Failing is Hard But it’s Part of the Game
Tags: Failure, Startup, Learning, Self Improvement, Experience

Photo by Javier García on Unsplash

When startups crash and burn, the real learning begins

It is a deeply sinking feeling of being out of control when you realize your dream is not going to make it. You’ve exhausted your opportunities and energy or you’ve simply realized it was not viable. Maybe a partner went south on you or you realized this thing was not something you want to spend your life working on. In every case two things can happen: an existential sense of gloom and weakness, and a period of evaluation. It is during that evaluation that you learn what you learned. And it is incredibly powerful.

Don’t take it personally

It is really easy to lay blame on yourself and others. This serves little purpose other than to prolong the pain and to put off healing. You may have made mistakes or taken on too much, but it is more likely that something out of your control was a factor. Someone else was building the same thing but better, or sooner, or maybe ten people were doing that. It’s a big world and a lot of people are chasing the same ideas and markets.

Aaron Newman has founded at least four companies (I’ve lost track, it may be five). I worked for his third one, a software startup called Techrigy. He sold his first company pretty early in the game and immediately started a new one. It grew to over 100 employees and stalled and he wanted out because he had lost his passion for it. He handed off management and some equity and immediately started Techrigy. I was his first paid employee. After two years an unexpected offer came in and he took the money. In the mid seven figures for two years of work. He is a pragmatist. And he started his next company, which is now worth hundreds of millions.

By any standard Aaron is a success but he considered the second company a failure because it hit a ceiling. But failure did not stop him from being a successful serial entrepreneur. He learned that you have to have a deep passion for what you are building, a very valuable lesson. He didn’t take it personally.

Be careful about jumping in on an idea without doing the work first

I worked in a tech incubator, now called Nextcorps, as an early stage startup mentor and teacher. We worked with three sets of 36 idea stage startup teams over three years. These were basically an idea and a dream. Out of thirty-six, about five made it and became viable companies. Three years later when I hear from the members of my cohort, none regret anything about the experience.

This is because we insisted on them doing all the planning a startup needs, not just the fun stuff. Many realized by the end that their idea was not for them. Some pivoted, a few dropped out, and a few gave it a real shot. Every one would tell you the return is the experience, not the money. But you have to do the work.

You’ll laugh about it later

A few years ago a local entrepreneur started an informal ‘TED talk’ kind of event called The Failure Dialogs. A couple of entrepreneurs would tell about their failures to an audience and take questions. I was one of the first presenters. A few years earlier I had a startup called 24pagebooks.com, an eBook publisher. In a total fluke my first pitch got me seed funding. It was a crude eight slide deck sent cold to a new VC group. Wow!

I found a partner (a requirement of the investment), and started publishing short how-to books. You could get up to speed on a subject during a short plane trip. That was the idea. Long story short, it failed. That wasn’t fun but a couple of years later I was giving a funny public retelling of the whole experience and laughing about it.

You did something few people do: you gave it a shot

Fear of failure keeps a lot of people from trying new things. It’s human nature. Yet, paradoxically, it is only by trying new things that we advance as a person. Starting something is a dream that many share but for many it remains a dream. If you failed it means you tried. And to be honest, you are now in an exclusive club. Not a club of failures, a club of do-ers.

Every single thing that happened will be useful in the future

When you start something, anything, you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s a tongue twister but it’s accurate in every way. Starting a new venture means learning a new vocabulary of skills from sales to hiring to finance. You’re not just reading about these things, you are doing them. It is the doing that makes them skills. Simply acquiring knowledge is not the same as experience.

The point is that skills are with you forever.

Think of it as a phoenix

The mythical Phoenix must immolate itself so that a new Phoenix can rise from the ashes. Failure can feel like you’ve lost everything. It is an utterly helpless feeling, at first. But there is a reason so many successful entrepreneurs can count failures in their past and usually consider them as valuable as their successes in the context of their lives.

Failure is an intense learning experience. It takes time to process intense experiences, sometimes years before you rise from the ashes. But you have the option to leverage that experience and start again, armed with new skills and new understanding. That’s why so many jump right into the next one.

Move on, move up, relax into the next thing

One of the takeaways I hear when I hear failure stories is a new kind of approach to new things. While doubt can hold you back, the fear of starting something new will have lessened. You know what the worst that can happen is. Many first timers don’t think in these terms and imagine that a failure means the end. The second time around they are noticeably more relaxed in their approach.

I saw this in the startups in my launchpad program. The participants gained in business maturity as they were forced to test their ideas and modify their dreams. Not one team drowned themselves in failure mindset. Early on they would get frustrated and stalled when they hit an obstacle. Our job (I was one of a team of three mentors) was to help them navigate through these obstacles, without doing it for them or telling them what was wrong or right. As they progressed through their process you could see this frustration fade as confidence grew, even if their idea didn’t pan out.

The reality is that a startup is just one stage of a life, part of a progression through experience. If you choose to leverage your failure as an experience instead of a personal failing, you are living life more fully. When you fall down, take a minute to look at the world from your new vantage point. You might learn something.