While any aspiring entrepreneur hopes to achieve success right away, one difficult truth many now-successful entrepreneurs cite is that the road to successful entrepreneurship is often paved with failure. From poor ideas to failed launches to repeated rejections, failure can crop up in numerous ways throughout a business leader’s career, no matter how experienced or knowledgable they are.
However, even understanding that failure is part of the journey won’t necessarily make it an easy path to follow, making maintaining a positive perspective in the face of rejection and adversity a difficult task. To offer their guidance, nine members of Young Entrepreneur Council discuss their best advice for maintaining the right mindset while on your entrepreneurial journey and how doing so will catapult you toward success.
1. Embrace Failure As A Chance To Learn
Maintaining perspective and a positive attitude in the face of failure is crucial for entrepreneurs. It’s important to remember to embrace failure as a learning opportunity and understand that it’s an inherent part of the entrepreneurial journey. See it as a valuable learning experience rather than as a setback. Analyze your failures objectively, identify what went wrong and take away lessons that can help you in the future. Learn to shift your mindset from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. Emphasize personal and professional growth over immediate success. Celebrate small victories, incremental improvements and the knowledge you gain along the way. Remember, failure is not the end—it’s an opportunity to learn, grow and build a stronger foundation for the future! – Anna Anisin, DataScience.Salon
2. Keep A Notebook To Document Your Journey
Keep a notebook documenting your entrepreneurial journey. Whenever you’re faced with a decision, document it. Describe the situation in detail: Write down the decision or problem you’re facing. Document what you know, what you don’t know and how you’re feeling about things. Once the outcome is known, describe it—the pros and the cons. Over time, this process will not only help you fine-tune your instincts, but it will also help you keep things in perspective. – Ben Landers, Blue Corona
3. Shift Into A Growth Mindset
The best way to maintain perspective and a positive attitude in the face of failure is to have the mindset that all setbacks are there to help us learn the correct way we should be operating. This allows us to take a step back, evaluate what we did wrong, strategize a different way to execute and ultimately succeed. All lessons allow us to have more opportunities to grow and inspire others. – Micky Klein, Micky Klein Interiors
4. Recall What You’ve Achieved So Far
Recalling my achievements so far has always helped me keep a positive attitude in the face of failure. When the odds are not in my favor, remembering what I have achieved in the past has helped me stay motivated and overcome the feeling of self-doubt. It has given me the courage to keep pushing forward no matter how many times I have failed at something. When I recall my past achievements, I also remember the failures I had to encounter before succeeding, and that gives me the hope that there’s always daybreak after a dark night. – Jared Atchison, WPForms
5. Weather The Low Moments With The Help Of Your Community
If becoming an entrepreneur was easy, everyone would do it! There are so many ups in entrepreneurship, but the downs can feel very low and sometimes lonely. Successful founders have strategies in place to weather the low moments and know how important using those strategies will be to their overall success. First, recognize that difficult moments can simply be business as usual. It’s easy to get swept up in the fires you’re putting out and lose sight of the fact that every business has daily struggles—and that’s to be expected! Second, lean into your community. Make sure you always have a group of trusted friends, advisors or colleagues that you can call upon when the going gets tough. Finally, keep on climbing. Progress and success are not linear. Failure is a part of success. – Rachel Lipson, Blue Balloon Songwriting for Small People
6. Try Not To Take It Personally
Don’t take it personally. Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a race. Just like a quarterback for a football team, you’re not going to win the Super Bowl during your first year playing in high school—for many reasons. Once you can accept that it’s a career and take each and every failure as a lesson, without taking it personally, you’ll learn from it and grow. Someday you’ll win— and then you’ll win again and again. – Andy Karuza, NachoNacho
7. Focus On The Long-Term Picture
Entrepreneurship is an exciting path, but it’s full of unknowns and trial and error. It’s impossible to know for sure all the right answers. We may fall a few times, but it does not mean we failed. Learn from mistakes, acknowledge they are part of an entrepreneur’s life and keep trying! For most of us, it has taken several years, several exits and another bunch of ill-fitting partners or investors, but the important thing is we now know way more than when we started. Use that experience to do it better, to choose your team wisely and to make smarter decisions. The path to success is a steep one, but it can be conquered! – Riccardo Conte, Virtus Flow
8. Remember To Always Pick Yourself Up And Move Forward
Writer Paulo Coelho once said that “the secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.” Going into any venture comes with risk. You need to know this going into it and use it as motivation to try and be the example of success. Remember that not all failures are terrible, and failure will appear in many ways. It is about getting up and continuing to move forward. – Zane Stevens, Protea Financial
9. Celebrate Your Victories
If you want to keep a positive attitude on your entrepreneurial journey, it’s important to celebrate your victories. I know many leaders who get laser-focused on their failures but rarely mention their successes. There’s no question that this mentality will drag you down and make it harder to see the bright side when things get difficult. – John Turner, SeedProd LLC
