Failure. It’s not a word that makes you think about good things, right?
Nobody wants to fail. But some tolerate it better than others. And some are so paralyzed by the thought of failing that they take few risks in life.
You’ve heard of Hershey’s chocolate? Of course. It’s one of the biggest candy companies in the world, with 14,800 employees and $7.1 billion in revenues.
It’s also a typical entrepreneur story: Milton Hershey started as an apprentice in a candy shop at age 14. At 18, he opened his own shop in Philadelphia. It went out of business six years later. He moved to Denver and took a job at a candy company where he learned to make caramel, then moved to New York City and opened another candy business. It also failed. At age 28, broke, he attempted yet another business. It worked. The Lancaster Caramel Company eventually became a leading U.S. maker of caramels and paved the way for the giant success of what is now The Hersey Company.
It’s evident that Milton Hershey learned from his failures and used that knowledge as he continued to strive for success.
The general public usually sees or knows only about the success. And people who wish to be successful will often study only success stories. But failure has a great value to the entrepreneur. And it’s failure’s place in your success that I want to discuss.
Emotional Education
In childhood and schooling, rather than learning from our mistakes, what we “learn” is that mistakes result in punishment: low grades, exclusion, humiliation and the rest.
We may become afraid of doing anything unless we’re absolutely sure of the outcome. But doing anything entrepreneurial means getting over that fear.
Entrepreneurs act. They have good noses for opportunity and may take off on a new venture without having to know everything about it. They “jump off the cliff and build the plane on the way down.”
People who take action and succeed make the most mistakes. They make mistakes and learn from them.
People who fear making mistakes—who have to know everything and have it all in place before they do anything—never take action.
No offense to straight-A students but often what you’re seeing when you look at one is someone who figured out how to make the least mistakes.
So, what’s the difference? The straight-A student has been educated logically, whereas the entrepreneur may also be educated logically but is most definitely educated emotionally: they know what fear is but they don’t let it stop them.
Entrepreneur Lessons
If you want to become a doctor or lawyer, there are certain, definite steps you take: You go to college. Get a degree. Go to law school or medical school. Pass the bar or complete a residency. It may not be easy but at least you don’t have to figure out the “how.” It’s a well-paved road. All you’ve got to do is walk it.
But what if you’ve got a million-dollar idea? What if you don’t want to follow the known route and become a doctor, lawyer, teacher? (All very valuable professions, by the way.)
In his book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, author T. Harv Eker gives what I think is the best definition of an entrepreneur: “a person who solves problems for people at a profit.”
Solving those problems, particularly in this high-tech world, often means bringing things into being that did not exist before. It can involve great risk. It can also lead to potentially great reward.
Few of us are raised or schooled in how to become a entrepreneurial success. There is no well-paved road. The entrepreneur paves it as he or she goes along.
The point I am driving towards is that by its nature, being an entrepreneur means there will likely be mistakes … things that don’t quite work out. You’re doing something that you’ve never done before. If you learn from your mistakes, you are one step closer to success.
The Failure Convention
How well-recognized is the value of failure in entrepreneurial business undertakings?
So much so that there is an entire convention devoted to the analysis of it.
FailCon is “a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers to study their own and others’ failures and prepare for success.” It was founded in San Francisco in 2009. FailCon events now occur in over a dozen cities in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East.
Several hundred tech start-up newbies attend a FailCon to hear industry veterans talk about their worst failures, in segments with titles like “How to Build a Dysfunctional Team” and “Survive Your Fundraising Trainwrecks” and attend round-table discussions.
Interestingly, In 2014, the San Francisco FailCon was canceled. In the New York Times, Cassandra Phillipps, the founder of FailCon, said that it was partly because the idea of expecting and learning from failure had become so pervasive in Silicon Valley (a primary hotbed of start-up activity) that there wasn’t much demand for a seminar about it.
And there are companies like Fail Forward, a business consulting service that acknowledges that it’s “possible to use our inevitable failures to inspire innovation” and…become more…resilient.”
Once a taboo subject, it seems failure has come out of the business closet.
Final Thought
My point is not to celebrate failure or suggest anyone give up because failure is inevitable. Rather, it’s to show that failure is a part of the process of success.
If you’re not yet a success, it may be due to, as Cashflow Quadrants author Robert Kiyosaki observed, a failure to fail enough times.
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