From grade school into adulthood, we’ve been taught that failure is a bad thing. Failing a test in school is bad, failing to make it to a certain event is bad, etc… but if you really think about failures, you’ll see that failure really isn’t that bad of an experience.
Failing that test gave you the opportunity to see where you went wrong and find out the right answer. Failing to make it to that important event could have saved you from getting involved in a terrible accident speeding to make it on time… the point being made is that not all failures are bad failures and in the world of entrepreneurship, failure can be the very thing that leads you to success.
Being in the business world, it’s always nice to hear and talk to people who have taken their business to new heights but rarely do they discuss the triumphs it took for them to achieve their level of success… it’s almost taboo to even talk about and people rarely ask.
When entering the world of entrepreneurship, it’s very important to understand that for every success story, there’s a story of some type of failure as well. As humans, we’re so hard on ourselves to meet these unrealistic standards society places on us and in the business world, the pressure is at an all-time high.
A lot of times, we look at failure as personal imperfection or shortcoming and that’s the thing about it… we’re not perfect… no one is so instead of beating yourself up over your failures, how about embracing your failures and looking at it as a chapter in your entrepreneurial story. Here are the reasons why you need to embrace failure and not run from it.
Failure is one of life’s biggest teachers… just like there’s a failure behind every success, there’s a lesson behind every failure. When you experience failure, it forces you to go back and retrace your steps to see why you failed in a certain area. You’re going to think about the choices you made, the factors that made you make those choices, and the mindset you were in when you made those choices… the reality is that you’re going to dissect and replay everything in your mind to figure out why you failed.
Upon dissecting your failure, your response is what’s going to determine your next business move. With failure, you can take it and respond in one of two ways: you can either embrace failure and use it as motivation to learn from and grow or you can take that failure and let it defeat you. Hopefully, you’ll choose to learn and grow from yours but all too often, entrepreneurs let their failures defeat them… that doesn’t have to be you.
In experiencing failure, it’s going to make you stronger but that’s only if you choose to learn and grow from that failure. Think of it like building muscle… the more you work a muscle, the stronger it becomes. Now, that’s not saying to keep doing things wrong or carelessly but the more you experience entrepreneurial shortcomings, the stronger you’re going to become.
The biggest thing about strength building in entrepreneurship is that it’s going to make you fearless to failure.
As mentioned earlier, no one is perfect and everyone experiences failure. The fact that everyone experiences failure is actually one of the facts that all entrepreneurs need to know and embrace before starting a business. If you start a business with this “I can’t fail” mentality, just imagine how hard you’re going to hit rock bottom when you experience your first failure.
You need to go into entrepreneurship knowing that you’re going to experience failure at some point and by accepting and embracing failure, you’re going to be able to recover and bounce back faster from it without feeling defeated more motivated. According to inc.com, fear of failure is the number one reason why seasoned and aspiring entrepreneurs never get their businesses off the ground.
When you made the decision to start your own business, you knew that you’d be up against all kinds of challenges and risks. Yes, there are certain practices that you can implement to protect you from those risks… For example, you can protect your business from libel and slander with professional liability coverage.
But aside from that, are you willing to take that plunge into entrepreneurship, risks, failures, and all? If you’re someone who hates failing at anything, then entrepreneurship may not be the right route for you at the moment. Until you can learn and understand that failure is part of entrepreneurship, you won’t be giving yourself a fair shot at success.
