How can you get past the idea that failure might be around the corner with each decision you make?
Entrepreneurship is not easy and you can certainly feel very isolated despite all the communities and groups openly available to help you. At the end of the day you and only you are in control of the decisions you make, the people you meet, and the success you achieve. In addition, you are the only one who will face the responsibility of failure along the way. That’s right, a very large portion of entrepreneurship is how you deal and overcome the fact that you will at one point fail or even perhaps fail all the time at your attempt to succeed. If failure wasn’t an obstacle, each and every person out there would pursue their dreams, innovations and motivations, but unfortunately the fear of failure is one of the main reasons very few people become serial entrepreneurs and even fewer succeed.
Entrepreneurship is all about trial and error. In most cases, all of our great ideas are so new that there is no real proven road map or easy way of bringing them to life other than by trial and error. Most will fail once, many will fail 2 or 3 times, and the majority will fail over a dozen times, as there is really no actual count on how many times you will fail. It is ultimately those that don’t give up and those that overcome failure who eventually bring their ideas to life. You are might ask yourself, if failure is so common and can appear with each and every decision you make, more importantly, if failure can make us lose all of our previous hard work, why should we even begin enforcing our ideas and dreams to one day succeed? The answer is quite simple, in order to reach your goal, you have to eventually learn from each and every challenge that comes to you. You can’t cover the sun with one finger, can you?
No matter how devastating or unpredictable failure may be, it is never a total loss as the experience gained is one you can never duplicate no matter how much money you may have. It is the repeat experience good or bad that enables you to move ahead without repeating the same mistakes twice, ultimately allowing you to progress forward. The experience is the “work in progress” put into place until we understand how to turn experience into actual results.
For all of the population, the choice of being an entrepreneur is ultimately the hardest decision to make during these tough economic times, it is not easy to undertake a 1, 3, 5, or 10 year project without pay and without the guarantee of success. Nevertheless, it is fundamentally differentiating those of us who have this desire for the game of uncertainty and can look at every challenge as an opportunity. It is those of us who fall and pick ourselves up when we learn how to skate or bike, and ultimately it is those of us who take the risk of investing in ourselves, who eventually end up in a position to invest in others.
Remember innovation through failure, not FEAR!
“Who has never tasted what is bitter does not know what is sweet.” – Unknown
