FAILURE IS A STEPPING STONE
Winston Churchill was credited with this saying: “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”
In my opinion, one of the primary reasons for the high failure rate among small businesses is due to their view and misunderstanding of failure. Starting and growing a small business means that in order to succeed you have to try a lot of “stuff” in a short period of time. When you do things in a hurry you will make a lot of mistakes. The word failure can be replaced with the term mistake; we can change the quote above to read: “Success is going from mistake to mistake without losing enthusiasm.”
I never heard of anyone that had a batting average of 1,000. If there are no mistakes in a small business, then there are no chances taken and your full vision cannot be reached without taking a risk. I know that mistakes are both costly and that they take a toll on self-confidence, but the secret to success is perseverance.
I made another change in the word “mistake”; I changed it to innovation. Innovation is trying something new that has the potential to take your business to the next level. So let’s rewrite the quote: “Success is going from innovation to innovation without losing enthusiasm.” In a small business almost everything can be labeled as innovation since most everything is new to the business owner.
The moral to this story is: it’s ok to fail, to make a mistake, or to try something new. Many famous people failed. Babe Ruth had more strikeouts than home runs and Michael Jordan missed more than 9,000 shots in his career.
If you believe in your vision, your WHY comes from the heart and your target market really needs you, your next risk may be the one that makes your dream a reality.
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Tips & Advice by Nick Petra, CFP – Founder of Strategic Duck and BizQuack
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