5 Lessons to Learn When You Fail
On the very first day of my Quantitative Analysis class the Professor wrote a set of Quadratic Equations on the board and explained how these are the equations you have to solve to be able to ride a bike.
Or, he told us, “Go to the parking lot, get on a bike, fall a few times, get your knees scraped and you will learn to do it, probably faster.” I believe most of us, even the quant types, really learnt to ride a bike the second way!
Making mistakes is inevitable in life. When innovation is involved, the risk of making mistakes — and of failing outright — escalates. For an entrepreneur, failure is rooted in every step of the process of building their business.
For most people, failure is a dirty word. It is something bad. While every entrepreneur knows the statistics of failure in their head, they continue to harbor an equally toxic reaction to failure.
Failure is the opportunity to begin again, only more intelligently. Henry Ford
Theoretical knowledge and understanding of the entrepreneurial process is one way of learning. However, there is no substitute for real learning that comes from getting your finger nails dirty and making mistakes.
Fear of failure is a learned behavior. Having mentored aspiring entrepreneurs for three decades, the most interesting lesson that I have learnt is to help them build the right mindset and redefine the concept of “failure”. Creative, innovative people need to and are able to absorb failure and take it in stride. A Mentor can help them internalize a redefined concept of “failure” itself:
Failure is Not Final
Failure need not be an outcome. It can be a step in the long journey. As a mentor, you have many stories that had their beginning by experiencing massive failures. That underpinning did not prevent them from achieving success.
Failure can set a strong qualification of success
I believe someone who has had a failure is a far better bet for the next go around than someone who has not yet tried. As a matter of fact, I would prefer mentoring a wounded entrepreneur any day. The trick is to get them back on the horse right after the fall. They have to draw inspiration from others that did not find failure to be debilitating.
Learn from Failure(s) of Others.
It is inevitable that an entrepreneur will have small and big failures. But, do all the failures have to be their own? No, They can learn from common sources of failure in each of the 24, or so, steps of the new venture creation process.
Try, Fail, Pivot.
If you are building something of consequence, chances are you are blazing a trail into at least some new direction. Learn the art of trying, failing quickly, and pivoting until you find the new solution to that puzzle.
Create “Intelligent” Failures.
Design small “experiments by engaging available resources to test various alternatives. Of course, many will not work. That is a given! But those that do work give you the answer that you could not have gotten any other way.
Successful is really a silly word. No one can ever be “full” of success. The new meaning of “Successful” has to be: Having many successes, that overshadow the many failures.
When you have learnt how to ride a bike, no one ever asks how many spills did you take to learn to do it.
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Dr. Rajiv Tandon is an Entrepreneur, Educator and Mentor. He facilitates peer groups for CEOs of fast-growing companies in Minnesota. To learn more, sign up to get the email newsletter.
