If I had a Cadbury's mini-egg for every time I've heard people say that failure is the path to success, I'd have a Sainsbury's trolley full by now. And that's after I've eaten half of them!
The truth is that failure may not lead to success, it might just stay failure.
Sir Ken Robinson in his wonderful TEDTalk from 2006 talks about how the education system progressively kills creativity in children. The need to get things right leads to a creative void. He cites an example of a young girl who is completely absorbed drawing a picture during her art class.
The teacher asks, "What are you drawing?"
The girl replies, "I'm drawing a picture of God."
"But no-one knows what God looks like."
Quick as a flash, the girl retorts, "Well they will do in a minute!"
Young children are not afraid to take a chance, and make a mistake, or risk failure. They have no downside and they are instinctively creative. Being wrong is just part of the process of getting it right. Sir Ken's point was that as pupils pass through their education, schools increasingly encourage them not to fail. Failing an exam is almost a crime. As we get older the consequences of leaping into the dark can be costly, so failure continues to be bad. As a business leader you don't really want your team to regularly fail. So we become risk averse, which is really not consistent with starting your own business, many of which will fail.
But there are really two types of failure:
The failure that comes with just doing things wrong; the worst being when the same failure is repeated over and over again.
The failure that comes with planning a series of experiments in the reasonable expectation that although some stuff won't work, at least one experiment will yield a positive (or at least an encouraging) result.
Having your own business is going to lead to some failures. You'll misjudge your customers' expectations with your product or service, with its price and positioning, in the way you bring it to market or in the way your competition reacts. You'll hire the wrong people, subscribe to the wrong CRM package, buy the wrong kit. It becomes a process of learning.
So I prefer to talk about 'controlled experimentation'. For example, you may not know which distribution method is going to work best for your new service - retail, online, charity or direct marketing. So you're going to experiment with each in a controlled way - with a budget for time and expense. Some will probably fail, but one or more may succeed. You can look at the profit you're making in each channel, and decide for yourself which one delivers the highest return. Failure in the context of experimentation can be seen as immensely positive.
So don't just leap into the void and try something. Think carefully about the options that exist and then plan a series of experiments to validate them. Keep your experiments time and money bound, and if something looks promising put more effort into it.
In that way failure really can be the path to success.
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