Brains 4 Business Personal Use Ebook

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There's learning the easy way (from reading and the experience and wisdom of others), and there's learning the hard way (from our own failures). When you're an entrepreneur, there will probably be both.

You might think that being a lifelong learner is a strange skill for an entrepreneur. Really, it's just the opposite. The mindset of a lifelong learner is teachability. It says, "Whatever is going on, I know I can learn from it." Can you see how that attitude can change adversity into an advantage?

Learning Lessons from Setbacks

In You Can Do It Too: 20 Essential Things Every Budding Entrepreneur Should Know, Rachael Bridge discusses 20 entrepreneurs who failed in business and then went on to become multimillionaires. Each one offers some advice based on the mistakes they made.

Kim Fletcher, an adviser with Business Link in Kent, says: ‘You need to be able to detach yourself from it. If you regard failure as being something personal, you will not be able to take a step outside it and look at it dispassionately. You have to be able to say, did I make the right decision or the wrong decision? What information didn’t I have that would have helped me make a better decision that would not have taken me down this route?’

He says a vital element of being able to learn from your mistakes is analyzing the type of failure you experienced so you can find out the reason for it. Normally, on closer inspection, it will be obvious what caused it. ‘Is it a failure because you lost money, or because you lost a customer, or because you lost a person in your business? Perhaps you were far too engaged in the technology at the expense of delivering what the customer wanted?

Daniel Ronen, an advisor from DoS UK, says the big benefit of making a mistake is that it gives you time to reflect: ‘Failure forces you to stop, look, think and act. That is the cycle everyone should be doing in business. The problem is that people are so busy doing what they are doing that they do not stop and take a hard look at what is working, what is not working and what needs to change. But with failure you are actually forced to stop what you are doing and start thinking about it again.’

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