I Wish Someone Told Me: Dan Beaumont

We all have those moments when we think to ourselves, “I wish someone told me this.” We want to get ahead, so we are getting in touch with the brilliant minds and fascinating entrepreneurs that work in the UK to get their thoughts on life, work and success.

This time, we sat down with Dan Beaumont. He is one of the people behind Dalston Superstore and Voodoo Ray's, a gay club and a pizza bar respectively. He also makes music, hosts a radio show and runs a club night. Driven by music and fuelled by pizza, Dan is a bit of a poster boy for turning his passions into a business.

What’s the secret, Dan? How does one turn their passions into a business?

The hardest thing for most people isn’t figuring out how to get what they want. It’s figuring out what they want. It’s figuring out what they want to be or what they want to do. If you have a destination in mind, everything you do can focus on that. As the Chinese would say, even a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. That’s the hardest thing: knowing what you want. Everything else is easy.

I wish someone told me that to do something right, sometimes you have to do something wrong.

When lines between work and life blur, setbacks can feel particularly personal. How do you deal with that?

That’s the challenge because we can only get to our destination through making mistakes. Setbacks are really the best thing that could happen to us and they should be embraced. Otherwise we’ll never learn. It’s not easy to philosophical about it because failures are never a nice thing to experience, especially when it feels personal. But, it’s the most valuable lesson we could learn.

What’s that one thing you wish you’d know about embracing mistakes all along?

I wish someone told me that to do something right, sometimes you have to do something wrong. The trick is to get up and learn from them and accept that sometimes you might make a mistake multiple times. That’s the nature of the beast. If you’re scared of making mistakes, you should probably stay in a job you don’t love.