadow a waiter and then they become assistants, then team waiter then head waiter. The training must be good, because we found all of them are really good waiters.

We did visit the kitchen too, and there's a whole other blog post I could write about that. Instead, I'll just leave you with the pictures.

Isla Roatan belongs to Honduras, but like Belize it was once part of the UK

Roatan is an island off of the cost of Honduras. It belonged to the UK, but it's now part of Honduras. The main language in the island is English, but there are Spanish-speaking people there, from Honduras.

Belize was once called British Honduras, but it never had anything to do with Honduras other than it was right next to it. It's now an independent country but the queen of England is still on their currency. Locals say she's there to keep it from devaluing. The Belizean dollar is pegged 2-to-1 to the US dollar and it's been like that for years. Belize has the second largest coral reef in the world (second to Australia). Our ship could not dock close to shore because of the reefs, so we had to take smaller boats (called tender) in order to reach shore. The sea life there is incredible (as it is everywhere in the Caribbean).

It's interesting that in Roatan, the locals there told us that the British traded Roatan for Belize with Honduras. But this doesn't seem to match the story told by the Belizeans, who said there was a war for control over Belize and the Africans alongside with the British fought the Spanish invasion. There's some truth to both sides though as there were many wars and British and Spanish occupation of the island as well as the country of Belize. You can read more about it on the "internets", here and here.

Conclusions

It was fun. It was beautiful. It was good to learn about the lives of the people in the countries we visited and the lives of the crew on board of the ship.

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