12: My Five Biggest Business Mistakes

If there were an award for screwing things up in business, I’m pretty sure that I would have a nice little trophy wall in my office. I’ve made a ton of great decisions in my business, but only because I’ve made A LOT of bad ones too. Making mistakes really isn’t an easy pill to swallow, especially if they’re ones that require you to go through a hard lesson or there’s a ripple effect that kind of hangs on after the fact.

This week on The Gutsy Podcast, I’m going to share with you My Five Biggest Mistakes that I’ve ever made. And while mistakes are inevitable and actually a really important part of our growth, my hopes are that you can learn through some of my experiences and help apply them to maybe something you’re struggling with right now or maybe something that comes at you in the future.

In any area of life – not just business but life in general as a human being – failing and making mistakes is part of the learning process. When you make a mistake, it gives you an opportunity to look at the scenario from a different perspective, and it also encourages you to learn how to prevent that from happening again. I’m also a firm believer that the mistakes you make and the way you learn from them are setting you up for the success of something in the future.

The majority of mistakes typically happen when we either are learning something new, don’t have all the information, or are trying to rush through something that really needs our attention. So let’s break these down.

The first one, when you’re learning something new, you don’t really know what you’re doing, right? Nine and a half times out of 10 when people are starting businesses, they have no idea what they’re doing. I mentioned in an earlier podcast that when I started Worx, I didn’t have any prior business training. I didn’t have any technical sales training. You know, I just, I didn’t really understand the mechanics behind owning a business. So EVERYTHING that I did was new.

I feel like owning a business is a lot like parenthood: There really isn’t a manual to teach you how to do it, and just when you get the hang of one stage – something else comes in and you have to learn it all over again (can I get an amen?). The key here is to be patient with yourself because you don’t know what you don’t know. Think of the process of learning something new as a time to kind of play around a little bit. It’s an opportunity for you to make mistakes so that you can learn from them to later apply to something bigger.

We tend to be so hard on ourselves when we make a mistake. And honestly, if you didn’t make mistakes – I would probably be a little bit more worried. If everything is constantly perfect and there are no mistakes happening, one or two things come to mind:

1. You are either spending a substantial amount of time crossing every T and dotting every I in every aspect of your life or, the more likely version is –
2. You’re hiding them.

And why do we hide mistakes? Because we feel like if we show that vulnerability, people are going to think less of us? Can you imagine if more people just literally owned the mistakes they have made and the challenges that they’ve gone through? That’s actually an aspect of our culture here at Worx. (Continue Reading)

- - -

Mentions: