We Have 4 Mini-Resolutions For You. Ready? Here’s The Challenge: Embrace Your Failures

You’ve been there: trying to figure out the newest, best way to bust through your blocks and open the floodgates to success. Sometimes it doesn’t work the first time…or the second…or the third. That’s normal. Read on to find out why the entrepreneurial path isn’t all glitter and shine.


Was I going to make it?

I’d wake up knowing there was a battle to be fought—and more than winning, it was about surviving. Success is built from failures that have somehow understood one another.

Before I came up with that definition, I had a hard time coping in my entrepreneurial journey. There were days I found myself 10 steps behind, told by many that my idea wouldn’t work and that I was making a total fool out of myself during presentations.

Someone once asked me, “What are you doing as an entrepreneur?”

I thought long and hard, even though it seemed like a simple question, and came up with this: pursuing new and unfamiliar opportunities.

Then it hit me. Boom.

Think of these two keys words: new and unfamiliar. As an entrepreneur, you are going against the norms in the first place. You left the systematic, timed environment for a place where none of that exists. You are creating something from scratch, and that starts with experimentation.

It’s like a putting a puzzle together.

You start by laying out all the pieces, then you try to place them. Most of the time, you’re wrong—but every single time you place a wrong piece, you’re closer to finding the right one and finishing the whole thing. Have you ever finished a puzzle without trial and error?

Okay, here are your mini-resolutions.

DON’T CONFUSE FAILURE WITH QUITTING. THE MOST IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE IS THAT YOU LEARN, AND MOVE ON TO THE NEXT STEP.

Change your perception.

Don’t confuse failure with quitting. The most important difference is that you learn, and move on to the next step. Embrace the fact that you will fail here and there, no matter how far you reach.

Define “Failure.”

What is failure to you? You and your team should each define what they think failure is in general, and how it is related to your business. Failure is rarely defined and acknowledged within entrepreneurship, but now, more leaders are helping other entrepreneurs understand failure in other terms.

List all of your current fears. What comes up?

You will feel better if you acknowledge these early on, and make it an exercise at the end of every week. Think of this as a crisis plan, so that whenever something happens, it doesn’t hit you out of the blue. You’ve thought about it, and you now have a possible, well-thought-out solution.

Go back to the past to understand the future.

Create a map. Write down the times you failed, and how it led you to where you are now. Connect each failure to a solution. This map will show you the bigger picture, and also give you a little burst of bittersweet memories. You can always keep adding to it!

Try incorporating these ideologies, and let your perception of failure change.

You will learn that failure is an opportunity for growth. So let’s make more mistakes—because trust me, that’s where you will find success!

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