How Can Making Mistakes Help Us Sustain as Entrepreneurs? Businesses thrive that see mistakes as a fundamental part of the growth journey.
By Abeer Raza
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Attaining sustainability and credibility in your business as an entrepreneur requires effort, dedication, commitment, and mistakes.
However, when we make mistakes and stumble upon our journey to sky-rocket our start-ups, we regard them as an obstacle in our way. Subsequently, we forget to contemplate questions like what was the driving force for implementing the idea and why we thought this could be the big thing.
Moreover, what else we fail to realize is that these obstacles can be a good source of learning to redefine our business procedures and success metrics.
On the other hand, throughout my entrepreneurial journey, I have realized that mistakes are rather one of the wisest teachers for entrepreneurs. In my opinion, employing our mistakes and failures to leverage our businesses could be a strategy that most entrepreneurs must implement today.
In doing so, a major part to be played by entrepreneurs is to overcome these feelings first. After that, you can employ a series of steps to rise above the fear of failure and fight against your real obstacles.
Related: Harnessing the Power of Positive Thinking to Grow Your Business
Response to mistakes
A major part of changing this perspective regarding entrepreneurial failure is altering the feelings associated with experiencing a failure, mostly fear. Reading it in a book, I realized that we actually hold back from challenging ourselves to push outside our comfort zones when we fear failure.
The wisest of all, Yoda, said, "Fear is the path to the dark side…that leads to suffering." Overcoming our fear to move ahead in our journey can be the first step to regard mistakes as a part of our learning process.
Next, to develop an optimistic, problem-solving approach to help us have a closer look at the factors and aspects that could be employed to turn the failure into an opportunity.
Related: The Most Important Career Lessons Are the Ones You Learn From ...
An empathetic mindset
Developing an empathetic personality comes with an opportunistic and optimistic mindset, successively helping us fight our egos to learn from our mistakes.
Empathy is an important trait for entrepreneurs for several reasons, but majorly because it helps to be a visionary leader. Since entrepreneurship is not only about starting and sustaining a business, it also caters to acquiring traits that promote a progressively learning and inclusive culture.
Therefore, developing an empathetic mindset helps entrepreneurs not only consider their mistakes as an opportunity to learn and grow. It also enables them to be inclusive and supportive towards others in their journey.
Strategic planning
Effective strategic planning for start-up businesses plays a pivotal role in their sustainability. However, when we talk particularly about developing a failure-accepting mindset, it also requires us to learn from those failures to avoid similar situations.
Making mistakes or failing at doing things is only good as long as we are learning from them. We come across a contradictory situation to what we expected; the next step after accepting the results is to evaluate the situation.
While doing so, we can highlight the loopholes in our strategy and areas we need to improve. This is when we identify the weaknesses that we must work on to take a step forward.
Effectively evaluating our mistakes earlier helps us in strategizing our plans and situations to an extended level, in turn helping us avoid any further unlikely difficulties.
Stop accepting excuses
"The most important microphone in the world is the one in your mind. It can be one of excuses or voices that encourage you to succeed."
These are my favorite lines from The Book of Mistakes by Skip Prichard. Also, my key takeaways when I ponder upon my years of experience as an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, the key driving factor in reaching the goal is how we perceive ourselves and our efforts towards the intended goal.
In the middle of it, when we are struck by failures that set us back on our path, the mindset we adapt to overcome such situations defines our overall approach towards success.
Developing negative thoughts or surrounding yourself with people that may block your ability to think beyond them is something you should never do. On the other hand, a productive approach in such situations is to be aware and mindfully implement strategies to overcome them.
Final thoughts
Starting up a business is accompanied by many challenges for entrepreneurs from every direction. However, the crucial ones to fight against are the ones that come from within. The optimal way to win that struggle is by implementing an optimistic and progressive mindset, especially towards mistakes.
A positive approach allows you to handle the majority of your business aspects effectively. Concurrently, it opens the door to collaborative success and strategic management of your start-up, enabling you to move beyond your competitors.
