Embrace Failure and Learn From It

Henry Ford said, “Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.” Often history looks back on someone and doesn’t even remember the failures that they encountered along the way. History focuses on successes. That’s what makes Henry Ford statement so powerful.

Failure is an opportunity. Because every failure gives you information and things to go forward. Changes you can make. Modifications to make things slightly different but may allow huge success. Last week, we talked about believing in yourself in our post Believe in Yourself Even When Everyone Else Thinks You’re Nuts. Part of believing in yourself is the ability to learn from your failures. As an entrepreneur, you can’t get hung up on that you failed but instead focus on what went wrong and how to fix it.

In our post Why Aren’t Customers Buying? Maybe it is How You are Packaging What You Sell?, we talked about what happens when people aren’t buying and how you can make changes to how you are offering your products and service. Some might see low sales as a failure but often this can be a huge opportunity for success once you have made a few adjustments.

Failure is a common occurrence in business, however, what you do in the face of those failures is the true mark of the entrepreneur. By stepping into it, embracing it and seeing failure as a learning opportunity you can not only move forward to try something different but you might just hit on the perfect combination. This, in turn, may leave you welcoming failure, even looking for it, knowing that the lessons that you can learn from it are often remarkable.

The next time you’re faced with a product or service that isn’t selling, another no to funding or any kind of failure or setback remember you have a choice. You can walk away or you can step back and study the situation. Turn it around look at it differently, and ask yourself what can I learn from this? Where could I make a modification that might change this outcome in the future? Don’t be short sighted? Instead be open to those things that are happening around you and trust in your instincts. You absolutely have the ability to transform failure into success otherwise, you never would’ve made the leap to becoming an entrepreneur.

And remember that success always lies beyond failure.