Ok, so most people don’t consider failing to be a joy. In fact, I know a lot of people who would rather not try something than risk failing. In my opinion, this is a depressing way to live, especially if you’re an entrepreneur, for a number of reasons:
- Some of the best lessons in business and life are learned through failure. As my father once told his high-school teacher, “I can not fail if I learn something from the experience.”
- If you’re not failing, you don’t know really what you can do. It isn’t until we push the limits into a new market or trying out a new service that we discover how much and how far we really can go.
- Just because we fail, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. The old story about Thomas Edison and the light bulb. In building over 1,700 models before he found one that worked, he said “I just found 1,700 ways not to make a light bulb.” Learn from it and try again, taking what you’ve learned with you.
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve failed, though I don’t really look at it like that. I prefer my dad’s view of ‘no such thing as failure.’ I actually celebrated the first rejection letter that I received from a publisher when I sent out proposals for The ParentPreneur Edge. I figured someone wasn’t going to want it, I might as well get the failure out of the way. Strange as it may sound, that rejection actually got a “WooHoo!” from me.
From a business perspective, most people don’t really make it BIG until their second or third business. So if you have an idea and it doesn’t work out, just look at it as one down, two to go!
I believe embracing the possibility (and the inevitability) of failing is liberating! Martha Beck has a great article on failure in O Magazine this month called The Woman Who Fell to Earth: To Fail is Divine that you should check out. She clearly agrees with this philosophy! Also check out Sara Reistad-Long’s arcticle in the same magazine that offers tips on how to Turn Your Regrets into a Life Booster. Refreshing!
So I am curious - how do you deal with what others might consider failure? What do you do to move on?
