Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2015 before Donald Trump’s political career, which is why he is called simply a “multimillionaire businessman”. The closing paragraph reflects Spain’s long-term unemployment during the crisis years.
Nobody goes looking for failure, but failing in business is a possibility once you decide to become an entrepreneur. In fact, statistically, more entrepreneurs fail than succeed.
Most of the advice you’ll find about failure is “cliché advice”, along the lines of “failure is necessary”, “you learn from failure”, “to succeed you have to fail” or “failure is the beginning of success”. In other words, people try to find the beauty in failure.
But the truth is that there is nothing beautiful about failure, and it doesn’t lead you to success. If anything, it leads to physical and mental exhaustion. Sometimes failure leaves you as if you’d been put in a ring with the world heavyweight boxing champion. At other times, it puts you out of the game for a long time. And if you live in Spain, failing in business can cost you dearly.
(Read: Why failing in business in Spain is anything but romantic)
We are sometimes sold the idea that we should be eager to fail, because that way we get closer to success. But no. I once compared it to a footballer who misses 10 shots on goal. Missing 10 shots at an empty goal doesn’t mean you’re closer to success; it means you’re a terrible footballer.
In other words, failure feels like a good kick in the balls. Nobody goes looking for a kick in the balls, and nobody is happy to get one. But once you’ve taken a good kick, the trick is to try not to take another one further down the line.
(Read: The secret price of starting your own business)
But sometimes failure is unavoidable.
Once we know that failure is very painful and exhausting, we need to understand exactly where it hits us.
Most of the time, we aren’t even that worried about the financial loss or the destruction of what we created. Failure often goes straight for our ego, for the image others have of us.
Many people call an entrepreneur crazy when, in reality, many of them feel envy at seeing other people doing something they didn’t do themselves, out of a lack of courage or ambition, or simply because they didn’t know how.
The moment you fail, you know those people are going to be pleased, and you see yourself as a fraud. Many feel ashamed of themselves and feel like failures in front of their partner and children. They don’t want to go out, and they even avoid talking about it and hide it from people they know. They see it as something shameful.
Talk about your failure for what it is, and naturally.
If you think someone is going to laugh at you or be pleased about your failure, remember: “idiots come in all shapes and sizes.” Talk about the failure the way you’d talk about losing a football match. Don’t try to dress it up or avoid the subject. That shows strength of character.
And if you find yourself negotiating a new start-up loan or seeking investment from a group of investors, talk about that failure as naturally and honestly as you can. It shows that you are strong, that you have learned a lesson and that you are free of emotional baggage and prejudice to start again.
(Recommended: How to fail in business without losing your dignity: the case of Chris Poole of 4chan)
It’s always your fault.
This isn’t about beating yourself up. It’s about recognising a universal truth. If your business failed, it was your fault.
Customers chose a worse product than ours… then you got the market research or the marketing of your business wrong.
The accountant cheated us… you hired the accountant.
My business wasn’t profitable… what made you think it would be?
In the world of business failure, all roads lead to Rome. It is always the entrepreneur’s fault.
And that is where you really can take lessons from failure, because although there is no beauty in failing, if on top of that you look for someone to blame to escape your own responsibility, your failure will have been completely pointless.
Study that failure.
What made your business fail? Take a few days to analyse when your business started its downhill slide with no brakes. Often it was doomed from the moment you had the idea, because the idea was not viable.
You have to start the chain of “whys”, because the vast majority of businesses fail when they run out of money to keep going. Poor financial planning? Cash flow?
Small entrepreneurs often make the most common mistake that sinks a small business: mixing personal and business finances.
(Read: This is the main mistake small business owners keep making)
In that case, if we analyse why we failed, at least the failure will have served as a “university for entrepreneurs”.
Then we really can repeat that famous cliché: “Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.”
Don’t let failure knock you down.
A business failure is no different from a broken heart. Some people get over it quickly, and some spend the rest of their lives making the other person’s life miserable because they can’t get over it.
Nobody can fix what has already happened. Your business went down the drain. Now you either get up or stay lying on the floor. You decide what you do and how much importance you want to give this disastrous event.
It is true that many people failed in business before achieving great success, including the multimillionaire businessman Donald Trump, who knows a great deal about this, before and after.
Ultimately, it all comes down to our way of thinking: each of us reacts very differently to the same event. And we’re not just talking about business, because some people cope with life’s problems much better than others.
(See: 17 steps to get through the worst moments of your life)
Being an entrepreneur isn’t simple. Starting and running your own business isn’t easy either. And in principle, not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur, but when starting a business is your only option to support your family, because you’ve spent years without finding a job and have already used up all the unemployment benefits you were entitled to, then you have to learn how to do it.
Then you may fail or you may succeed. If you have no idea about business, the most likely outcome is that you’ll fail, but if you think about it coldly, you were already “going hungry” before you tried to succeed with your own business. In other words, you were already getting kicked in the balls every morning when you woke up.
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