Perhaps the most counterintuitive concept to come out of the wild-and-wacky entrepreneurial craze is the notion that failure is a good thing. That it’s not just OK to fail, but beneficial to your career and your business. That you really can’t succeed without failing.
You’ve no doubt seen countless books and blogs telling you how to fail fast, fail often, fail better, fail forward -- every possible permutation on the theme you can imagine. The question is, is it true that failure is good, or is it all just a load of hype?
The answer, I’m afraid, is mostly the latter.
First, let’s be clear: failure is not a good thing. It’s not a goal. It’s not a desired outcome. The very notion that it’s not a big deal is creating a generation of entrepreneurs and workers that, best case, have a cavalier attitude toward failure and, worst case, think it’s OK to screw up.
The problem, I believe, is that all those popular books and blogs are confusing the heck out of everyone about what failure is and is not. Let me break it down for you.
Failure is lack of performance. Failure is the opposite of success. Failure is falling short of your goals and commitments. Failure is saying you’re going to do something and not doing it. Failure is being hired to do a job and then not doing it to the best of your ability.
Clearly, that’s not a good thing.
Now let me tell you what failure is not. Failure is not a part of learning, as in trial and error. When a baby is learning to walk, takes its first step, falls down and bursts into tears, that’s not failure. If the baby never gets back up and succeeds in learning to walk, that’s failure. But making mistakes as we learn new things is not. It’s simply the way we learn.
You have to take failure seriously if you want to avoid it in the future. And trust me when I tell you, you do want to avoid it if possible.
Besides having the guts and the tenacity to stick with a venture through all the inevitable hurdles and pitfalls, you have to pay attention when things go wrong. You have to be willing to do a post-mortem on what happened and take a cold hard look in the mirror to learn from the experience. If not, you risk making the same mistakes over and over again.
Do everything in your power to be successful at everything you do. If you fail, learn from it.
Source - Entreprenuer (Some highlights from Steve Tobak's article)