Look Forward To Your Failures
Failures Help You Succeed
Have you been so terrified of failing, that you feel it’s preventing you from moving forward – or even getting started with your online efforts? This was one of my major obstacles for the longest time. I was so afraid to put myself out there that I would try to do a whole bunch of projects at once or get 90% finished and move onto the next project.
But, there are people who think of failure differently like scientists and medical researchers. In fact in their field failure can be a good thing.
When they fail it means that another vital experiment has been tried and eliminated, so now they can move on to the next. Sometimes, it’s just a numbers game – you have to have a certain amount of failed experiments before you arrive at the one that’s going to make a difference.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Thomas A. Edison
If you look around at the success stories or anyone that has experienced great success they’ll have their own stories of failures. They didn’t just arrive at the outcome you see now. They have some failures under their belt.
The difference between them and those who aren’t successful is that the successful learned from their failures – and the others simply accepted failure and gave up.
Remember These Important Things When You Start To Look Forward To Your Failures
1. Failure Is a Good Thing
If you’re still waiting for your success you should remember that what doesn’t work is in the past – and what does work can propel you on to future success. Failure is a good thing. Maybe you’ve never thought of it that way. When you fail, it means you’re working hard on your business and finding what works for you. This might mean tweaking your system so that it will eventually run like a well-oiled machine.
2. What Works For Someone Else Might Not Work For You
And what worked for one entrepreneur may not work for you. They have different experiences – both business and personal – they think different, have different values, have different ideas and are not you.
What you need to do is find your niche and develop it rather than try to be a copycat to others. This doesn’t mean you can’t get ideas from what you see are working for others. But don’t completely take what they do and run with it. You’ve got to find you in what you’re doing otherwise it won’t work.
3. Give Yourself Permission To Succeed
When you give yourself permission to succeed – you also give yourself permission to fail.
As you try new things and ideas, not all of them will come to fruition. In fact when you’re first starting out you might have to go through a lot of them to get to the heart of what you actually want.
By doing this you’ll figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. It’s the only way to know for sure. The more you try and fail, the more likely it is that you’ll hit your dream along the way. You’ll find that one of your ideas will take off and feel right, then another and another until you’ve got a business that you love.
4. Risks Need To Be Taken
Some top entrepreneurs agree that if you succeed in everything you try, then you’re failing in the big picture because you’re not taking enough risks. The very nature of an entrepreneur means that risks need to be taken.
That doesn’t mean that all of your risks are going to work, but you should look forward to your failures.
In fact, many are sure to fall by the wayside. This is normal. Take a look at pop-up businesses in Silicon Valley. There are huge successes there – but, if you look closer you’ll see many dreams failed and abandoned.
That doesn’t mean that the person failed. Only that particular idea or business at that particular time. Many of those who stuck with it rose beyond the failures and are the big successes you hear about.
One thing that’s imperative to remember about failure is that there are two types:
Honorable and Incompetent.
Honorable failure means you attempted honestly to try a new or different way to do things and the attempt failed. Incompetent failure means you failed because you didn’t put enough effort or action into the attempt at success.
Remember the Thomas Edison quote above? He tried time and again to invent electricity, in fact he had numerous failures – but when people asked him why he had so many failures before he found a method that worked, he said that he didn’t consider the experiments to be failures – they were simply discoveries of methods which didn’t work.
Can you imagine what life would be like today if Thomas Edison accepted failure the first time?
Keep trying and look forward to those failures – they’re what will eventually point you in the direction of your success. Plus, it makes you more of an expert in marketing because you’ll be able to say what works, and what doesn’t.
Have a great and productive day!
~April
