Why Failure Is Important For An Entrepreneur

Life of an entrepreneur hovers around two questions – Will I be successful with this product idea or Will I fall flat on my face? Honestly if you tread the path of starting your own venture then these questions should form a part of this ride. It is imperative for every entrepreneur to get down do some introspection about his product. Success means just one thing – Your product making waves in the market and getting popular amongst your target audience.

However failure could mean a lot – The product or your service bombed drastically or the original idea wasn’t good enough to work or you as an entrepreneur failed miserably in keeping your company together. Now let me ask you a question here – If your product or service failed then are you gonna sit back and keep crying over it? If the original idea wasn’t good enough or you couldn’t keep your company together, then will you just give it up and get down to a 9-5 job?

I believe that you should be saying NO to all of the above and will get back to the white board in your meeting room and rework on your idea.

Failure for a successful entrepreneur

If you go through the biography of any successful entrepreneur you will see that they all embraced failure to the best of their advantage. Accepting failure is the best option to succeed in your entrepreneurial life and this is by far the best strategy that you can follow. We all have grown up listening to the old adage which goes like this :- Failures are stepping stones to success. This holds true for us in every sphere of life.

We have also heard that education is directly related to success but this actually does not hold true if you aim to be an entrepreneur. Success has little to do with education. It is the attitude that matters. Doesn’t really matter if you failed in your product idea but if you want to create a dent in entrepreneurial world then get up and rework by learning from the mistakes that you have done. Looking at the most successful businessmen of all times you will see that most of them were barely educated. Education is important if you want to get into a regular 9-5 jobs but getting into entrepreneur phase it holds no relevance. In fact if you really think that college degree is a must to be a successful entrepreneur then you must check out Forbes 400 which is a guide to richest people in the world. They have listed down 400 men and women and out of this number, 63 of them did not pursue higher education and almost 15 of them were college or university drop outs. Although Rahul Yadav from Housing is not a part of the list but still he is one entrepreneur who has the audacity to run a business. Despite all the controversies he has been through I still consider him as one of the most daring and maverick entrepreneur India has ever seen. He left IIT, Mumbai to set up a business which everybody was gung-ho about last year.

Do you call him a failure? Well may be but look at the bigger picture. He is up for one of the daring venture which will be the biggest India has ever seen. How can we even miss out on Bill Gates from Microsoft. He decided to give up college life and went on to make Microsoft. Do I need to say more?

A failed business idea or a failed product is a failure or is it the beginning of your success? Failure becomes hard to define. The only person who can define it is YOU. Check out the history and you will see people reaping success after failing terribly. Call it luck or doing R&D all over again about the product or just sheer determination to succeed, the crux of the matter is that they succeeded in such a way that the world knows about them.

Steve Jobs was one of the biggest example of coming back with a bang. After being fired from the CEOs position from Apple because of terrible products, he started NeXT. This venture turned out to be a huge success and it was because this only that Steve Jobs got back to Apple as a CEO. Thomas Alva Edison is yet again another example of someone who bounced back after failing. He invented something which mankind cannot survive without. He took nearly 1000 attempts to discover light. His words on failure are a great source of inspiration for one and all –

I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps

You need to remember one extremely important thing here – Starting your own venture is a risky step. Start Ups can make you a multi billionaire or bring you down to rags. World’s greatest entrepreneurs are always known to take risk. The can be categorized in many forms such as Financial, Personal or even a commercial risk (the biggest example is that of Apple iPod). Here I need to ask you a question: Don’t you agree that Risk and Failure are two sides of the same coin? The trepidation of failure is a cramped grotto; it is such a fear that many creative thinkers fall flat on their face and give up and never to bounce back.

Conclusion

I say that everyone should fail at least once in their lifetime. It is important but once failed do learn what mistake you did and then come back with a bang. Failure and Success are destination which as an entrepreneur we are not sure about so why not just enjoy the ride to that destination. What according to you is success and how do you perceive failure? Do let me know in the comments.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.