Key Idea: See Failure as a Normal Occurrence

Only children and people who have never tried to do anything difficult think that they can get through life without failure.

Q:  How does a person look at failure and call it success? Even harder, how does one experience failure and call it success?

A:  Critics and cynics who are very often academics who have opted out of the free entreprise system when they get tenure, tend to look at entrepreneurs and think we are blinded by ambition, arrogant, or just plain stupid when we tell people that our failure is really a success.

We all know in advance that we will fail on the way to success. We expect it. Joe Dannis didn't expect it to take him seven years to create his product but that didn't mean he quit before he reached his goal. And, you need to know that the founders of Diversified Chemicals were more surpised at their success than they had been at their earlier failures.

We are optimists who see the glass half full and we are willing to work hard to achieve big goals. Most business owners and entrepreneurs are bored with easy goals and even get a thrill from some setbacks. We see them as challenges and we learn from them.

Last Christmas we were visiting with family. Our niece Toni, who is a new mother, called her girlfriend a "waaaa-waaaa." We asked, "What's a waaaa-waaaa?" Toni quipped, "It's a wuss or a wimp. A milksop, Milquetoast, mollycoddle, namby-pamby, sissy or sop. It's more than a crybaby. It's somebody who should know what to do and should do it but they don't because they are scared or lazy or they are waiting for someone to do it for them."

This brought back memories of Marc Katz, founder of Katz Deli in Austin, Texas. Marc told us, "Running a business is not for wimps." And the reason this is true is that there is much failure on the road to success.