Lang Biz Tips February 2025

The Power hidden in business failure

Failure is a part of life and certainly in business. If your barbeque business has a failure, don’t be discouraged because you are in good company. Failure can be a wonderful lesson for success.

Take a look at this famous list of people who experienced failures and what the result turned out to be.

Henry Ford: While Ford is today known for his innovative assembly line and American-made cars, he wasn’t an instant success. In fact, his early businesses failed and left him broke five times before he founded the successful Ford Motor Company.

H. Macy: Most people are familiar with this large department store chain, but Macy didn’t always have it easy. Macy started seven failed business before finally hitting big with his store in New York City.\

W. Woolworth: Some may not know this name today, but Woolworth was once one of the biggest names in department stores in the U.S. Before starting his own business, young Woolworth worked at a dry goods store and was not allowed to wait on customers because his boss said he lacked the sense needed to do so.

Soichiro Honda: The billion-dollar business that is Honda began with a series of failures and fortunate turns of luck. Honda was turned down by Toyota Motor Corporation for a job after interviewing for a job as an engineer, leaving him jobless for quite some time. He started making scooters of his own at home, and spurred on by his neighbors, finally started his own business.

Akio Morita: You may not have heard of Morita, but you’ve undoubtedly heard of his company, Sony. Sony’s first product was a rice cooker that unfortunately didn’t cook rice so much as burn it, selling less than 100 units. This first setback didn’t stop Morita and his partners as they pushed forward to create a multi-billion dollar company.

Bill Gates: Gates didn’t seem like a shoo-in for success after dropping out of Harvard and starting a failed first business with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen called Traf-O-Data. While this early idea didn’t work, Gates’ later work did, creating the global empire that is Microsoft.

Harland David Sanders: Perhaps better known as Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, Sanders had a hard time selling his chicken at first. In fact, his famous secret chicken recipe was rejected 1,009 times before a restaurant accepted it.

Walt Disney: Today Disney rakes in billions from merchandise, movies and theme parks around the world, but Walt Disney himself had a bit of a rough start. He was fired by a newspaper editor because, “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” After that, Disney started a number of businesses that didn’t last too long and ended with bankruptcy and failure. He kept plugging along, however, and eventually found a recipe for success that worked.

Albert Einstein: Most of us take Einstein’s name as synonymous with genius, but he didn’t always show such promise. Einstein did not speak until he was four and did not read until he was seven, causing his teachers and parents to think he was mentally handicapped, slow and anti-social. Eventually, he was expelled from school and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School. It might have taken him a bit longer, but most people would agree that he caught on pretty well in the end, winning the Nobel Prize and changing the face of modern physics.

Charles Darwin: In his early years, Darwin gave up on having a medical career and was often chastised by his father for being lazy and too dreamy. Darwin himself wrote, “I was considered by all my masters and my father, a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect.” Perhaps they judged too soon, as Darwin is well-known for his scientific studies.

Robert Goddard: Goddard today is hailed for his research and experimentation with liquid-fueled rockets, but during his lifetime his ideas were often rejected and mocked by his scientific peers who thought they were outrageous and impossible. Today rockets and space travel don’t seem far-fetched at all, due largely in part to the work of this scientist who worked against the feelings of the time.

Isaac Newton: Newton was undoubtedly a genius when it came to math, but he had some failings early on. He never did particularly well in school and when put in charge of running the family farm, he failed miserably, so poorly in fact that an uncle took charge and sent him off to Cambridge where he finally blossomed into the scholar we know today.

Socrates: Despite leaving no written records behind, Socrates is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the Classical era. Because of his new ideas, in his own time he was called “an immoral corrupter of youth” and was sentenced to death. Socrates didn’t let this stop him and kept right on, teaching up until he was forced to poison himself.

Robert Sternberg: This big name in psychology received a “C” in his first college introductory psychology class with his teacher telling him that, “there was already a famous Sternberg in psychology, and it was obvious there would not be another.” Ouch! Sternberg showed him, however, graduating from Stanford with exceptional distinction in psychology, summa cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa and eventually becoming the President of the American Psychological Association. This should inspire students at traditional and accredited online colleges to always strive to succeed, no matter what anyone says along the way.

Overcoming failure

Failure indeed bruises the ego, and self-importance. When we fail, we feel threatened—and that sense of threat can trigger a fight-or-flight response.

“Fight” in the context of failure looks like wholesale dismissal of the value of the task, or criticism of the people involved or the unfairness of the situation you faced. However, “flight” might be the more common response to failure. When we run from failure, we move our attention from the task that threatens our sense as effective people.

In a study of six experiments published in 2020, Hallgeir Sjåstad, Roy Baumeister, and Michael Ent randomly assigned participants to receive good or bad feedback on a cognitive test or academic performance. They found that participants who initially failed at a task predicted that succeeding in the future would make them less happy than it actually did—and they tended to dismiss the goals of the tests. The researchers coin the term “sour grapes effect” to describe this kind of response.

What can you learn from failure?

Failure doesn’t make us feel good. It can put our self-esteem to a serious test. It can be difficult to pick ourselves up to try again. So, what do you learn from failure?.

Humility

Egos are sensitive. They can grow and evolve into issues of their own. Most of the time, a healthy dose of failure is good. It keeps us humble. Failure can teach us how to embrace important characteristics.

Resilience

From failure, you learn resiliency. It’s hard to not to learn how to build resilience once failure has come, especially if you’re determined to overcome failure.

It’s an important life skill to build. And when you build resilience, it helps you in other ways. It can help you adopt the right behaviors. And it can help you build grit and motivation.

Innovation and creativity

Much like flexibility, these two qualities can present themselves as lessons of failure. Thomas Edison didn’t land the lightbulb on the first, second, or even thousandth try. It took 10,000 tries to perfect the lightbulb. Innovation and creativity take time, iterations, and failures along the way. Practice patience to keep the creative juices flowing.

Flexibility

Even the best-laid plans are often disrupted. The famous boxing champion, Mike Tyson once summed it up this way. “Everybody’s got a plan, until they get punched in the nose.”

And that goes for failure. You may have set a certain goal and realized you’ve overestimated. You’ve learned from your first failure that you need to adjust your goal. Or you can still achieve your goal. You need to adjust your approach.

That’s where flexibility is very useful. I often think of the phrase: Failures teach us flexibility, adaptability, and how to overcome obstacles. It teaches us to use change to our advantage. It keeps us nimble and helps us adopt that growth mindset.

Motivation

Are you one of those people who when someone tells you that you can’t do something, it makes you that much more determined to prove them wrong. Motivation is a valuable lesson learned from failure. Oftentimes, our failures are motivators.

Seeing progress along the way is a big motivator. Failure can help energize our motivation and help us reach our goals.

So, take another view of failure and apply it to motivate a better solution for your business. What better flavor can you taste, than success!