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Guaranteed to Fail

Every day of my life I hear someone say, “why should I bother doing all that work, it probably isn’t going to succeed anyway.” Sure, it’s easy to label that person as a pessimist and some people think pessimism is a good thing (because they are pleasantly surprised if they are wrong, and if they are right, then they get exactly what they expected), but how does that attitude fit in with success, failure, and entrepreneurship?

If you don’t try, you will fail. If you do try, you may fail. I always tell people this. If you don’t do something, I can guarantee you 100% you will fail at it. You won’t complete the task or succeed, and there’s 0% chance of it happening. But if you do it, you try, you make the effort, there’s a 10%, 30%, 80% chance that you will succeed but regardless, that chance is greater than 0%.

Being an entreprenueur means taking risk but it also means learning from failure. I look at failure like a series of test tube lab tests. You take 10 test tubes, each has a different experiment running, and you go into it knowing that 9 of them will produce nothing, but 1 will produce that spectacular result. I don’t get all discouraged when 9 out of 10 of my ideas fizzle, that’s what I EXPECT will happen going into it, so my expectations are actually being met when those ideas fail. If you go into it thinking that all 10 ideas will succeed, and 9 fail, you will have disappointed yourself, you’ll be depressed, and you’ll be less likely to want to test any ideas out ever again.

Most of the ideas I implement aren’t success/failure black or white types of things. They are building blocks, and one idea by one idea I build the business to be better. Some ideas don’t do as well as others, but I know one thing for sure: if I don’t brainstorm, I don’t play around and test different ideas, I don’t implement anything, then I absolutely will not achieve anything.

This is what sets successful entrepreneurs apart from employees: employees know that all of their ideas will succeed because no matter what slop they produce, their bosses will send them a paycheck (unless they get fired, but the amount and quality of work they have to do to be above that threshhold is pretty low), and they love that - they can’t handle failure, they can’t stand risking their income on the success or failure of their ideas because they expect that all of their ideas will fail so “why try”. Their “reward” for zero risk and zero chance of failure is a mediocre capped paycheck and a prison sentence to report to an office building from 9am to 5pm every day.

Successful entrepreneurs approach a problem from multiple angles and with multiple ideas, knowing full well that most of their attempts will either fail or won’t do much, but they know that with enough effort, all of their work will slowly build a great business over time, and every now and then an idea will win and win big, which rewards entrepreneurs with a huge financial upside. When you’re just starting out, the risks are large and the rewards are small. But as you build a successful business over time, you begin to reap huge benefits: like being able to work from home every day if you want to, taking half a dozen vacations a year, and answering to no one. So never be afraid to fail, because the most successful entrepreneurs out there know that most ideas will fail, and that’s their key to success.

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Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 3:23 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.