Why you can’t have success without failure

I was talking to a friend recently who came up to me looking really down in the dumps. I asked him what was up, and he told me that a business idea he’d been working on for years didn’t work out.

“I’m a total failure,” he lamented. “Guess I’ll have to call up my old boss and see if he’ll give me my job back.” 

It was wrenching to watch my friend like this, not because he had failed but because he was my friend and it upset me to see him so emotional.

I wasn’t upset because he had failed because I knew that he hadn’t failed at anything. Rather, he’d learned how not to do something.

I bought him a drink and told him he didn’t have to sheepishly call up his old boss.

“All you need to do is learn from your mistakes, listen to the feedback and make a few adjustments.”

Everyone fails and makes mistakes, it’s how we learn and grow!

Steve Jobs failed, Richard Branson failed, even Michael Jordan failed. Jordan, the most iconic NBA player of all time said of failure: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Successful people like Jobs, Branson, Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and so on know that failure happens. It’s something you have to go through if you want to succeed. But rather than look at it as game-over, successful people look at it as a teacher that has helped them improve for Round 2.

They use failure to make adjustments so that they’ll succeed the next time they try something. They know that trial and error is just a fact of life if you want to get ahead in life. Instant success just isn’t possible!

Take Richard Branson for example. He knew that you can’t have success without failure. If he had never failed, he would never have become one of the most recognised entrepreneurs in the world. We would never have heard of him!

Branson got plenty of his inspiration from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, explaining that Mandela was “one of the most inspiring men I have ever met and had the honour to call my friend.”

Sometimes all you need to do is surround yourself with stimulating people and you will flourish too.

The Power Of Validated Learning

The Lean Startup is the startups Bible. Author Eric Ries promotes a message of failing early and quickly so that you can soon get back on the horse.

He promotes the idea that you should build a really cheap, bare-essentials prototype so that you can test it out on the market. It costs you hardly any time and money.

Then you cultivate feedback. Customers will tell you what they like about it and what they don’t like. You then return to the drawing board to implement the changes.

You’re failing early and you’re failing without any consequences.

Validation looks like failure to some people; they assume that the customers just don’t want their product. So, like my friend did, they give up completely.

But successful people know that validation is just your chance to tweak what you’ve got, make improvements and do better next time.

Our amazing team at Easy Consulting does everything in our power to help our customers become as successful as possible. It gives us a feeling of satisfaction!

Our question to you is “Are you in a highly competitive industry?” Do customers have a lot of other options when it comes to your products or services??

Easy Consulting will provide a thorough analysis of your website and industry, and then create a custom SEO package solution for your business to get you back in the game. Get in touch today and let’s get the ball rolling!