Failing Faster Doesn’t Work For Everyone, but It’s Still a Valuable Lesson to Understand

One of the most difficult things to grasp when it comes to succeeding as a business owner is being able to identify the many different paths to success. There’s no such thing as a one-way street to a successful business that everyone walks. There isn’t a guaranteed way to grow a business and there’s no such thing as a fail-proof idea.

There also aren’t defined routes to take if you want to become successful. Everyone successful might have similarities, but trying to correlate these traits to their success is a little silly. In reality, people are successful for many different reasons. Some are lucky, others work hard, and some just work incredibly hard and grind out every day to the best of their ability.

However, there’s usually one concept that everyone throws around when business success is brought up; the idea of failing faster.

What is failing faster?

Before we go deeper into this topic, it’s a good idea to give you a rough idea of what failing faster really means.

To some people, failing faster means throwing ideas at the wall until one of them sticks. For example, you can invest in a low-cost startup that sells a specific product or latches onto a certain trend. This is usually a great way to build up experience and learn more about the market before you decide to invest full-time into a project that you know will succeed.

But like we said at the beginning of this post, there are no guarantees in the world of business.

Failing faster like this is a waste of time and often resources. If you have a great business idea, then it’s fine to invest in it and show that you truly believe in it. However, if you’re just tossing ideas into the wind and hoping to see a return, then you’re eventually going to run into a situation where you’re out of money or just haven’t learned anything past the initial stages.

Think of it as a video game. If you play with the intention of constantly failing so that you can perfect the first level, how will you ever progress into the second level and beyond? Failing faster can help you perfect your skills, but it’s not going to help you grow your business in the long run.

Breaking out of your comfort zone through failure

Failure is a great way to help you experience some really uncomfortable situations. Failure helps you realize that there are no guarantees in the business world and that you really need to focus and take challenges one at a time as they come if you really want to succeed.

Being an adaptable business leader isn’t easy, but it’s one of the most secure ways to grow your company and truly reach new heights. Taking on challenges by getting uncomfortable will force you to learn new skills, and it puts your team in situations where they really need to think on their toes. It’s understandable if you want to maintain a comfortable situation where you feel like you’re in control of everything, but this is going to be a detriment in the long run.

If you’re serious about growing your business, then failing faster is a fantastic concept to understand. It’s not about constantly failing to perfect a specific business strategy. It’s about braving failure, seeking those situations where you can fail, then dissecting the entire scenario so that you can learn from it. Understand why you can fail, how you can avoid it, and what you can learn from those encounters.

Dodging failure when possible

So how exactly do you avoid failures in business? After all, if you continuously seek out situations that you’re uncomfortable in and always come out behind, then you need to fix something in order to get back on the right track.

For starters, we’d highly recommend that you start working with experts in the industry. This can mean a number of different things depending on who you are and what type of business you run. For example, it could mean speaking to a company about buying a compressed air dryer for industrial and commercial purposes. However, it could also mean speaking to networking professionals to help protect your business from cybersecurity threats.

The key here is to identify areas that you can’t invest time into. For many business owners, that’s usually creative areas such as logo design and branding. If you’re focused on running your company, the last thing you need is to learn how to draw a logo. Instead, you want to delegate tasks to other people and focus on what you’re strong at.

And this is where we arrive at the core of the lesson; learning to trust in others, delegating tasks, and understanding where you need to draw the line.

A business isn’t run by a single person. It’s a team of people that share common goals and are encouraged to work together in order to reach them. Once you start gaining trust in your employees (and they also start trusting you) then it can greatly improve your working relationship. This will enable you to delegate tasks without concerning yourself about failure, and it’ll also help you understand what your limitations as a business owner are.

You can’t run everything alone. You can’t run a massive business without any help and if you start to suspect employees or have a sour relationship with them, then you’re going to be constantly worrying about things that are unproductive in the grand scheme of things. Make absolutely sure that you trust in your team and dodge failures by understanding what you are and aren’t capable of. It’s one of the most valuable lessons to learn when you want to start a business and it has the ability to completely change your perspective on how your business is run and how to make important decisions that will greatly impact the future of your company.