Provides motivation and boosts appetite for risk
“Humans are engineered to be motivated by both seeking pleasure and avoiding pain,” says Birkby. “So failures can become as motivating as our successes.”
Birkby also says that failure can build risk tolerance levels and courage, enabling people to take greater and smarter business risks in the future.
Eckersley-Maslin agrees.
“To be entrepreneurial you have to break rules and take risks,” he says. “With risk comes failure. Failure teaches you to push the limits.”
He adds that pushing those limits teaches entrepreneurs where the “edge” is so it can be avoided. “If you fear failure, you’ll never be there.”
Failing fast and early
Stone says failing fast and failing often is now a key strategy of a new wave of start-ups.
“It encourages businesses to launch much earlier than they otherwise would, and show products and services to their customers that may still have imperfections or even gaping holes, all for the purpose of seeing if their ideas can succeed or fail much earlier,” he says.
“If customers like what they see, the founders can quickly and iteratively improve their products. If customers don’t like what they see, the founders can get back to the drawing board much earlier and try and try again.”
Matthews also sees benefits in the fail fast and early concept. “It’s good to fail early, when recovery is easy and doesn’t cost much,” she says, adding that companies in ANZ Innovyz Start’s program “fail” and pivot several times during their 13-week course.
Don’t give up
Stone notes that it’s suggested Thomas Edison failed 1000 times before finding the right filament for his lightbulb invention.
“Where would be we if Edison gave up, even after the 900th attempt,” he says.
“You will probably fail in 100 small things and a few large ones as you try and start your own business; the only real failure is when you give up. It only takes one success to wipe out all of those prior failures.”
Matthews has a similar view, recounting the story of a college student asking an entrepreneur what they needed to do to become as successful as the entrepreneur. “The answer was: ‘Be prepared to fail at least seven times’.”
“Each time you fail, you can deduct one more from the magic number of `seven’ failures. But this only works if you take time to learn from something that didn’t turn out as expected. Study the pattern of problems, recognise the signs, and don’t make that mistake again,” Matthews says.
For Birkby, failure means that “you actually showed up in the first place”.
“True failure is really not participating at all.”
