How do you handle your failures?
Hey Moguls, Chris Clothier here, and if you’re like me, you don’t like to dwell on your failures. But, if you’re trying to succeed as an entrepreneur, it’s time to take a new approach…
You need to see your failures as opportunities.
Many people think being an entrepreneur is easy. You buy a course, pick up some books, sign up for seminars and you’ll quickly own your own business and watch your profits roll in.
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Real entrepreneurs succeed not because they’ve taken a course, but because they never give up, and because they see failure as opportunity.
It’s Hard Work
Being an entrepreneur is tough. It’s a daily grid. I can tell you from experience that there is nothing easy about being an entrepreneur. In fact, it’s a pretty lonely job.
Sometimes it’s a crappy job. It changes every day, and there’s no overnight success. You get punched in the face a lot. Honestly, you might not have an idea of how hard you’re going to have to work...
You’re going to have to grind every day. There are no days off. And you’re going to need a tremendous amount of patience.
But it all comes with an opportunity, if you have the right discipline and you understand what it’s going to take.
If you think it’s going to be easy, if you think it’s going to be something that you just turn on or off, and if you think you don’t need to waste time developing any skill set, you’re not going to succeed.
Sorry, not sorry.
But if you’re ready to embrace hard work, you’re on your way to success.
There Are No Shortcuts
To be an entrepreneur at the highest level, you must pursue excellence.
Every. Single. Day.
Those who are looking for a quick way to the top see a mediocre job as passable. But to those who really want to make it as entrepreneurs, a mediocre job means it’s time to start over.
Only the best is really a success.
Failure Is an Opportunity
You’re probably going to fail in a BIG way, several times. But those who succeed never quit.
In 2017, the Alabama Crimson Tide lost the national championship after the Clemson Tigers scored a touchdown in the last second of the game. Nick Saban, the football coach at Alabama, said in an interview about their preparations for the next season:
“Hopefully, we won’t waste a failure.”
I think Coach Saban was saying that he wants to see his team learn from that loss and use it to improve, so the failure doesn’t happen again.
And I’ll say the same thing to you: learn from your failures.
If you don’t, they’re wasted opportunities that might just have been the key to helping you succeed.
While hard work is critical, if all you do is work hard, you’re not going to make it. You’ve got to learn and adjust along the way. And a big part of that learning process is learning from your failures.
Get What it Takes
Successful entrepreneurs are problem-solvers. You need to bring something of value, whether that is a product or a service, that solves a problem. And when you do that, you become an entrepreneur.
You have to do the research to understand how:
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to provide value
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to provide a service
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to provide a product.
Once you’ve mastered the skill of problem-solving and start providing that service or product, you will get paid.
But you won’t get rewarded for just putting in the time. You have to bring real value.
This is an ongoing process...
In my company, I go looking for problems. Every company has problems; I just go out looking for them. I ask people about them. I want to know what they are. And then I help solve them. That’s what you have to do as an entrepreneur.
Remember, easy does not work. Shortcuts do not work.
You have to put in the time. You have to grind every day. You have to be patient. You have to learn from your failures.
If you do that, and after all of your efforts, you bring real value to the table, you will succeed as an entrepreneur.
Your Take
What have you learned from your failures? Let me know below.
1. Embrace hard work.
2. See failures as opportunities to learn.
3. Learn how to solve problems.