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It always gets worse before it gets better! - Failing Your Way to uccess

Guest post by: Ron Finklestein

Article Overview: As a business owner ongoing learning is essential. Did Bill Gates grow up thinking like a billionaire? Of course not. He had to grow in to a billionaire mindset. Did Walt Disney wake up one day and say this is what Disney world needs to look like? Of course not. He had to grow into the idea of building Disneyland. Both earned the right to achieve their goals because they failed forward.

It always gets worse before it gets better! - Failing Your Way to uccess

It always gets worse before it gets better! As a business owner ongoing learning is essential. Did Bill Gates grow up thinking like a billionaire? Of course not. He had to grow in to a billionaire mindset. Did Walt Disney wake up one day and say this is what Disney world needs to look like? Of course not. He had to grow into the idea of building Disneyland. Both earned the right to achieve their goals because they failed forward.

When you learn something new, hopefully you start doing things differently.

That's where the problem starts. When you do something different, you do not do it as effectively as necessary to be successful.

As business owners it is our job to continuously respond to feedbacks that we receive from the market, from our customers, from our employees, from our referral partners, and industry magazines. As we try new behaviors in response to these new demands, we are not unusually very effective our first time trying something different.

I remember the first time I walked into the training hall where I was starting to learning karate. I was watching black belts doing wonderful things and I was absolutely scared to death. I ask myself if I could ever do something like that. Over time, not only did I learn these new skills, I implemented these skills in my own karate practice. Within five years I was a black belt. I did not wake up thinking like black belt. I did not wake up acting like black belt. I had to grow into the black belt mindset. It took persistence to learning things that my body and mind did not know were possible.

And that's what being a business owner all about. If you have never run a business before, it is about learning new skills, it's about taking new action; it's about learning to fail so you fail forward.

What does fail forward mean? It means failure is good and it is essential to your success. If you are not failing you are probably not doing anything. Do you remember when you started your business or decided to go into business for yourself? There was so much you had to learn. You had to learn about marketing, customer service, business strategy, defining your unique value proposition, and maybe you had to hire employees. Most business owners do not grow up with those skills. They were skills that needed to be learned (acquired).

It was failing forward with persistence that made you success. When you try something new, you are not as effective as you would like, you made adjustments and tried again. Through repeated application, your new behaviors, your new knowledge, became second nature. You did not have to think about it, you just did it.

Persistence is essential to success.

In one of my prior blog post, I discussed redesigning an accounts payable process. We increased productivity from 75 invoices per day per person to 300 invoices per day per person. The transition from the old system to the new system was quite painful. Using the old system productivity was 75 invoices per day per person. As they transition to the new system, productivity dropped to 25 invoices per day per person. As they mastered the new system, productivity increased and leveled off at 300 invoices per day per person. If management said that we must stop the installation of this system because productivity dropped to 25 invoices per day per person, we would not have achieved the results that we did. If management was not persistent in their goal of fixing the accounts payable process, the transition from the old system to the new system would have never occurred. .

As a business owner, you must meet your business challenges with the same kind of persistence. As you learn new skills, your faith will be tested. As you persist and master those new skills, your confidence will grow. You will learn to fail forward and try more new things. And isn't that what success is all about. Isn't success about taking action? Isn't success about learning from our mistakes? Isn't success about taking those mistakes and doing something different and failing forward? Isn't that what persistence is all about-- failing forward.

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Article Tags: adversity, failure, overcome, overcoming, persistence, persistent



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