Failure Begets Success

Photo by Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs

Many people are naturally dispositioned to avoid failure as if it is the end of the world. Many employees have this issue but most entrepreneurs don’t. It’s all a matter of how you think about failure and can you leverage it for something useful. Some of the best employees a company can have are prior entrepreneurs. They have a different sense of risk and comfort around making things happen.

To be clear, nobody wants to fail, but failure happens. And it happens more often than the successes. But the successes would not be there without the prior failures. Sure you can get lucky here and there on the first shot, but in order to succeed at things you are going to fail at things — and you only need to get comfortable with that.

That’s where almost all of the learning is and that’s where the best life lessons are, which will then guide your decisions the next time you work on something.

Will Smith recently put out a very succinct video that talks about this.

He calls practice “controlled failure” where you deliberately try to do something and push it to the point of…