SUMMARY
- Nearly every successful author or artist will tell you tales of their encounter with rejection and multiple failures during their early years in their career.
- In business, the same phenomenon is very common.
- Most successful entrepreneurs have failed or encountered formidable setbacks in their lives such that if they quit as a result they would have sufficient reason with solid proof.
Nearly every successful author or artist will tell you tales of their encounter with rejection and multiple failures during their early years in their career.
In business, the same phenomenon is very common. Most successful entrepreneurs have failed or encountered formidable setbacks in their lives such that if they quit as a result they would have sufficient reason with solid proof.
When they look back, many would admit that some of their rejections were justifiable and caused by their own mistakes but most of them were subjective.
However, what is important is how they reacted to failure. Nearly all successful people don’t take failure personal even if it stems from their mistakes or inabilities. They take failure as a lesson to learn something new and move on.
We are a product of education system and a society where we have been made to believe that failure is something bad that must be avoided at all costs.
In fact, failure has such a bad tag that most people choose not to take any risks at all, rather than risk even a small chance of failure.
This is a very serious problem because most things cannot be accomplished without admitting and embracing failure as a way of achieving objective.
It is important to note that most adaptive individuals and companies use trial and error to innovate – to know what works and what does not work.
Trial and error is a messy affair and failure is a key component of it as one has to do so many things to get one or few that works.
Most solutions emerge from failure. Thomas Edison, the innovator of bulb is said to have tried more than ten thousand times before he made a breakthrough.
Whether you are trying out new products or new ways of marketing one of the best ways is doing different things until you find out what works and what does not. It is like the evolution theory which is a story about the survival of the fittest as well as the failure of the less fit.
The best way to handle failure is to do a postmortem once it occurs to establish how it happened and what lessons can be learned from it.
Find out the skills, knowledge or policies you need to acquire or put in place to ensure it does not occur again.
Failure has another brighter side. You get lost on your way to an important meeting but in the process you discover something that changes your life. In other instances, you discover another shorter way of getting to the same destination.
Thus failure is not a dead end. It is simply a detour that may take a bit longer to get you where you want to go and in the process equip you with lessons that enable you to sustain the success.
The lessons you learn from failure makes you a stronger and wiser person when it comes to managing success later in your journey.
Mr Kiunga is author of ‘The Art of Entrepreneurship: Strategies to Succeed in a Competitive Market’. murorikiunga@yahoo.com
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