Understanding Failure

What lesson’s can our failures teach us?

My life as an entrepreneur began early. When I was 10 years old, I convinced my 7 year old best friend and neighbor to open a “Video Store” with me. It was a small section of my families garage where we kept a collection of all of our VHS’s that I decided we would “rent out” to other neighbors in our subdivision.

Several months on end were spent creating pricing structures, marketing materials, late return policy’s, and fine tuning every detail of launching and running the business. And the only “customers” we ever got were our parents…

LESSON #1: Know Your Audience.

When that didn’t work, I came up with another idea to earn money which was to create artwork and then go sell it to our neighbors door-to-door. We spent weeks deciding what to paint, setting up still-life scenes, researching beautiful landscape paintings and perfecting our technique, until we had created a decent size samples to begin our voyage.

We set off, and after just the second house, a neighbor took us up on our offer and wanted to buy one of my paintings: and I froze. This was before the day of prints, copies, digital images of anything and everything, this was the one and only masterpiece that I had slaved over for the last 3 weeks, and I suddenly realized I wasn’t ready to part with it. I apologized, packed up the paintings, and headed straight home…

LESSON #2: Anticipate Success.

When I was 25 I started a hobby of creating custom designed jewelry frames. I made dozens, and my creative juices were still flowing strong, so I made dozens more. They were a collaboration of multi-medium which included: wood woking, spray painting, fine painting, drilling, wire work, craft work, scrapbook, etc. It didn’t take long before I was running out of work space and storage space in my parent’s house where I was staying.

This time I was more than ready to part with them, because what I was most excited about was designing and creating more. I began looking into ways to sell them: Etsy, craft faires, the farmer’s market. I spent the next two years continuing to make and work booths to sell these art pieces that I was in love with, and I traveled far and wide for these vendor events, driving and flying several hours, and paying top dollar to be a premium vendor at the best shows.

And here’s what happened: 2 (out of 75+ frames) left my possession:

The first frame was a donation piece at one of the craft faires I attended and given away in the host’s raffle….

The second frame was bought off Etsy by a woman in Alaska (with free shipping), the item sold for $75 and the shipping of this large item to Alaska cost ME $114.

LESSON #3: Start small and scale.

Each failure, whether it’s in business or relationships, or parenthood, has a lesson it can teach us.

My aunt, whose birthday it is today, once told me to view financial failures as if it were a course I had taken in that topic.

For example: I spent about $3000 with the whole Frame ordeal, which can be looked at as a $3000 real-life course in Business Design and Management.

Instead of letting my business failures get me down, or deter me, my entrepreneurial drive lives on and continued to propel me forward; using each past experience as a stepping stone to the future.

Failures are necessary, important, and highly valuable on the pathway to success. I don’t know a single Guru or Millionaire who achieved success without a preceding slew of failures.

Find the silver lining in your failures and know that with each failure you endure, you are one step closer to triumph.