Failure Is Good

Most people are afraid of failure. I know I certainly am at times. The problem is, failure is often the best way to learn. When you succeed at something difficult or amorphous, you usually don’t know why: a lot of little things had to come together to succeed, and many of them get overlooked. But when you fail, it’s easier to see that one little thing that derailed you.

One of the reasons America is so fantastic is that we don’t really care about failure like other cultures do. In Asian and Latin cultures, failure still carries a great stigma. This makes entrepreneurship hard. If 8 of 10 restaurants fail within 6 months, and your culture regards failure with shame or disgust, the desire to start that new venture is certainly going to be tempered. But, if you dig deep enough, even those cultures don’t really care about failure that much.

When Oprah visits Argentina or Cambodia, nobody thinks of her as a failure, even though she’s failed at dozens of different things. When Richard Branson or Mark Cuban visit Columbia or Malaysia, nobody considers them failures, even though they’ve lost more money on failed deals than most families will ever make in a lifetime. Oprah, Branson, and Cuban fail so much because they do so much. Nobody’s success rate is 100%. The more you do, the more you’re going to fail. Not only is that ok, it’s good.

As Cuban has famously said, “In business, you only need to be right once.” If you are, everyone will forget about all the times you failed.