I had a very interesting discussion during the UnConference Event, where one of the participants was telling me how she feared how the community would react if her business failed and that prevented her from taking actions that were not in her comfort zone. This is a huge problem in Iceland. I get the feeling that people think that failure is a bad thing. I embrace failure and I am fearless about my business ventures. There is no other way to look at the abyss of Entrepreneurship. I remember Steve Jobs seminal talk in Stanford and I wrote about it many times.
It is impossible to connect the dots looking forward, it was very very clear looking backward 10 years later. Again, you cannot connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking back. You have to trust the dots will somehow connect in the future, you have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever… because believing that the dots will connect down the road, will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads off the well worn path and that would make all the difference.
Almost everyone looks at Silicon Valley as this role model of building a startup ecosystem, and I wonder if Silicon Valley would have become such an ecosystem without the leadership of Research oriented organizations and companies that embraced failure as a way to learn to improve on their experiments. Mark Suster had a post about this where he was interviewing Steve Blank and their discussion is extremely illustrative of the nature of Silicon Valley. I believe a Culture that embraces failure and has the buffer to support those who dare to challenge the norm and improve the community need to be embraced. I also believe those who take chances on those type of individuals need to be embraced because without capital the challenges of experimentation is made doubly hard. Here is the video interview of Mark:
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- Bloomberg BusinessWeek Rips Bravo’s Silicon Valley Reality Show, Calls Its Stars ‘Shallower Than A Dinner Plate’ (businessinsider.com)
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Even though failures are terrible hard while your experiencing them they are the times where you learn the most. I have had some failures in my life and from all of them I have learnt a valuable lesson.
Hi Bala, I was also talking with some ladies at the UnConference and this topic came up. They said that in Iceland if you fail once you are always considered a failure. I found that shocking as we all know and as you mention in your post that the most sucessful entrepreneurs failed many times before they hit the jackpot. Personally I have tried many ventures, some of them worked great others were complete disaster but that never held me back from starting something new. I now understand why my Icelandic husband is always so reticent when I tell him about a new idea, especially if the last one did not work out.
Word
I say carry on Pauline… take chances, learn new things and continue to fail, because that is difference between those who live and those who don’t. Steve had it right in the talk above, don’t live someone else’s life.
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