Is there a simple way to turn failure into success?
Jan 28th, 2016
We recently became aware of a rather interesting research graphic. It bears the title of “Without Fail”. But Is there a simple way to turn failure into success?
We present it below, followed by our comments and suggestions.
Source: OnlineMBAToday.com
The graphic starts by stating that 90% of business startups fail and 42% of those failures are actually due to lack of market for their products. Additionally I’d like to say, botched plans. No big surprise here, these numbers are “known” in the markets.
The inforgraphic then displays a gallery of famous present and past personalities. It includes names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein. It states that all of them shared significant failures at a point in time. University drop-outs, being fired from their own company, refusal to enter an Engineering School, and then great success stories, once they came back.
We note that among that list there are a few names that belong to another list that has lately made a lot of noise: the one of the 62 billionaires owning as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population.
That being said the examples from the list can be interpreted as having belonged, for some times at least, to the 90% “business startups failures”, but then, often after trying over and over again, they emerged as winners, not only entering in the 10% of success, but reaching the top of the Olympus of the, say to be generous, 700/7B people, that is 1 in ten millions super billionaires.
I have hard time believing that studying those success stories, with such a low rate of success is very useful as we wrote in a blogpost on survivor bias and another showing that bias at work during WWII.
Is there a simple way to turn failure into success?
However, the graphic avoids that pitfall and in the last section, entitled “Turning failure into success” suggests “simple steps that will help you look at failure a little different”.
These are the very wise words constituting the recipe:
Of course we would like to add a few elements to that recipe. When entering highly uncertain environments with a new venture you need extra attention to:
Tagged with: budgets, business environment, failure, risk evaluations, success, survivor bias
Category: Risk analysis, Risk management
Seriously… such a motivational post.
Keep up the good work.