Failure to Success in 3 Easy Steps

A few months ago, my 7 year old son and I splurged on some new Hoverboards. We watched YouTube videos of how fun and exciting they were. It looked like a breeze. So we unboxed these 22lbs machines and jumped on them.

Just as quickly as we got on them, we fell to the ground. And when we finally got to stay on them, as soon as the machine moved, we fell. But every time we fell, we were able to stay on longer and longer. I even told my son, who didn’t enjoy falling, “It’s ok to fall. Just keep going and by the time you get to your 6th fall, you’ll be good.” He never made it to his 6th fail. We were zipping around the house and park within an hour.OK, this story has very little to do with business, but we can use this story as a microcosm to describe how you can take your business failures and turn them into success. Here’s some take aways:

1. Be afraid of failing to try, don’t be afraid to fail.

Every one fails. There is no shame in failure except for those who never really tried. If you lost the NBA championship but gave it your all, you’re still in the NBA next year.

In business, I’ve failed and we’ve failed plenty of times. We’ve almost gone out of business nearly a dozen times when we started up, but just like the Hoverboards, you’ll nearly fail at everything in the beginning and compound your successes as you move forward. If you never get started, you didn’t fail, you’re a failure. The only thing that got in your way was you. You can blame yourself.

2. Don’t repeat your failures.

When we launched Grunt Style, I put most of our money on a billboard, and we lost our butts! That was a big lesson and needless to say, I never did that again.We used to sell at flea markets. That didn’t work, so we tried a fair, military units, concerts, MMA events. Some worked, some didn’t.These are just two examples, but every failure leads to success. If you’re a rat in a maze, there are only so many possibilities, you may not know how many there are but you know how many didn’t work after you accomplish them. Try something. If it works, good! Do it again! If it didn’t, don’t do it again. Learn from the process and set a new plan with those lessons in mind.

3. Enjoy your success.

Now that you have a few things going for you, take the time to enjoy your success. Look back and reflect on what it took to get you there and the hunger that you need to keep going forward.

Final thoughts.

Success is like a freight train. It’s big, it’s heavy and takes a lot of power and energy to get it going, but once it starts to build momentum, it’s easier for it to go down the track. It’s much harder to get it started than to continue it.Want more business advice? Check out this story and tell me what you think in the comments.