Throughout your entire life, you’ve been taught that failure is something you want to try to avoid. True enough, if you can avoid failure, you should try to. But failure is something that’s inevitable, especially on your journey to entrepreneurship. At best, you can embrace failure and use it as a learning experience to do better next time.

The reason failure is so hard to embrace is that it’s been presented as a “mythical creature,” in a sense. You’ll see articles titled “Ways to Have a Successful Business” or “Prevent Your Business From Failing With These Success Tactics”… These articles present readers with information as though if you do these things, you won’t experience failure, and that’s just not the truth.

Sure, everyone loves a good success story, but what about the real story? The good, the bad, and the ugly parts of starting a business?

The reality behind every success is that there were a dozen failures that happened beforehand. In fact, failure is almost like a right of passage for every successful business.

In addition to blogs and articles saying that you need an effective marketing strategy, user trust, and high-quality products for a business to be successful, failure is an additional bullet point that needs to be added as well.

The key to embracing failure is to first embrace a positive mindset. Once you embrace a positive mindset, you’ll be more apt to see the beauty in failing, and ultimately, overcome your fears of failure.

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned vet, you may not be able to see it right now, but experiencing failure could be the very thing your startup business needs to achieve the level of success you never thought you could.

How Embracing Failure is the Key to Building a Successful Business

Failure gives you a strength you never knew you had

It’s perfectly understandable why you might feel like giving up after your first business fail, but it’s also important to understand that just because you’ve failed in a particular area of your business, it doesn’t mean that you, as a person, are a failure.

You’ve invested too much time, money, and effort into your business and one mistake shouldn’t make you throw all of that away.

Entrepreneurs tend to base their self-worth on their successes and it’s not always an accurate reflection of the person or even their work ethic. Forbes states that people will measure their self-worth based on who they surround themselves with, their accomplishments/ successes, and what they do for a living… This is definitely not a healthy way to measure your success.

If you truly want to measure your success, look at your strengths. Think back to the failures you’ve experienced and count how many times you overcame them. Think back to how many times you’ve received “no’s” but kept pushing to get that one “yes” to fund your business.

If you want a true measurement of your success, just look at how many times you’ve had to flex your strength to not give up and keep pushing through your failures.

Failure gives you the opportunity of a second chance

You’ve heard the famous quote “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”… Well, that’s how you should look at your business. Not succeeding at something the first time gives you a second chance at success.

Let’s say you’re starting an online business and you decide to set up your store yourself. Well, in doing that, you end up creating an unsightly storefront that doesn’t function well. You know you can’t leave your store like that and try to open it for business…

So what do you do?

Well, you can hire a professional web designer or you can opt to redo your business but this time using the best website builder that’s easy to use for beginners and experts alike. Remember, failure is all about the lessons you learn from the mistakes you’ve made. Learning from your mistakes will prevent you from making the same mistake twice.

Failure forces you to reroute your thinking

Another beautiful aspect of failure is that it forces you to take a new approach in your thinking. If you’re new to the entrepreneurial world, you might take an approach that you learned in business school but find that it’s not working for you. So what do you do? You have to figure out a different approach to achieve the results you want.

It could even be a situation where you couldn’t keep a particular product stocked because people bought it so much. But as times changed, so did customer shopping habits. Because of this shift in customer shopping habits, you’re having to reroute your thinking and give your customers what they want, whether you like it or not… you just have to do what’s best for business.

Failure is the BEST learning experience

Failure is the best teacher, they say, and it proves to be true in every failure. The biggest perk of failing is the lesson you learn from it. Most failures teach you that whatever you did to not succeed, you probably shouldn’t do it again.

This particular lesson is evident in everything. If you ate peanuts and had an allergic reaction to them, you just learned that you’re allergic to peanuts and that you should never eat them again… With your business, you may have come across a customer who made several small purchases of the same item; you later find out that it was a fraudulent transaction… from that, you now know at least one sign of fraudulent transactions.

That’s not saying that failures won’t hurt you emotionally or doesn’t do costly damage to your business, because it will. But if you have it in your mind that failure is something that all entrepreneurs will face and you will too, it won’t be such a blow when it happens to you.

The sooner you can embrace failure, the quicker you’ll be able to bounce back and immediately start to reroute your thinking, flex your strength, and look at your failure as a second chance to succeed next time.