Google the term failure and you get 226 million results. So clearly failure and its preceding action, failing, are pretty popular.
There’s stuff written on failing fast, failing forward, fail often or pushing for failure. We read upbeat stories from start-up founders talking about their fails like it’s no biggie. They’ll get it right eventually – usually with other people’s money. They get to walk away a bit dented, but not really having lost too much, aside from a bit of pride.
However, a lot of what’s out there is either just plain wrong or misleading at best and if you’re a small business owner, that’s especially dangerous. It’s as if we’ve made failure kinda cool, accompanied by the belief that if you fail big enough times, you’ll eventually succeed.
Except it’s bollocks.
What you don’t see in those stories is the trail of destruction real failure leaves in its wake. The people who lose their jobs, their homes, their families or, at worst, their lives as a result of their own or someone else’s failure.
That’s what the term failure in business is really about; betting big and losing it all, often taking other people down with you. So to proclaim you’ve learned your lessons after destroying all of that – well that’s rather all a bit late.
It’s time to get real about this failure thing before it encourages more people to bet everything they have.
When you scratch the surface, a lot of what’s written on “failing” isn’t actually failing. It’s just making a mistake, things not quite going according to plan, experiments not delivering the expected outcomes, correcting your course, or just not achieving yet, etc.
Much of the cliché is from sporting analogies; quotes like “Michael Jordan failed thousands of times”. Except Michael Jordan didn’t “fail” over and over again. He simply missed a shot – as in he didn’t get the ball in the hoop as he practiced and refined his craft. That’s very different to all out “failing” in business. Every time Michael missed, people’s lives and livelihoods weren’t on the line. He wasn’t betting his house or his family on his ability to make a jumpshot. It was just a game, where the only people whose businesses were riding on it were the bookies.
Betting “all in” without first honing your craft (and the 10,000 hour rule rings true for a reason) is never a great idea. Sure confidence and self-belief can be good things when you’re building a business, but over-confidence is a liability best avoided. Especially so if you’ve got responsibilities – a mortgage, kids to feed or older family (or staff) members who rely on you not losing your sanity along the way.
An all or nothing gamble mindset comes from chasing growth at any cost and the dream of the billion dollar payday (which happens in about 0.000001 per cent of cases – now that’s gambling.). Far better to create a sustainable business that does the job, than to constantly chase anything that moves, always wanting more and risking and sacrificing more to get it.
“Risky failures” don’t teach you what you need to know to succeed next time. Rather, it’s having a sense of responsibility combined with the courage and grit to dig in and make things work. For me, it’s all about finding ways to grow business in a sustainable way, a bit at a time. It’s the intrigue of small risks and experiments along the way. Checking, correcting, changing – rather than an all or nothing gamble.
Kristin Austin, Creator, 1stinbiz.com – the real-life sales revenue game
