When you meet a successful business person, you are indeed meeting
someone, who has learnt how to overcome failure. A person who does not
get beaten and lose hope in being an entrepreneur. People who take
failures as lessons and use the new knowledge to spring back. PHOTO |
FILE
I remember my primary school days when we used to run cross
country. Cross country is a tough sport in which people run on open-air
courses over natural terrain in the fields or nearby roads.
I
am the type that always tries to excel in every activity. I remember
pushing myself hard, running breathless and my heart pounding hard.
All
this while, some gifted runners made it look pretty easy. But once at
the finish line, I would be exhausted yet happy to have finished the
race.
We all get into business with a
similar attitude – to excel and make good money. However, along the
way, we give the business everything but still realise that some things
are not working and the money is not as good as you hoped.
We find ourselves pushed to accept that the venture is about to fail or is indeed failing.
I have been in business for slightly over 10 years now and I have discovered that failure is part of the journey to success.
When you meet a successful business person, you are indeed meeting someone, who has learnt how to overcome failure.
A
person who does not get beaten and lose hope in being an entrepreneur.
People who take failures as lessons and use the new knowledge to spring
back.
DIFFICULT TIME
Many
of the renowned business people around the world have had difficult
times to get to where they are today. Do you know one Akio Morita, the
Japanese businessman, who began Sony? He did not have a rosy start.
Although
we know Sony as an electronics giant that has recorded big success in
making entertainment units ranging from TVs to playstations, its first
product was a rice cooker, which sadly, burned the rice!
But Akio moved on coming up with bigger and better devices, which we all know Sony for today.
Do
you know that the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, before building his
Microsoft empire as we know it today failed in a venture called
Traf-O-Data?
The outfit was meant to read raw data from road traffic counters and create reports for traffic engineers.
Gates
and his partner had to get an engineering friend to help them build a
computer on which they could run their software. After hard work and a
visit from the county officer, it turned out that the product did not
work.
Soon after, the State of
Seattle in the US, where they lived, offered free traffic processing
services to the cities making the effort of private contractors, among
them Traf-O-Data, redundant.
This experience that was not entirely successful was the springboard of what we know as Microsoft today.
And with his business partner Paul Allen, Gates went on to create one of the most successful software companies in the world.
These are just two examples, we have many other success stories.
If
you read the stories behind most of world billionaires, you will learn
that success is indeed a journey, often fraught with failures.
EMBRACE FAILURE
But what do those who succeed have in common? One, they are always switched on to a positive mode.
They
don’t fight failure, they embrace it and only then are they able to
understand what an experience it was. Always take note on what you did
right and what you did not. Reapply what you did right and get solutions
for what you did wrong.
It is very important that you are aware of what to continue building on.
Second
and most important, start again. For those who overcome failure, the
mood is always simple — get up, brush off the dust from the fall and
walk with your head high towards your next venture.
Otherwise,
failure will knock you off the entrepreneurship road and you shall soon
be back to where you were before your tried business.
Few entrepreneurs usually make it with the first jump, as such, be prepared for multiple attempts to reach your goals.
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