Chapter 6
FAILURE IS AN EVENT NOT A PERSON
All men fail but the true men are the one that rise again.
If you have the luxury of time to check through history, you will notice that all successful entrepreneurs have failed in one or more areas of their entrepreneurial endeavors. The question is how come they are still recognized as ‘successful’ after the seemingly ‘flooring’ failure situations they encountered? No matter your reasoning to this question, I can boldly let you know that they understood the importance of separating the ‘person’ from the ‘failure situations’
No matter how many times you have failed or will fail in your entrepreneurial journey, the good news is that you are a better person after every failure situation because you know better and you will agree with me that it will be foolhardy to classify anyone who knows better as a failure.
On the strength of this thought, I encourage you to learn to separate yourself from any failure situations that you may encounter on your entrepreneurial journey.
I am a fan of the boxing champion, Floyd Mayweather Junior. In one of his interviews with CNN, he revealed a brilliant secret that his father gave him. He said that his father had told him that for him to stay long enough in the boxing game, he needs to as much as possible be mindful and avoid being hit by his opponent.
Even though we might argue with this piece of advice because there is no way to avoid being hit in a boxing bout, but this helps put him a state of self-awareness that helps him win his bouts without sustaining much injuries and which will help him stay long enough in the boxing game.
Just like the advice to Floyd Mayweather, your ability to stay long enough on your entrepreneurial journey will largely depend on how much you distance yourself from failure situations which you may encounter.
What happens is that when you see yourself as a failure, you erode yourself of whatever morale, zeal, passion, creativity you have left until you begin to see yourself as not worthy to do anything. The end result is nothing other than quitting on your entrepreneurial endeavors and goals.
Prepare your mind in advance that you will be tried several times on your entrepreneurial journey to the point of quitting. Separating yourself from these failure situations will help you stay longer on your entrepreneurial journey and you will eventually be on ‘auto-pilot’ in your winning realm in this journey.
Take solace on the knowledge that Thomas Edison did not fail once, Tiger Woods failed and is once a champion, lifting the US Open Championship trophy, Bill Gates failed at some point, I also failed several times.
If there is one thing we learn from these examples, it is the fact that these characters have learned to separate themselves from the failure situations they encountered and that has enabled them to keep unleashing new creativities that has helped them to eventually achieve outstanding successes through the realization of their goals.