Change your Views About Failure & Succeed in Leadership

People commonly, everyday, hate to fail. Admit it, you hate failing. It makes you feel low, humble, betrayed, seconded, or even trialed. It makes you feel completely challenged, doesn't it? What's more? It makes you feel like you won't reach success, sometimes. Many people who don't expect success reach it, but most people who try at success end up failing instead. Why? Let's explore.

Failing is a necessary, key challenge to get to success. Many people who've failed too many times change their mind about failing, and start creating stuff that they don't expect to have any success. They might just be targeting a specific audience, or trying their hand at the sport they're involved in.

People who try and try harder at success end up not reaching it...why? My belief might be that they haven't worked long enough to fail, or they may not have enough experience in failure to learn its lessons.

Failure has a lot of lessons to teach you, and if you don't change your mind now and be okay with failure, then you're going to get burned sometime. Some of the starter successful people ended up getting burned sometime down the road, and learned greatly from it. It may have taken them a long time to get back on their feet. But, that one entrepreneur that created Formula 409 cleaning product should've had no problems getting burned, because Mr. Rouff failed 408 times. How does that make you feel?

Steve Jobs created Apple. But, got shoved from the company in 1985, only to come back 11 years later and recreate the company from the ground up into a challenging empire of electronic devices. Steve Jobs disrupted all markets in computing and device making. Then, at a sad death, Jobs left a legacy of awesomely useful products, very loyal customers, and super-frustrated competitors.

Facebook is not any different. People say that Mark Zuckerberg and his pals created the Facebook brand in their dorm rooms, and it became successful all on its own. But, what they didn't foresee was failure down the road. When Facebook tried to IPO, they failed it miserably. Why?

Do you want to leave a legacy? Either fail often, get back up every time, and keep shooting for success. OR create a powerful brand right away, get burned badly, then restart. One way or another, you will probably have to deal with failure.

If that's not bad enough, there are people everyday now who're saying the key to success is a road of failure. People are not competent enough to live a life perfectly, create the perfect business, or make tons of money with their own strength. People that become billionaires didn't get there easily, unless they were heirs of a fortune. For those self-made millionaires and billionaires, they've went through a lot of hurtful, challenging, and disrupting times to get where they are. If that's not enough, they have the testimonials to prove it.

Building successful brands are not hard to do, but what is hard to do is maintaining that successful brand for years down the road. If you're not prepared and don't have the drive for failure as a road to success, then don't even bother being an entrepreneur or business leader.

If you don't think of failure in the following ways, then you may have to rethink your ideas of being an entrepreneur or business leader:

1. Getting to success requires you to fail, at least a few times, at something.
2. Success is hard to come by, because you haven't failed enough.
3. If you think people got to success taking the easy way, think again. Most people have dealt with some hurt, failure, and severe challenges that made it almost impossible. But, they had the patience to get back up, when they failed, and now they're successful.
4. In order to fail and get back up, you need drive. Just because Mr. Rouff failed so many times, he wouldn't quit, because he had drive. The Formula 409 product is a great cleaner, and he knew it would be if he just kept on swinging. He did, he kept on swinging. He even named it 409 because that's a true mark that said he failed at it 408 times.
5. Time will be spent, and you will be unpaid for most of the time you put in as a leader and entrepreneur. You will feel like a volunteer at times, occasionally creating a sick feeling in your stomach. You have to be a humble leader and expect the indifference of time versus money. You aren't working a regular 9-5 job, you're working as the leader/owner/manager. Get used to not getting paid for ALL the time you put in.

I hope this revealed a lot of truth in the matters of failure to you. Without failure, where would we be? I keep swinging in my article writing, business coaching, and other consulting because I know one day soon, people are going to want to get more of me involved in their work. What's it going to be now? Don't fall down and not get back up. Stand up to failure and stay on the pathway of success.

Need someone to help give you a swift kick each time you fail? Get a co-founder or two, some partners, or a good leadership team and just keep swinging!

Comments or suggestions? The board is open below. Feel free to have at it!