During a one hour Lunch and Learn yesterday at SalesLoft, we had a special guest, Mark Cole, stop by to give the team advice on Leadership Development and Personal Growth.
One thing he said to us stood out to me in particular, “Failure is not final.”
In a previous post, I touched on how experiencing startup failure taught me several important professional and personal life lessons.
I consider that chapter of my career to be an invaluable learning experience and I have no regrets in that regard. As long as something is learned along the path, then there is no shame in failure. Understanding how you failed can help you prevent it from happening the next time around.
However, I think it’s important to distinguish that I am not an advocate of accepting and embracing failure. I believe that it’s misguided for successful entrepreneurs, investors and venture capitalists to use the Silicon Valley mantra of “Fail Fast, Fail Often” when dishing out advice.
No one realistically sets out with the end goal of failing. No one wants to lose, let alone lose often. No matter how well prepared we are though, failure happens because it’s a certainty when you’re a player in the game. The most important thing to consider, then, is how failure affects you once it inevitably occurs.
Startup founders, especially, know that the odds are stacked heavily against them. They know that they are 90% more likely to fail than to succeed. Yet, they still take calculated risks to start a business because they also know that failure is not final.
In SVC circles, there’s an anecdote that the entrepreneurs who have truly “earned their stripes” are the ones who have a failed startup attempt or two under their belt. For a culture driven by innovation (and money), that says a lot about the level of respect that is given to someone who has faced heartbreaking failure only to triumphantly bounce back with success.
However, I can assure you that these same founders do not accept and embrace their failures.
They acknowledged them…
They lost sleep because of them…
They learned from them…
…but then they let their failures go.
So if we are to accept and embrace anything, let’s choose to accept and embrace the most meaningful outcome of failure — resilience.
