I hear this all the time from folks who have become too scared to try the entrepreneurial path. These people created a business once, and it did not succeed. From one failure, a conclusion is reached that entrepreneurship is never to be pursued again. This sounds like a very sensible analysis, doesn’t it? You made one or more mistakes that led you astray, so why try again? Unfortunately, this flies in the face of what neuroscience now says about how we learn.
The great physicist Niels Bohr once said, “[an expert is] a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” The truth is that we learn best by making mistakes and learning from them. Research has confirmed this. And, to the contrary, those who commit an error, and then shrink away from trying the very task again, live limited and generally unsatisfying lives.
The older we get, the more fearful we become of mistakes. A child learns to ride a two-wheeler bicycle after falling off several times. This same child as an adult may submit an article for publication with a magazine, get rejected, and never submit it to another venue.
The same holds true for starting a new business venture. We know most will fail; the question becomes if you fail the first time, will you try again? If you learn from the mistakes you made, each subsequent effort should garner a greater chance of success. So why should you try again if you failed the first time as an entrepreneur? Consider this: If you understand what happened in your inaugural voyage, you have increased your odds for a prosperous subsequent attempt!