Failure Gives You Freedom, as Long as You Learn from It

 "Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that's where you will find success." -Thomas J. Watson Learning from Failure will happen in life. Believing you will make it through without discouragement, a missed deadline, defeat or catastrophic loss is silly. Life has alot of moving parts, and when you attempt something difficult like starting a business or adapting to industry changes, you will fail at some point in time. The key to freedom and business success is to learn from each failure, stop kidding yourself about why you failed and to adapt to market conditions. We coddle and kid ourselves when we fail. We blame everything but ourselves. Did we do everything we could have done to prepare for adversity? Were we fully trained, educated and ready to perform? We probably had some weak point in our approach. The key to failure is how we react to it. If we sulk, blame others and continue our current practices, we are likely to fail similarly again. When we fail, we need to examine the situation and find the root causes. Failure is caused by conditions and actions that we have encountered. Consider what led to your loss and bolster that area. If you crashed your boat on a sandbar, did you understand the tide table and did you have a sonar? If your business lost a multi-million dollar account, was your service world-class and was your product the best in the market? Work on it. According to Lending Tree, 50% of small businesses fail within 5-years of beginning. Having a business is a path to freedom. Many entrepreneurs fail several times before they are successful in their venture. Sources: Picture from Pixabay. https://www.lendingtree.com/business/small/failure-rate/