"Success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right first time." Tim Harford (Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure)
Small business owners, dreamers, and future entrepreneurs usually want to follow a straight and beaten path to success. Only few people with a vision realize the importance of failure, and that failure is a natural part of the development process. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over half of small businesses fail within the first five years of their launch.
Despite society's inclination to completely avoid failure, the truth is that no business owner, dreamer or entrepreneur has truly succeeded until they have failed; it’s only after a failure that we truly move forward and make our businesses live to its full potential.
Failure is a part of self-discovery. After the Olympics earlier this year, TheGuardian.co.uk ran an article discussing how athletes often handle failure better than students in classrooms worrying about getting straight A+s. Why? Because athletes “have a greater understanding of their own personal psychology, which in turn leads to greater mental strength (to add to their obvious physical strength) and a higher level of psychological resilience.” In other words: knowing ourselves lets us push ourselves more effectively towards success; this applies to people with business ideas just as much as it does to students or athletes. Failure allows small business owners and entrepreneurs to gain insight into their own psychology, helping them build a stronger idea of what they personally want and where they want to go with their idea in their future.
Failure teaches us what works and what doesn’t. There is always something new to learn or a new trend developing in the business world, whether you’re just beginning your own business or you’re an experienced entrepreneur. Failure is simply a way to find out what does not work and why it does not work in a modern day market. It’s a chance to adjust one’s mindset, goals, or company policies, which ultimately leads to a better plan for future business endeavors. In other words, failure is simply a social experiment or survey that plays into your thought-process when you begin designing the blueprint for your next idea.
Failure pushes us to improve and drives change. Failure can act as the ultimate drive to improve a business model. Not only does failure teach us what not to do when a problem arises – it pushes us to think outside of the box and find the solution that does work. Failure is what helps us realize what needs to change and be improved on, and it’s one more step down the road to success. Ask or read the biography of any inventor, from Thomas Edison to Bill Gates, and you’ll find this to be true.
"Startups don't only succeed because of their surroundings, they suceed because of their failures. It is all about their ability to deal with mistakes - their agility, flexibility and speed of pivoting." Thomas Hessler, CEO of UFOstart
The short rounds on UFOstart, usually three months in length, increase the awareness of failure, provide immediate feedback and give startups the freedom to pivot. Looking back at the lessons learned and experiences gained every quarter is the essence of a dynamic startup process -and the idea behind our Global Crowd Network.
-bmt
Join our first "Global Crowd Network" for Lean Startup funding! Connect with facebook on www.ufostart.com and calculate your Startup Value. Interested in how you can leverage the power of the crowd for your startup? Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter!
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