The Ultimate Investment

In today’s economy failures of all sorts are in the news. Failure is such a stigma many miss golden opportunities rather than risk it. The fear of failure is greater than the fact of failure. I don’t know anyone who has died from failure. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t recovered from failure given reasonable efforts. Fear of failure is a great hindrance to success.

Actually, failure is an integral part of success. You can’t succeed if you aren’t willing to risk failure. Every successful person fails. Most not to the extent they’ve lost everything and had to start all over, but to the extent that they’ve tried ideas that haven’t worked. They’ve lost money on deals that didn’t pan out. They’ve risked failure . . . and failed. The trick of turning failure to success is learning from it, recovering, and trying again.

Don’t avoid failure at the expense of missing opportunities. Instead manage it. Minimize it. Limit it. But don’t gamble unless you have bounded the risk to what you’re reasonably are willing to bear.

There are mavericks out there who risk big for fast wealth and accolades. They get attention. After a while, most either settle down to protect what they have, or go out in a blaze. They’re hot for a while, but the heat cools, the law of averages catches up, and they fail . . . and fail big. Still, most of them recover and try again.

Those most successful are those who manage failure best.

Don’t give failure more power than it deserves. Factor failure into your plans, then seek to minimize, limit, contain, and yes, avoid it. With continued effort, passing through each failure, learning, recovering, and trying again, you’ll win! Besides, you don’t learn from success. You don’t grow from success. You don’t have satisfaction from success unless you’ve failed first.