I originally wrote the post below as a newsletter to my list, but I figured it might be helpful to some other DP members, since dealing with failure is something we all have to deal with from time to time. Hope you enjoy it! ** Are you afraid of failure? Well if you are, I'm afraid I've got a bit of bad news for you. If you're not failing in your business, somewhere, right now, your business could very well be doomed. "Wait...What???" you say. "How the heck could NOT failing doom your business? Has this guy completely lost his marbles?" you ask. Well...yes. Yes, I have. But that's beside the point for now To understand how NOT failing could spell doom for your business, let's get clear on what I mean by "failure". As I'm defining it, Failure = Feedback about how NOT to do something. Every failure contains a lesson. You just have to be willing to listen to the lesson. And more importantly, you've gotta be willing to take ACTION based on what you've learned. In business, the lessons to be learned from failure could be anything from "There's not enough demand in this market for this product for it to be profitable" to "You need to improve your copywriting skills" to "You need to outsource the tasks in your business that you're not good at so that you can focus on the tasks that you ARE good at." But if you're AFRAID of failure. If you avoid taking action because you don't want to screw up and feel bad, then there's no way to learn these lessons. Think about other skills you've had to learn over the course of a lifetime, and you'll see what I mean. - Learning to walk usually means you end up falling on your butt a few times. - Learning to ride a bike usually means getting a scraped knee or hand when you fall. - Learning to play a musical instrument usually means annoying your neighbors into the wee hours of the night while you try to nail that SWEET guitar solo from Journey's "Don't Stop Believing". Okay, maybe that last one was just me, but you get the idea. I don't know of any massively successful person, in ANY field of human endeavor, who doesn't have a bunch of failure stories to go along with their success stories. A few years ago, there was a popular Nike commercial featuring Michael Jordan, who's considered by pretty much everybody to be the greatest basketball player in history. In the commercial, he said: "I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot... and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why... I succeed." You can watch the commercial here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc In his seminars, marketing expert Eben Pagan talks about the importance of failure in business. He says that if you're going to fail, you should fail FAST, so you can learn from it and move on. Here's a tip: While you can't avoid failure altogether, there are things in your business that you can do to lower the chances of failing on a big scale. One of those things is TESTING. Before you sink your whole advertising budget into a Pay-Per-Click campaign, start by investing a small sum of money to test your ads on a small scale. Then ONLY if you get a positive result, do you scale up your ad campaign and invest more. If you're in the internet marketing niche, rather than spending months planning and setting up a big product launch, why not spend 20 bucks to test your product out as a Warrior Special Offer at the Warrior Forum (www.warriorforum.com) first, so you can confirm that people actually do want your product, and get some early feedback that you can use to make improvements. THEN, you can move ahead with your big product launch. So, to wrap things up for today: You're GOING to fail in your business. The people you see having mega success stories failed a bunch of times too. It's okay. Don't fear failure. Accept it and learn from it, because failure can actually be one of your best allies in business.
i deal with failure by accepting it as inevitability... but when i do fail, i don't write it off - i learn from the experience and try not to make the exact same mistake twice... i look to thomas edison as my inspiration for making the best of mistakes... =)
Great Post! The way to deal with failure is through perseverance. Take Abraham Lincoln as an example. He lost 8 different elections before winning the big one. Regardless of one's opinion regarding his politics, we have to admire his sense of perseverance. We should all approach failure in the same manner.
try, try and try againt untill your success....we have accept our mistake and use the faillur as the steping stone... and never repeated that mistake again...
The best thing you can learn from repeated failures is when to pull the plug on future ventures, so you can move on to something with a higher likelyhood of success. Don't stay stuck on a go nowhere project.
If you can learn from failure,pick yourself up and keep on trying that is all you can do.Its how many times you pick yourself up that counts. What do you want try and fail,or NOT TRY AT ALL. We all get pissed of,i try selling a crm software to builders,most of them think hard drive is something to do with golf,software is a floral dress the Mrs will wear when the summer get hot.
Let me get this straight...there HAS the be failure? I know you mean well with this thread, but I'm sorry, that is one of the most dumbest, reckless things I have ever heard. Leave it to Pagan to say something so reckless as that to people. I do seminars, classes also, and I would rather kiss a pissed-off Rottweiler on the nose than to say that. And he is not a "marketing expert." Sorry, had to get that off my chest,. heh. Good quote. I forgot about that one.
I deal with failure by trying and trying again. I don't give up. I believe you only fail if you give up on what you are striving for.
I agree I try again, but I take a different approach and I make sure I don't repeat my past mistakes.
Not so much "has to" be failure, as much as there's going to be failure at some point. I guess theoretically, you could build a successful business or master a skill without ever making a mistake, but the chances of that would be quite slim. Maybe I should've included the context in which Pagan mentioned the "fail fast" thing. He was pointing out that, as opposed to trying to get everything perfect because you're afraid of failing and falling into the trap of "paralysis by analysis" (perpetually in the planning stage with little or no action getting taken), you should plan what you're going to do, and then DO it, and be willing to just go ahead and risk making mistakes along the way, as mistakes are part of the learning process, provided you analyze your results and make corrections. So to clarify, no he wasn't saying you should purposely try to screw up your business. Yeah, "marketing expert" was just a descriptive phrase I used there. I could've said "info product publisher" or something like that, but that's not really saying anything. You don't like the guy?