The experiences your mind tends to identify as unpleasant—mainly, those associated with failure—actually represent your most authentic source of power. Retrain yourself to view these challenges as golden opportunities, and you’ll be on your way to the bank. Ready to get started? Here’s how.
“If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
These words of wisdom come from the most daring and risk-taking entrepreneur of our time: Elan Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors.
I read this this quote a while ago, and it had me thinking for some time about my own failures. Was it really worth it? Had my failures taught me anything in my personal life, career, or business? I started listing a bunch of my failures—and to my surprise, there were a lot. I thought to myself, Why haven’t I noticed that I’ve failed so many times, yet kept going and never stopped doing what I always intended to do? This is when “you are not INNOVATING enough” started to make sense to me.
IT IS WHEN MISTAKES HAPPEN AND FAILURE OCCURS THAT REAL CHALLENGE TRIGGERS THE BRAIN TO START OPERATING INNOVATIVELY.
Innovation is now the key ingredient that differentiates one business idea from another, making each unique. Innovation cannot happen without previous mistakes. It is when mistakes happen and failure occurs that real challenge triggers the brain to start operating innovatively. This is when great ideas are created. Unfortunately, once people experience failure once or maybe twice, they usually back off and call it a day. This is actually the best time to look back at your failure and start getting innovative with your ideas: fix the problem where the mistake was made, and come up with brilliant ideas through the push of your innovation. There is no one who will not fail at some point in their life, especially when they are running a business (or are about to start a business).
Some would ask: How can I fail, and then be innovative, before I even start my business? Well, you learn from other people’s failure—which brings us to copycat businesses. Copycat businesses are usually the easiest ones to start, because the concept already exists, and the demand has been created. Many people do not notice that if you need to start a copycat business, you actually are going to face a challenge in attracting customers—unless your copycat idea has that brilliant, extra-innovative idea that will differentiate it from the original.
DON’T BE SCARED OF YOUR FAILURES. THINK POSITIVELY, BE INNOVATIVE, AND NEVER WORRY ABOUT YOUR CRAZY IDEAS.
As an entrepreneur, a person must look at their failure with a positive view in order to start enabling their innovative thinking within the context of their business. Innovation is an actual requirement nowadays, and many of us, as customers, would like to see that special, innovative spark attract us to a business, whether it is offering a product or a service.
Back to my own failures. There have been many that I never realized were failures—because I automatically started thinking positively about how I would do things differently. That’s when my innovative thinking starts to kick in. Come to think of it, some of those ideas were pretty crazy—but they ended up working perfectly. Here’s my last piece of advice. Don’t be scared of your failures. Think positively, be innovative, and never worry about your crazy ideas. If you fail, try to think more innovatively, and then give it another go.
