I can name dozens of failures: This is a beautiful quote by Josiah Humphrey about startup failures and the ability to learn from feedback. Perhaps a startup world is one of the most evident ones with failures and learning. One of the most popular approaches is – Fail fast, fail cheap! In other words, focus on minimal waste approaches to try and deliver the best outcome for yourself. At every point in time, as a founder, you will be listening to the market and identifying if your product achieves the product-market fit.
You might already be aware that one of the most common reasons for failure for a startup is the lack of product-market fit.
I can name dozens of failures that we had over the years. Yet, with all these failures, we still managed to build Appster into one of the largest, and best companies in our industry. So, remember every time you fail, remind yourself these words: ‘Life won’t always go my way, but I will always find a way
-Josiah Humphrey, Co-founder of Appster
As a startup, naturally your resources are low and there’s usually pressure to achieve more goals than in an established set-up. Not surprisingly we’ll have to pivot our plans to meet the demands of a situation and ensure survival. In other words survival is one of the biggest goals of a startup. In such scenarios, you’ll obviously make more mistakes and face more outcomes than in a regular setup. If you’re afraid of failures, you’ll be in for a rude shock in this part of the world.
Failures – it’s not you, it’s just the approach!
Most of our inspirational quotes centre around the ephemeral nature of failure. It sucks to fail, but it is worse not to have tried. Although we glorify some of these events in the name of creative liberty, the overall truth is – failures hurt a lot!
This is not to say that we are ok with failures, but just to know that we are aware of them as an occurrence. The more time you spend in this world, the more you realise that it is just a natural occurrence. If you let these events bother you, you cannot progress. So the foremost tip is – don’t take it too personally. If you do, you’re going to waste a lot of your good emotions in consoling yourself.
Focus and fixate on what you want
Everything else is a distraction: Every outcome is just an outcome from an external point of view. If you step out of the situation for a minute you’ll be able to identify what really went wrong. As a startup, your biggest challenge is to think beyond yourself. You’ll need to reach out to those limitations within and claim your spot.
There’s no place for your doubts or shortcomings. There’s lesser time for you to console yourself and feel better. You’ll have to keep pushing for such is the requirement. You always have a lot to lose. The moment you fall down for these failures you’ll easily sucked into a bottomless pit. Sure it hurts and you’re passionate. But that doesn’t matter for a business does it? The only real question at any point for these failures is – what are you going to do about it?
Ultimately, keep coming back to what you truly want. It is easy to get lost in the details and small outcomes. But your biggest motivators are your vision and goal. As long as you keep them at the forefront, you can wade through these minor failures to achieve your goals.
I can name dozens of failures
At the risk of sounding repetitive, it is all about how much strength you’re willing to gather. And these strengths are the ones beyond your limitations and beliefs which hold you back. The path is long, you can’t rely on sadness to achieve this!
A beautiful school of thought says that failures are necessary to succeed. As a startup, you’ll face lots of them. You’ll also find successes in unknown places. Perseverance, passion and ability to react to feedback are cornerstones of successful entrepreneur characteristics. The best way to react to failures is by finding out what you can learn from them. Each lesson you learn gets you closer to success. Also, watchout for errors made by others. You don’t have to make all the mistakes yourself!
If you look far and wide, you’ll see from lessons of other entrepreneurs or even large businesses who have failed. Try to get the objective lesson from it and be passionately curious. You will find out what works for you. Until you do, the only way is to persevere and try different things.
On that note, we’d love to invite you to this discussion on failures and quick responses to it for the quote :
“I can name dozens of failures that we had over the years. Yet, with all these failures, we still managed to build Appster into one of the largest, and best companies in our industry. So, remember every time you fail, remind yourself these words: ‘Life won’t always go my way, but I will always find a way’.”
-Josiah Humphrey, Co-founder of Appster
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Start UP is an attitude. One needs to cultivate ability to take risk, be a go getter and ability to stand up after a fall. In India, we are mostly trained for a regular job, though situation may be changing, preferably a government one where one is not fired for failing to deliver.
True, it is a very different approach as compared to a day job, the commitment and expectations are enormous. It is exciting no doubt and at times can yield brilliant results. But also there is a huge risk for an employee in the terms of certainty and predictable work. But then again like you said it is the attitude of work. I guess it is the same in Uk as well but a little tempered I believe. The risk is still quite a concern for most people
“Taking failures too personally” – I think this is where a lot of us falter.
For the success of a startup, there are many contributing factors apart from the founder. You need a good team, market should be stable etc.. Same with failures. There could be multiple contributing reasons . Often blaming oneself or others is not sensible. What we can rather do is, learn. Although, even i get frustrated once in a while about something not working right, i keep reminding myself of this- If i’m calm and patient I can work better (which in turn increases my chances to get things right).
Beautiful post with nice quotes.