So…I went to networking meeting.
I’m a huge believer that free food has no calories, and they offered free pizza and wine.
And inevitably, people ask how is the business.
And every single person answered that it’s brilliant.
Now, let me remind you that it was Wednesday night, when we all could have an evening with our family or friends or at least with ourselves, the book or a movie.
So, let me ask you – if business was brilliant, and you were busy, busy…what the heck are you doing at networking event? Why not just, you know, relax after a day of work?
And yes, I was audacious enough to ask that question. (I have no social manners, sad but true.)
And I got a lot of flustered responses…some admitted that yes, it’s true.
The business is taking over our life. We work too much.
Authenticity.
Transparency.
Values.
Those are big words we use often, because it makes us feel good about ourselves, about business we are building.
We are different. Authentic, transparent – we use that to make us look better.
Yet…things don’t up. They simply can’t.
We only share failures, after we conquered the world. It makes business sense – no one wants to hear about our failures unless we also have a ready make, quick fix solution to it.
And if we went on and on how we fail in business…it would probably not be too good about our ‘image’ or brand.
It’s understandable.
Yet it also means, that while we are busy building the business….there is no one we can share our -often just perceived, I might add – failures with.
In this prevalent culture of success – failure carries a stigma which means it can be shared only as a beginning of success case study.
But herein lies the problem you see – we take outside metrics of success and apply them to our different value systems – and nice people, people who deserve to succeed, simply give up.
What we are not talking enough is that true success is only possible because of the failure before. It’s the failure that gives us the baseline, the wrong that needs fixing. Success doesn’t teach us anything, we often just become complacent with success.
Failure on the other hand…failure is so painful it always, always accelerates learning.
So yes, you can fail- over, and over again, your way to success.
Just keep on going. Because each failure – it’s a stepping stone.