Death of a Dance Trip
on accepting little entrepreneurial failures
This month I launched—and killed—another Unschool Adventures trip.
Dance Trip 2024 was the brainchild of me and my friend Milla von Tauber. As an Unschool Adventures alum, experienced youth leader, and flippin’ fantastic dancer and event organizer, Milla was the ideal person to lead this trip.
Together we schemed (what we believed to be) an exciting 5-week adventure across the major dance communities of California, Oregon, and Washington. I announced the program far ahead of time and spread the word in the usual ways, but in the end, we only got 5 applicants. To move forward with confidence, we needed 12.
With more sustained outreach, we certainly might have gained more applicants. But I’ve played this game long enough to know that, if a trip is going to reach minimum numbers, there will almost always be a flood of applicants upon launch. People will be clamoring for it! Otherwise, it’s better to kill the trip early and not waste everyone’s time, effort, and calendar space (including leaders, applicants, and parents) attempting to resuscitate a trip that’s dead on arrival.
Could Milla and I have planned better? If we offered the trip in Europe rather than the USA (as we almost did), or if I had joined as a co-leader, would it have been more popular? Could we have charged less by avoiding the insanely high costs of West Coast cities? Might we have guessed that the number of unschooled/self-directed teens who also possess a serious interest in partner dance is tiny?
Yes, yes, yes, yes. We gambled, and we lost.
But we also won.
Milla and I won back the time of our lives—a big chunk of the fall, plus all the planning—which we will each use for dancing, travel, and personal projects.
We won our integrity, in the sense that we did not compromise our vision of of what makes an excellent trip merely to serve the market. (If I wanted full enrollment, I know exactly what I’d do: offer a trip to New Zealand, Spain, or Southeast Asia, packed with tourist activities.)
And while we lost the chance to earn money by running a teen trip, we gained valuable insights and the chance to rebuild again from scratch.
Taking this perspective—embracing little entrepreneurial failures—only functions atop a secure foundation. Neither Milla nor I were absolutely relying upon the income from this trip to pay our bills (although Milla needed it more than I did). We both have multiple ways to make money, and we’re both good at living cheaply. And crucially, we both view work as a game in which we’re trying to have it all: money, meaning, integrity, and freedom. This is a hard game. Winning requires real risk-taking, over and over again.
Milla and I are smart people. If we wanted secure jobs, we could get them. We could have big houses and new cars and nice clothes. But we find those games less interesting to play. Milla is busy building a life around the magic of partner dance. I continue examining how to keep teenager’s spirits alive (and my own, by way of example). We’re both less grindset, more kindset. We’re not optimizing for profits, productivity, or even “impact.” We’re here to lead our messy lives, figure out our little slice of the The Truth, and offer something that enlivens both ourselves and others.
That’s why I’m happy to offer weird trips that fail to garner enrollment. That’s why I’m not interested in building a highly profitable travel company with trips to Thailand and Machu Picchu. That’s why I laugh at moments like this, telling myself: Well, back to the drawing board. If I’m going to play any game, it’s this one.
The trick is always the same. Just keep dancing.
[Choreographed and filmed by Milla von Tauber at the UA Patagonia Retreat 2023.]