Isn't it great to have spectacular products, one after another? To be unable to remember when you failed last time. If that's your situation, you better be prepared for a very hard fall. Because it will come.
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Sometimes it comes as a surprise when a successful young person living the dream breaks down and have a hard time trying to regain self-confidence and get back on the track. A successful athlete may suddenly drop in performance and start an avalanche of questions what happened to yesterday's very successful person. The same thing may happen to any business person.
Although it may seem counter-intuitive at first, the reason is too much success and too little failure. It is known fact that children that are successful in any way and activity may sink fast when they come to university. The problem is, you can't succeed if you haven't seen a fall.
When you are successful, you simply don't know what to do when you fail. How to behave? What to learn from that? Where's the way back? Those are very hard questions for all people unfortunate enough to live a long period with no problem at all.
In the case of a young student, a number of questions come to daylight. Is this school good for me? Am I good enough? Should I choose a new major? Maybe I missed my future profession? What will people think about me?
And those are all wrong questions. But, they make sense because the unfortunate young soul doesn't know that there's no need for questions at all: the only thing needed is to learn what went wrong. Then stand up and move on. That's it.
People with hard life, the most of us, know that the failure is part of life and don't make a drama out of it. But if you never experienced it, you are in trouble.
Now, what happens if you happen to have a company that's successful from day one? Everything is fine and nice until your first idea goes down the drain. Bad product, for example. Then your problems start. You are asking yourself are you a good manager, is your vision good, how-the-heck-that-failed?! You are in doubt and have second thoughts about every team member and your plans.
Then you start to think about radically different business course, about grandioso ideas that will change the world, humanity, the purpose of life... In short, you need a shrink. Seriously.
If you never experienced a failure - or you experienced a very few of them - when a big one hits you, you should remember that the only thing you have to do is to go to work tomorrow. Nothing more. The world is still there, your company is still there, you competition is still there, the end of the world didn't happen. Go to work and continue to work on something else.
That's something every experienced manager knows and if you stick to that your life will be much easier and you will learn a lot. Failures are here to teach us something and should be taken as that. No drama, no despair, just one more lesson on our way to be better than we were yesterday. ■