A Guest Post by Heather Green
In business, you won’t always get a win. In fact, you may experience many failures on your path to success. Many successful CEOs suffered through failed businesses, terminations, and even bankruptcies before they became the millionaires (or billionaires) they are today.
There are many things you can learn from failure that will contribute to your long-term success. The next time you experience a setback, remember these things that failure can teach you:
Active Questioning
When success comes too easy, you rarely question what could be improved. Failure teaches you to think more critically about the progression of your business or your career, causing you to analyze what is working well and what isn’t. These analytical skills will serve you well throughout the course of your business or career, helping you to recognize potential missteps along the way.
Character Assessment
Without the right people on your side, your business and your career will fail. You need to be able to hire the right people, to choose the right partners, and to put your support behind the right team mates.
Failure can teach you how to recognize the wrong people. It can show you the type of people who are not compatible with you. It can show you the type of people you shouldn’t trust. Ultimately, that will help you pick the right people to support your success.
Resilience
When you fail and then try again, you learn resilience. You learn that failure isn’t the end. You can start over, and you can find success with the right effort and the right insight.
Those who have weathered failure and continued on their path to success have greater commitment to seeing their vision through to the end.
Better Business Practices
Of course, one of the best things that failure can teach you is how to improve your business or your leadership. You made mistakes that led to your failure — now you understand how not to make them. Failure provides an opportunity. Once you know what your weaknesses are — or the weaknesses of your business — you can improve on them.
Without failure, there would be no innovation. Without failure, there would be no need to take great risks — and there would be no great rewards.
No one wants to face failure. Success is the ultimate goal for all of us — no matter how we may define that success individually. However, failure can teach us the needed lessons to find success and to sustain it. Failure teaches us to actively question our efforts, to recognize the right people with whom to share our journey, to become resilient in our fight for our dreams, and to create better business practices.
Heather Green is a Christian mom, freelance writer, pet lover and the resident blogger for OnlineNursingDegrees.org, a free informational website offering tips and advice about medical transcription programs and nursing school resources.
