Amazingly too many people fail because they fear to
fail.
Just think about it. How did You and every toddler of
the human race learn how to walk? How do major discoveries and breakthroughs in
research happen? It is all about trying and failing and trying again and basically
failing your way to success.
I used to have this thriving business where I appointed
a promising young employee to help me manage things. Everything was going well
until we entered a tricky phase of fierce competition from copy cats who plagiarized
our unique marketing approach. I had arrived at our unique and effective marketing
system after many failed experiments. Now what we needed was urgent development
of new ways to deal with the evolving situation and that meant going back to
the drawing boards and failing our way back to success.
Immediately I noticed that the promising employee was
so terrified of failure that he was looking for a drawing board solution guaranteed
to work. That in itself is hardly feasible. How do you get anything to work without
muddying yourself with the practical nuts and bolts of it?
I also discovered something else. In his stint as a
promising manager he had all along been playing to the gallery. Decisions were
made based on how impressive they would look to those who were watching.
Horrifyingly this is exactly the way many businesses in
Kenya and elsewhere (that happened not to be very successful) are run. Instead
of asking the question “how will we improve our profits?” it seemed that the
key question was “how will we impress as much as possible?”
Safaricom for many years consistently the most
profitable enterprise in East and Central Africa has tried and failed in many
projects. Remember the Ujamaa phones? I was recently told that that the failed
business cost the cell phone company a huge loss running into millions. Today Safaricom
continue trying many things and they continue to thrive.
Google always has dozens of projects in development
stage (at least 100) all going at the same time. In most cases none will be
implemented and sometimes it takes several batches of 100 to find just one
winner. Many would view this as a reckless waste of company resources. But you
can bet that it isn't.
Always embrace failures as vital and inevitable stepping
stones to success. Try and learn as much as you can from them and keep trying
until you hit the jackpot. That is the way it is done. In fact it is the only
way to true success.
Take seriously the words of Sergey Brin co-founder of
one of the most successful business enterprises in the history of the human race.
He said the only way to have success is to have many failures first. Meaning
that if you are not ready to fail then you will never EVER achieve your true
potential.
Incidentally is the fear of failure the reason why you
have not yet tried this revolutionary affiliate program? Food for thought huh?
