Take a Look at What You Have Achieved!

Over the last two years — while working on Gibbon — I’ve learned a thing or two about success and failure and I felt the need to write a few of these thoughts down. Failure and success are often defined by one moment and it usually means the end of something, good or bad. Yet, failure and success happen almost every day at a startup, or at least it should happen almost every day. For most people it’s easy to see where you fail, but to see where you succeed is much harder… and sometimes even forgotten. That is why I decided to write this post, to remind myself (and hopefully others) to also take a look at what you achieve along the way!

Take a look at what you have achieved!
In order to fail you need to achieve something. It’s that simple. If you’re not working on anything, you can’t fail. Though achieving something may sound very big, its actually not. Every time you make something, you achieve something.

Failing happens often, failing is not just when you start a company and at some point you need to shut it down. Failing — if you do it right — happens almost every day of the week. Every time you make something, take a next step, try to get a new customer onboard. You will fail, to some extent.

There are always things you could have done better, that you want to do better. And you should. That dedication is why you started in the first place. It is what drives you and what eventually will make you thrive.

But throughout that process make sure to look back every once in a while. Be proud of what you’ve made, be proud of how far you’ve come. Because, yes in every step there is failure, but there is also success. And if you don’t recognise your successes, if you don’t see you’re actually moving forward it’s easy to lose yourself in the failures. And suddenly your motivation is gone, you feel stuck and your productivity is down to zero...

Take a moment to be proud of what you have achieved, be proud of what you made. All the small successes start to build up to a quite an accomplishment that not everyone could have achieved. You need to recognise that for yourself in order to keep on moving forward.

You could have stopped every step of the way, but you did not. You continued, build something, achieved something and once you start to see that… Every failure, every struggle, every fuck-up, will turn into nothing more than a small lesson that will help you take the next step. And guess what? In that next step you will fail as well...

And that is ok!

Setting up a business is a freaking hard, frustrating never ending journey that you could totally love if you celebrate your successes as much as your failures. But remember, you’re never done… There will always be new challenges and next steps. It’s up to you to take them on!

Keep moving, keep failing, but be proud of every single thing you build! Because you could have not done it at all…