Let’s talk about failure. In business, there’s two types of failure: temporary and permanent. The ultimate failure is never going back and trying again; never learning from how you failed. School teaches us never to get the wrong answer, but if you never fail, how can you learn to succeed?
Just like the stock market, you should diversify your risk portfolio in your life and business. Diversifying those everyday risks, big or small, is how you develop yourself as a person and as a product.
Venture Capital firms take money from their clients and invest it in startups. In a study of 2000 investments, 75% of them failed to give a return. What does this mean for you? It means that even the professionals fail 75% of the time. The difference is in where they win. VC firms understand that just one of their investments will return 1000 times over, but they can’t get that return without the other failures. They are professionals, but they can’t predict the future.
From their strategies, you can learn to make consistently good decisions over time. You have to step up to the plate and take a swing knowing that you might not always hit, but when you do, you’ll hit it out of the park.
I’m not talking about necessarily investing money, I’m talking about where you invest your time, energy and education. Make a habit of investing in yourself, but don’t forget to calculate the potential for return before you make that investment. Over time, your risk portfolio will balance out. When you fail, don’t tell yourself that you are bad. Remember that the professionals fail 7 times out of 10, all it takes is one good investment.
If you want to learn more about using failure to gain success, visit https://www.digitalnomad.com/Podcast/