Failure is a part of eventual success

Learning how to fail successfully is the key to a rosy future as an entrepreneur.

It’s the summer of 1992 and I’m standing at the starting line of the sprint race on my school sports day. I’m seven years old and I’ve spent the summer glued to the TV watching the Olympic Games in Barcelona, where British sprinter Linford Christie won gold in the 100 metres. I go to the village primary school, so the crowd today is a little bit smaller and there are only two of us in the boys’ race. But for me, this is my Olympics and today I am going to be Linford Christie.

When we pull up to the starting line, the headmaster has acknowledged that I am a better sprinter than my opponent, so he gives him a 2-metre head start. I still think I can win it, so I agree. Then the gun goes and my legs are powering away as fast as they can go. But wait, I’m not going anywhere and my opponent is shooting off ahead of me getting farther and farther away. The headmaster, it transpires, has his index finger in the neck of my shirt holding me back until my opponent has almost finished the race and then lets me go; needless to say I lost the race.

I felt cheated, humiliated and angry that I didn’t get a fair chance to win. It was my earliest memory of failure and it leaves a fearful feeling. This is a common emotion for most when we fail at something, and from a young age we are taught that failure is bad and we feel shame when it happens. We are told we haven’t tried hard enough if we fail an exam, or aren’t popular if we aren’t good at sport.

As any entrepreneur will tell you, failure is part of the journey to success and if your thoughts are programmed the way I was as a child, then you need to relearn how you think about it. It’s no secret that failure rates among new start-ups are very high. According to the US bureau of labor statistics: “Across sectors, 66 per cent of new establishments were still in existence two years after their birth, and 44 per cent were still in existence four years after”.

Steve Jobs, in his commencement speech at Stanford University, exposed how his biggest failures in life were the very thing that made his successes possible. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards,” he said. “So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

So given that failure is not only very likely for entrepreneurs but also vital for success, my question is how do I fail successfully?

Through the many ventures I have undertaken, I can say with humility that I have had many defeats. Some I look back at and think I could have hand­led it better and others I am pleased happened, as the learning experience was worth more than what I lost. I have developed some principles that allow you to mitigate the damage of failure and make it more of a developmental process than a damaging experience.

Firstly, if you are going to fail then do it quickly and early. Make your mistakes when you are young, if possible, so that you carry the learning experience with you throughout life as it’s much easier to come back from a loss when you are young. It’s also important to recognise when you are in a hopeless case and put it to bed early. One of my regretful failures was when I stayed hanging on to a business that wasn’t working because I had set out on a mission I couldn’t let go of. So read the signs that it’s time to move on and do it quickly.

Secondly, you must constantly reflect through successes and failures, as this is how we build upon these experiences. When you reflect on failures there will be some things that were out of your control and some that were totally up to you, and you need to recognise both before moving on.

Thirdly, your biggest failure will be not bouncing back and having a shot at something else. You’ve had the harsh learning experience, so don’t let it go to waste by not giving something else a go. Now you are stronger, smarter and hungrier, so it’s a better time than ever. You must find the tenacity to roll the dice again.

As Winston Churchill once said: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Paris Norriss is an entrepreneur and partner in Coba Education, which provides educators to schools and institutes

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