Why it may be necessary to fail in order to succeed as a business owner
February 19, 2021
A business failure is a drawback and one of the most depressing events to ever occur to a business owner/entrepreneur. A failed business unleashes a wave of disappointments, heartaches, and stress to one’s holistic well-being.
After a tremendous sacrifice of time, capital, and effort as well as the hope of seeing your dreams come to reality, you have to wrestle with the devastating fact, You Failed! But here’s the important question you need to ask yourself, does success truly come without failure? If you couldn’t answer that, the answer is no.
According to Soichiro Honda, the Japanese engineer and industrialist who established Honda Motor Co., Ltd., “Success is 99% failure.” And according to Albert Einstein. “Failure is success in progress.”
It is vital to understand that your failed business venture isn’t the end of the road but a path to attaining success. It’s all a matter of perspective. Your failure arms you with knowledge and the chance to bounce back stronger than ever before.
Below are 3 reasons why business failure is vital
Failure provides clarity If you can only choose to not wallow in your failure but rather take a moment to review your processes, you will come to understand the reason for your failure. Having that clarity arms you with knowledge and experience to reinvent yourself and press on towards the goal you have set. Also, having to fail in your business may provide you with the clarity of pursuing another venture. Failure has helped some entrepreneurs to realize the business venture they were pursuing wasn’t what was needed. It therefore enabled them to change focus and pursue what was needed.
Failure teaches resilience According to merriam-webster.com, resilience is “an ability to recover from, or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” That is what failure does. Failure gives us the ability to recover. No one wants to experience failure but here’s the thing, we live in a little bubble called ‘Life ’ and life has a way of trying to bring us to our knees.
While some entrepreneurs bounce back from a failure and push on, others remain on their knees. They give up and never realize their dreams. This is what separates ‘the men from the boys’. Remember success doesn’t come easy. It can be long and arduous. Only the strong survive. Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company said, “Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.”
Failure ignites determination Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you about how much they kept pushing despite the several times they failed. This is because each fail comes with it new lessons. Think about the first time you learned a new recipe or learned to play an instrument. You certainly did not get it on the first try but you continued anyway and now you are probably a good cook or a good piano player.
Michael Jordan said, “I’ve missed more than 9000 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 and over again in my life. That is why I succeed.”
