I'm sure at this point, we've all heard of the Fyre Festival but in case you haven't, here's a little rundown:
Fyre Media founder Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule set out to create a "luxury music festival," kind of like Coachella, to promote a new talent-booking app. But instead of holding it somewhere simple like California, the duo decided to step it up a notch by holding it on an island. (Was I the only one who thought location alone was problematic?)
Promised luxury housing, gourmet meals, and acts from famous artists, attendees arrived for the weekend of the festival to cheese sandwiches, tents that were used to house victims of Hurricane Michael, and not a single musical guest in sight.
In short, it was a disaster. McFarland and Ja Rule are now the subjects of multiple lawsuits and McFarland has been sentenced to six years in prison. What goes around comes around, right?
My dad and I watched Netflix's documentary together the night after it came out, and what commenced was an hour and thirty-seven minutes of us screaming at the television and rewinding because we couldn't believe that what we heard was actually true.
As the clock ticked and the festival crept closer and closer, multiple team members advised McFarland to come clean to the attendees and he brushed them off, believing somehow that everything would just work out, neglecting to see that he had real problems (and big ones at that). Problems that wouldn't work themselves out, but that needed to be worked out.
It was at this point in the documentary that my dad hit pause and turned towards me to offer some sage life advice. "I'm going to offer you some really valuable professional advice, alright?" I nodded, thinking that he was ridiculous if he thought I would ever get into a mess even a fraction as big as the one McFarland found himself in.
"In your future job, if something ever starts to go wrong, 'fess up. Deliver bad news quickly, don't hold it in."
And I realized that my amusement at the far-off thought of ever getting into a Fyre Festival sized mess wasn't so far-off.
Okay actually, it was still a little far off, but at that moment I realized that there are two lessons to be learned from the Fyre Festival disaster if nothing else:
One, like my dad said, deliver bad news quickly. Don't wait for problems to solve themselves, because sometimes they won't…which brings me to the second lesson.
Billy McFarland was quoted countless times during the Netflix documentary as saying, "We are not a problem-focused group, we are a solutions-oriented organization." McFarland was essentially telling his staff not to worry about the growing cluster of problems they were running into, because it would all work itself out in the end.
This also seemed to light a fire underneath my dad, even worse than the first one.
Like I've said before, you cannot wait out a problem and hope it'll fix itself. My dad tied this mindset back to the idea of "everyone gets a trophy."
Maybe that is what blinded McFarland and caused him to drive Fyre Festival further and further into the ground, relentlessly lie to his staff members and paying customers, fire anyone who had a dissenting opinion, steal people's money, lie some more, and eventually end up in jail.
He failed.
And his pride and greed are what did him in.
So what can we gather from McFarland's failure? We are all going to fail in this life, but how you handle those failures is going to be what shapes you and shapes what people think of you. It's as simple as the childhood phrase: "Honesty is the best policy."
And one more thing…
Sometimes, things that sound too good to be true are just that.
