I have found that one of the challenges many individuals and business persons have is that they do not learn from the mistakes they make.
A person is not a failure if you fall down. You are only a failure if you refuse to get back up. And so it is with many persons I speak with. They get disheartened easily by their first failure and never try again, whether it is personal relationships, business ventures, or even school.
The quality to persevere is a very significant characteristic of successful entrepreneurs and individuals. And this quality is not something we are born with, but in many cases it is a part of our socialization growing up when your parents or a close relative would encourage you to go again when you fail. What I find with many people though, particularly those who always complain about the low wages they receive or challenges in life, is that they are so fearful of failing that they do everything not to fail, including not succeed.
In other words your fear of failure restricts the risk you take and if you take no risks then there can be no reward.
Yesterday I had a meeting with someone who is trying to start a new promising business venture, and naturally they were trying to eliminate every risk to the business failing. And it is a good thing to look at risk management from this point of view but it is also very important to realize the practicality of risk management, that is that you can never eliminate every risk. So I had to say to him that if you eliminate every risk there is then what you do at the same time is eliminate profit.
This is the nature of business. All risk cannot be eliminated but risk can be managed.
The important thing is not to avoid failure by doing nothing, but to (1) ensure that failure has a limited effect; and (2) learn from your failures.
The fear of failure though is what drives many of us to be complacent and not do anything that could give us what we dream about. Risk is not bad by itself but is catastrophic if not managed.
But when we fail we need to relook at everything that happened and do a proper assessment of what went wrong. One mistake that many people make in doing this assessment is that they try to cast blame on others and always try to pull themselves away from it, even if they had sole responsibility of it. This is the first failing that will ensure that the mistake is repeated again.
The first step of dealing with failure is to take responsibility. If you do not do that then you can never do an objective assessment and will make the same mistake again.
You should then carefully look at the timeline of events and speak to people about why they think something happened, and why the expected outcome did not happen. Make a careful note of everything that went wrong and ensure that when you do your next plan that those errors are eliminated, and by doing so you will also eliminate your risks and increase your chances of success.
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By Dennis Chung, dennis@mindyuhbusiness.com