Failure is an Option! To be a successful entrepreneur you must fail
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Real entrepreneurs are not afraid not fail. Not only are they not afraid to fail, but they don’t look at a failed business as a failure but as an experience to learn from and to make their next start-up a success.
The first thing we need to do is define the word “fail”. What do we mean by fail or success? Is success the fact that you can pay your bills from your business or is success when you have an exit? The same for “fail”. What does it mean to fail? If you struggled for a year to get a business of the ground and during that time your business paid your bills for you then did you fail? What if you sold it for a small amount because it was not bringing you the success you hoped for? Is that failing? Or is failing simply when you need to shut down your company because it is not paying the bills and you could not sell it to someone else? Obviously there is no simple answer.
It is very rare that an entrepreneur is successful with his first venture. Often it can take a few failures before he finds his success.
A lot of entrepreneurs failed or never finished college. They couldn’t be tied down to a strict regement or program. They needed to get out, break out of the system and learn what they need to know on their own.
Experience is the greatest education.
I often wonder why young entrepreneurs go to college. With the money they spend on a 4 year college degree they could have invested in a real world business and be four years ahead of the system. Even if after four years the young entrepreneur fails, his education of starting and running a business, even a couple of businesses can be a greater education then what he could have gotten in college.
There is no embarrassment in failing, there is only embarassment in not getting up and giving up on your dream. Entrepreneurs are dream driven not business driven. If one business fails they will start another one and continue their dream of living life on their terms and becoming a successful entrepreneur.
This post was inspired by a post on Feld.com. Brad Feld is a very successful entreprneur and investor. He asks:
What makes a better CEO of a new startup – an experienced entrepreneur who’s last company was a failure or a big company executive with a stellar pedigree who has never worked in a startup?
His answer?
Give me the experienced entrepreneur whose last company was a failure 100% of the time.
You should read the rest of this excellent post and most investors will feel the same way. I’m 36 years old now and I am proud to say that I “failed” many times and in many different ways and for many different reasons. Like the time I launched a new website on September 11th 2001 with Newspaper ads that I spent a lot of money on coming out on September 12th. I wonder why the ads didn’t work? But I never considered myself to having failed. As long as I learned something along the way and used my knew knowledge for my next business then I do not consider having failed, but consider it having been a learning process.
My first start-up when I moved to Israel I spent 3 1/2 years putting in blood sweat and tears and it eventually failed, but I can not even begin to explain to you how much I learned from the mistakes that were made that have saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars in the success of my current company. It was a tremendous education that you simply can not get in any University. I didn’t fail because the next day I got up and starting planning my next company which now has 9 employees and is on it’s way to B’Ezras Hashem tremendous success. In fact, looking back, I never really failed at all.
Oh, and by the way, when you do succeed, no one remembers that you failed in the past.
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