It might sound paradoxical, but in order to become successful in business, as well as in many other areas of life, you must first gain a lot of experience by failing.
Some of my biggest lessons in business and entrepreneurship have come when I had a failure. In fact, the more spectacular the failure, the more profound the lesson.
While it’s certainly true that you can get a lot of valuable knowledge from books, courses, the internet, and formal education, sometimes the only way to really grasp a key concept is by learning it the hard way.
Sometimes it is not enough to learn something in theory. In these cases, the only way to really absorb the lesson is through learning by doing – or more precisely, learning by failing.
The Purpose of Failure
Although it is never something that we want, failure has a much deeper purpose that can serve us extremely well.
The strength of failure goes a lot beyond just ‘learning what not to do for next time’. There are many additional beneficial perspectives that it can bring.
If you can learn to handle failure in the right way, it offers a brilliant way to learn the art of perseverance and resilience.
When you fail at something, especially if you put a lot of effort and work into it, the emotional feeling of deflation can be quite overpowering.
For many people the disappointment can be so strong that they give up on their goals right then and there.
This can be a huge pity, because just beyond that peak of negative emotion lies the path to true wisdom, and ultimately, the exact success that you are looking for.
So failure is your opportunity to build resilience and keep persevering in your endeavour. The rewards for being resilient and having perseverance are always worth the blood, sweat and tears that they require.
That’s not all though. Failure has another great purpose, which is to help you overcome your biggest fears.
Once you can fail confidently, with a smile on your face, then you have conquered your fear of failure. This can be one of the biggest obstacles of all, for both entrepreneurs and many others in business.
Analyse Your Setbacks
One of the best ways to leverage your failures is to transform them into vehicles for success by analysing them carefully to see what went wrong.
With the benefit of hindsight, you can carefully root out the cause of the things that went wrong, so that the same mistakes are never made again.
This requires a rigorous set of thinking processes and procedures that you need to carry out, by making conscious and deliberate use of the mechanics of thinking itself. This is what Effective Intelligence is so useful for.
Using an Effective Intelligence map, you can make informed conclusions in order to evaluate the causes of your biggest problems. With that under your belt, you can then plot the correct course of action to maximise your chance of success on the next attempt.
The One Single Cause of Failure
Failure can actually be summarised with a very simple and concise sentence:
Failure occurs when we apply inappropriate thinking to the task we are looking to complete successfully.
It really is that simple! By contrast, if you apply the appropriate thinking for your task, you will take the correct actions and you will find success.
Here you can see in graphical form how your thinking directly determines your results:
As you can see on the graphic, your thinking actually comes from your ‘profile’. What this means is that each person thinks with their own style, so your thinking style, determined by who you are as an individual, will affect how you think and how you approach tasks.
If you’re lucky, your individual profile will give you a thinking style that just so happens to be perfect for the task you are faced with, in which case you will naturally have a high chance of success.
If you’re not so lucky, your thinking style won’t be a match for the task, and you will unfortunately have a high chance of failing.
We all have natural biases in our thinking. Some of us like to be analytical and focus on data, some of us are action takers, some of us are very creative, etc. There are millions of variations!
So maybe you have what it takes to succeed with a particular goal, or perhaps not. But what should you do if you don’t want to leave it to chance?
Guarantee Your Own Success?
Well, of course, it’s not possible to guarantee success 100%.
You can get very close to doing so though, and the way to do it is to take conscious control of the thinking processes in your head. You can then engineer them in such a way that you can create the best fit for your task or goal.
While you might not quite make 100%, this is the ultimate way to get your chance of success up to as high as it possibly can be. And almost nobody knows this powerful secret!
Before you can engineer your thinking to maximise success, you must first understand your thinking profile. Once you know your own strengths, weaknesses and biases, you can adjust the dials accordingly so that you can stop failing and start getting what you want.
Start by discovering the most important insight from your thinking profile here!
