Recovering from entrepreneurial failure, discouragement, depression: the BREATHE method (2020 short)
Channel: George Kao
Date: 2020-02-25

Read the blog post here:
https://medium.com/@georgekao/recover-from-entrepreneurial-failure-breathe-22fcb6f4df3

Last year, I launched a product that had far fewer sales than expected… barely any buyers.

My first reaction was to get discouraged and slightly depressed. In earlier years, I would’ve been tempted to quit.

Some might be surprised to read that a business/marketing “expert” like me would experience failures anymore.

In truth, the most experienced professionals usually have more “failures” than anyone else. They’ve learned more than others in their field because they are willing to keep trying new things, keep failing if need be, and keep extracting the lessons from “failures”. Trying again and again, they get a little more knowledgeable with each experiment.

The highly respected marketing expert Seth Godin says:
“The rule is simple: The person who fails the most will win. If I fail more than you do, I will win…. So, if you fail cataclysmically and never play again, you only fail once. But if you are always out there putting your work into the world, creating and starting things, you will learn endless things. You will learn to see more accurately, you will learn the difference between a good idea and a bad idea and, most of all, you will keep producing.”

While I was in my state of discouragement, I asked myself:
“What would I say to a client who was experiencing this… and what therefore should I do to also recover?”

The word that came to me:
BREATHE

Intentional deep breathing is always a good reminder! However, I also got curious what else it could mean. In the next few days, what formed was BREATHE as an acronym for resilience, bouncing back from setbacks.
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It’s important to have a recovery process quickly available to you when you start to get discouraged. The next time you encounter a discouraging mistake or failure, try the following BREATHE method. (You may want to bookmark this page to come back easily.)

Read the blog post here:
https://medium.com/@georgekao/recover-from-entrepreneurial-failure-breathe-22fcb6f4df3