Real Talk: Overcoming the Emotional Toll of Failure
For anyone who has tried to build a business or product on their own, success is the goal. But success isn’t the majority, even though in this day and age we are constantly bombarded with success stories. You hear about children building million dollar apps from their bedrooms, or an inventor striking it rich with a product he made in his garage. Hearing these stories, it makes it seem like your failure or your path to success, if it’s longer than a few seconds, is monumental. To not make it when everyone around you is apparently striking it rich can make you feel so incompetent and small. Well, you’re not. You’re real. Because reality is failing towards success, and it can happen in an instant or take years.
The real magic is continuing to move forward in spite of failure. But let’s be honest, it’s easier said than done. Failure can be emotionally debilitating.
Here’s the good news. You’re not alone. We’ve failed pretty much every effort we’ve had due to a number of different factors: support, timing, lack of resources, not enough energy, you name it. But we’re still going because of a few tips we’ll share here for anyone who needs a push back onto the path of getting to that goal.
Identify your true vision of success.
This is a loaded one, but for so many years we’ve measured success as the amount of money made off an idea. When it comes to business, that’s the point, right? So when an idea didn’t happen or the dollars didn’t pour in, we felt like massive failures, and that failure was tied to our sense of self. This was beyond taking it personally, we built an identity on the idea of success, and since that idea of success was money, we felt like losers.
If you take a closer look, you may find that your idea of success is not actually tied to the material prize you’re focused on. It took a while, but we realized that our true vision of success wasn’t the amount we made but the quality of life we sought from creating something ourselves. Turns out, our quality of life is already in line with what we think success is. Which means how we value ourselves as people isn’t tied to money made but time well spent.
Now, when we fail, we can separate our identities from the failure, and move on quickly. Identify your true vision of success. Is it the amount of units sold? Cash in the bank? Is it living in a certain area code? Is it more time to spend doing the things you love? Then find out what you truly need to reach that success (and it may be you are closer than you think). This will help you find happiness in yourself separate from your project goals, which can help you rebound from failure more quickly.
Establish a failure plan.
When you are laser focused on a goal, it can be hard to consider what happens if it fails. Positive thinking only, right? Unfortunately, if you place all of your energy into the expectation of success, failure can feel like a door slammed in your face.
Keep your positivity, for sure. But, also make a plan for failure. What is your plan if the goal doesn’t go through? Drop the goal and move on to something different? Or maybe re-evaluate your goal and the event leading to the failure in order to position yourself differently? If you have a plan for failure, that slammed door won’t be the only opportunity you have, and it can keep your momentum going when otherwise it would crash to a halt.
Be honest about your commitment and find areas of improvement.
So earlier we told you how we attached our self identity to the success of a goal. When that happens, it’s easy to become defensive and even a bit in denial about failure. You play the blame game since the failure occurred because of a host of external factors. In some cases, that’s the truth. But sometimes, it’s important to take a good hard look at the events surrounding the failure and gauge your own participation in that failure.
For example, in other products we’ve designed, the failure of them taking off came down to a lack of commitment or consistency to marketing and effort. We had the idea, we produced a product, we then half expected the product to make itself successful. A lot of this also comes down to a lack of resources: not having enough time or support as a small team to develop the proper marketing or channels in order to launch something successfully. But it also was about us not accounting for those resources, and for expecting things to work out anyway.
Are you putting in enough care, work, and effort for your goal? Be realistic about it. You may not be and that may be contributing the failure. By being honest with yourself in order to change that, and it may be the difference between another setback, or finally scaling that mountain to success.
Do you have any tips when it comes to failing and overcoming it? We’d love to hear about them and maybe even add them to this list! Share this post on Twitter to get the conversation going.
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