“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.”
-W.C. Fields

I’m sure you’ve all heard that quote, or at least the variation that goes “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  If you’re in that school of thought, then you’re with the crowd that follows the path of success.

Most business owners believe that when chasing success you’ll often meet with failure along the road. But as long as you allow those mistakes to shape you into a better business owner, professional or entrepreneur those failures are actually a positive, not a negative.

If you agree with me, you’re also in the company of visionary, ground-breaking billionaires Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.  Both of them truly believe that the secret of their successes are the mistakes they’ve made along the way.  In fact, Bezos not only admits to making “literally billions” in mistakes but says that if Amazon isn’t failing, they aren’t innovating.

Meanwhile Zuckerberg feels that successful people not only learn from their mistakes but spend most of their time making mistakes.  “If you’re successful, most of the things you’ve done were wrong.” If you get a few big things right, he said, “you can make some pretty important changes in the world.”

I couldn’t agree more. If you try new things you’re bound to fail at some point. But failure is a good thing – you’ve just learned an important lesson on what NOT to do next time, or how to make a process, launch or product better.  Especially in today’s innovative world, if your company isn’t constantly pushing forward you’ll find yourself left behind. So in 2015 I encourage all of you to try something new or do something differently. Then let me know how it goes…

Happy failing!