Failure is not the same as defeat.
Unless you allow it to be.
It’s probably cliché to quote Thomas Edison, but it’s also relevant: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
If he’d allowed his first – or 100th, or 9,999th – failure to equal defeat, someone else would have invented the lightbulb.
We are going to fail. As business owners, as people in relationships, and simply as people, we are going to fail.
Probably especially as business owners, because there are so many ways in which we have to put ourselves out there, be visible, take risks, dare to be vulnerable.
If we allow our failures to become defeat … if we believe disappointing results are personal failures and allow them to defeat us … we’ll never reach the 10,001st iteration that’s successful.
Failure is only defeat if we refuse to learn from what happened.