It’s no secret either that the reasons of these failures are often as predictable as they are unavoidable; the over-confidencethat often goes along with the eagerness of the start-up spirit, a growth that is often correlated with a dangerous comfort zone, a product that doesn’t find an audience; these factors, no matter how cyclic they are, seem to be the standard traps that many start-ups are confronted with.
One other point however that is often hidden is that a start-up to succeed needs not to be the first attempt at a start-up. In the West this non-negligiblefact has been a mean to get better and stronger. Like William Edward Hickson once famously said ‘If at first you don’t succeed,Try, try, try again.’
Unfortunately this legendary quote is yet to be understood in our region where failing start-ups are often associated with disgrace and deterrence.
Before crying failure, a start-up tries to pivot. When you’re pivoting, you’re trying to rescue the company by putting it on a path to doing something useful and monetizable. But when even this attempt fails, it does not mean that you have failed, but rather that you are getting one step closer to succeeding. Churchill said ”Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”.
So why is it that in our region we lose our enthusiasm after a first attempt, why do some people believe that this failure will define their whole career?
It appears that this notion of irrevocable failure seems to be engraved in our mentalities. In a region that has witness businesses and fortunes collapse over night, some find it difficult to get up again (and again) to fight and build on what they believe is a worldwide economical quicksand. The percentage of start-up failure can also be quite discouraging for some, not to mention the energy and the time consumed by such an endeavor that suddenly they think has all gone to waste. They are also worried that they will not find the initial enthusiasm of the first timers in them because they think they put it all in that first start-up.The very start-up that has failed.
Enters the real key to start-up success. Perseverance. Perseverance if your project fails, perseverance to start again, because failure is part of your asset, not a weakness. That is where real courage lies. To succeed, you need to fight until you get it right. Laziness, fear and misplaced pride are the real adversaries nowadays not failure.
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