Lack of success is proportionately related to lack of effort and preparation.
This chapter will focus on the concept of failure and how to mitigate it. Failure is defined as: “the lack of success.” The main obstacle to success is fear of failure. Failure, success, and fear work hand in hand. However, because, as mentioned in Chapter 4, everyone’s definition of success is different, failure too will have a different meaning for different people and there are different ways to mitigate fear of failure. The second biggest deterrent to entrepreneurship, aside from the start-up funding aspect is avoidance of failure. As with fear and avoidance of risk, discussed in Chapter 5 (Do Not be Afraid to Take Risks), the first part of that combination, fear, is natural, and you can learn to channel it. The second part of that combination, avoidance, is counterproductive. It means you are not confronting or dealing with an issue. You are missing out on potential learning opportunities. Do not attempt to avoid failure because it will happen. Besides, it is a lot easier to avoid risk then it is to avoid failure. Many people, can, and do, go through life having avoided risk, but very few people can avoid failure. Those that prepare the most and mitigate it the best, will have a better chance at success. How you handle failure, or challenging times, is determined by the amount of experience or intuition that you have and is a byproduct of preparation. Some say you should hope for the best but plan for the worst. Once again, like in the space program, first mentioned in Chapter 5 (Do Not be Afraid to Take Risks), the fear of failure did not stop our scientist from reaching for and attaining the goal of landing on the moon. They failed many times, but learned from each failure and got better. They prepared, planned, tested, researched, and pushed forward, despite their previous failures. Their fears forced them to plan for all contingencies and triple-check all their numbers. There was too much at risk, not to.
The first step in dealing with failure is to understand it. As the definition of failure is “the lack of success,” and as the definition of success is different for everyone, you must first define what success means to you. The next step, based on your definition of success, is then to identify and define what failure means to you. There are two forms of failure: professional failure and personal failure. There is only one way to mitigate failure, that is, through preparation. There is only one way to benefit from failure, that is, by learning from it.
What is your definition of failure? As failure is lack of success, first you must define success by identifying your ultimate goal. The lack of obtaining your ultimate goal, by your own definition, is failure. This definition can be redefined and adjusted over time. Refer to Chapter 4 (Identify and Attain Your Goals). Failure then, will be the lack of “enter your definition of success here.” Once you understand what failure is, you can plan for it and learn to mitigate it. However, failure is not relegated solely to lack of achieving your ultimate goal alone, along with your ultimate goal, you should have subgoals designed to attain your ultimate goals; therefore, failure, too, will be defined by the lack of attaining each of those sub-goals. Therefore, you will have many opportunities at both success and failure in your path to your ultimate goal (success). The point is, to be successful, or attain lack of failure, you must be keenly aware of all of your subgoals and prepare and plan accordingly. This is done by, as mentioned in Chapter 4 (Identify and Attain Your Goals), identifying all your sub goals, writing them down, planning, creating action items and tracking your progress. They should be extremely specific, attainable action items and be set to manageable deadlines. Then, think of ways in which you can fail in attaining each of the subgoals. Once you have done that, include ways to mitigate failure of attaining each subgoal and be prepared.
What are you afraid of? If you have a fear of failure, following the preceding suggestion will help mitigate that. You must understand that fear of failure, as well as fear of anything, is a defense mechanism. Your body will physically and literally warn you of impending harm. That fear and those physical effects will force you, if you focus its energy properly, to prepare better than you normally would. It is your mind cautioning you that you are leaving your comfort zone and heading into the unknown. It is okay and natural to be afraid. You must pay attention to its cues and act accordingly. Learn to channel that fear into preparation and do not let it paralyze you. Once you understand what your fear of failure entails, then you should write down the rest of your fears and study them and then confront them in the same manner. Define them, understand them, break them down, and create a plan to mitigate them.
Professional failure: Lack of business success:
1. Prepare: The only way to mitigate failure or achieve success is to be prepared. You must thoroughly understand the subject matter. Like mentioned in Chapter 5 (Do Not be Afraid to Take Risks), learning to mitigate failure is like preparing for a test. If you listen in class, do the homework assignments, and read the assigned books, the odds are in your favor that you will not fail. The same is true of preparing for failures. You must also understand the consequences of you failing. You must have a mitigation plan ready. An exit strategy. Perform a risk of failure assessment. Do your research and homework and understand what you are getting yourself into. Make a list of all the potential consequences associated with failure. It is said that success happens when opportunity meets preparation. I would add…and a little luck. There is also no guarantee that good planning will lead to success. But, by planning for success, you mitigate failure.
2. Learn: The only way to benefit from failure is to learn from it and do not repeat the same mistakes that led you down that path to that result. If you do fail, you must learn from it and grow. Times of failure force you to take measure and stock of yourself. It exposes weakness that need improvement. Failure shows you what you are made of and how you react to adversity and, if and how, you overcome, will be a testament to your character. Sometimes, you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes. Times of success, while very gratifying, are easy to digest for you and your friends and family. Times of failure are not easy to digest, and they can expose tensions and vulnerabilities. They can, however, if analyzed and understood properly, offer up paths and opportunities to improvement that are not readily available after times of success. So, in a weird way, failure is good, if it provides you with a valuable lesson. It can allow you to redefine failure and recategorize it as a learning experience. Why should you not avoid failure? Because you will deprive yourself of a valuable learning opportunity though real-life experience. Resilience and sacrifice are essential to recovering from and learning from failure. Not getting discouraged or giving up, but instead steeling of resolve and determination are key traits of successful entrepreneurs and accomplished people in general.
Personal failure: Lack of personal success or the effects of professional failure on your personal life.
1. Be open with your family and loved ones: The lack of business success can affect and lead to personal failures if you allow it. Exposure to failure can grow like a cancer if not dealt with properly. Those affects are not limited to the entrepreneur, but affect everyone. This can also create risk or exposure to mental injury. Talk openly about the upcoming risks and the consequences of failing and how you have planned for it. Discuss the sacrifices you will be expected to make. Being open about the hardships and struggles you can face, or are facing, is one way to lessen the emotional burden. Do not hide those feelings from you family or loved ones.
2. Create an advisory group: Entrepreneurs understand that they do not know everything, so they surround themselves with advisors in all fields of practice to consult and seek advice from. This includes advice on how to handle failure. You are not the first, or only, entrepreneur who has failed. Seeking counsel from those who failed and overcame can prove beneficial. This will help mitigate potential risk of injury to you and your family from failure.
3. Create a support group: Like with risks, failures cause stress, and stress causes anxiety and that can lead to mental injury. You should not underestimate the power of stress due to failure and the effects it can have on your well-being. Like with any other potentiality, you need to be prepared to handle the stress associated failure not only on yourself but also on your employees.
Success, for me, some of my goals, throughout my career were: Graduating as an engineer, building a successful team, starting my own company, running my company at a profit, becoming the best, obtaining my Professional Engineer (P.E.) certification.
The fear then, for me, was directly linked to each of those goals: Fear of not graduating, fear of not being able to build a successful team, fear of not being able to convince clients to trust me, fear of financial ruin, fear of not being good enough, fear of not obtaining my P.E. certification.
Failure, for me, then, at one point in time, followed closely behind some of my fears: I was forced to declare academic bankruptcy in my goal of graduating as an engineer; I had to build my staff and start my company during the Great Recession; I did not have the needed P.E. certification to start my own firm; I suffered numerous cash flow problems; I had many insecurities about whether I would succeed, and so on. But, I learned from each of my initial failures and pushed forward, ultimately achieving success in each of those goals, with one exception.
The following is a more detailed explanation of my life experiences with goals, fears, and failures:
1. The goal (graduating as an engineer): The fear (not graduating): The failure (academic bankruptcy): I almost did not attain this goal. I had failed out of school and was working odd jobs with no direction. With renewed determination, I sought out help and due to the kindness of an associate dean at the university, I was given a second chance. I declared academic bankruptcy and began my academic career anew. Through preparation and hard work, I excelled the second time around and attained my goal of earning a degree in engineering.
2. The goal (building a successful team): The fear (not being able to build a successful team): The failure (the Great Recession): Despite this fear, I left my first job of 13 plus years of working in the only discipline I had ever known. I took a huge pay cut and gamble and went to work for another firm outside of my area of specialty in the hopes that I could transfer my knowledge and experience and build a successful team at the new company. I had conquered that fear and achieved my goal. However, during this period, which came to be known as the Great Recession, all engineering firms were undergoing financial hardship, and I had to make another career move. I decided to leave that firm and start my own firm.
3. The goal (starting my own company): The fear (not being able to convince clients to trust me): The failure (not having a P.E. certification): I had made a rash decision to leave my previous firm and start my own firm without knowing if the clients would follow me and trust me with their work. It was a difficult time in the engineering industry, due to the Great Recession, because I would be starting my firm, while other firms were struggling. On top of all of that, I did not have a P.E. certification, which was required to start an engineering company. I had taken a big gamble and risk. My solution was to hire a P.E. and make him or her my vice president and company qualifier. I would then offer our services at a reduced fee. The business model of better service at a reduced rate worked. I was able to build my company up quickly. Due to the Great Recession, there was an abundance of highly qualified engineers who had been laid off, and I was able to secure them to work for me at an affordable salary.
4. The goal (running my company at a profit): The fear (financial ruin): The failure (cash flow problems): After the Great Recession ended and the economy started to pick up, I lost many of those same high-qualified engineers to larger general engineering firms from which they originally came from. At one point, I lost my top three engineers within a short period of time. My revenue and cash flow suffered tremendously because I had to rebuild my company and had lost many clients due to lack of manpower. I focused, rehired, retrained used up most of my financial reserves, and got the company back on its feet.
5. The goal (becoming the best): The fear (not being good enough): The failure (insecurities): I always had a dream of being the best. Becoming an expert in my field. But, how could I do that, I thought, without having a P.E.? I had already become an expert in field based on experience, but I did not have the most important credential, so I thought, the certification as a professional engineer. Without that, I would just be a graduate in engineering with its corresponding degree. I became insecure, and that prevented me from seeking out expert witness status and cases. During a personal experience with hurricane damage and losses suffered at my condo unit, as part of a suit I had filed against the insurance company for failure to adequately estimate my losses, I was exposed to experts on both sides of the case. I quickly realized that I had more knowledge than both experts had combined, in my area of expertise, which was the exterior building envelope and hurricane mitigation. I had gathered and prepared evidence that essentially disqualified the testimony and opinion provided by the opposing expert. My input and professional opinion ended up being a big reason why the insurance company agreed to settle the case to our satisfaction. At the end of my case, based on the demonstration of my knowledge in the field, I was hired by both our expert and my attorney to perform expert witness assessments on future cases.
6. The goal (obtaining my P.E. certification): The fear (not obtaining P.E. certification): The failure (not obtaining P.E. certification): This is the one professional goal that I am still working on and has become my cross to bear. The reason it has eluded me, to date, is both pride and my choice of specialty. My degree is in architectural engineering. When I graduated, I went to work immediately with a specialty engineering firm dedicated only to design of the exterior building envelope for hurricane mitigation. Therefore, I gained no experience in architectural engineering, which includes the design of only building structures and all its services such as mechanical, electrical, and plumbing. The P.E. exams are not designed to test your knowledge of what you learned in school, that is, the engineer in training (E.I. or F.E.) exam, which I passed on my first attempt. The P.E. exam is designed to test knowledge gained after five years of practical experience in your field. At the time of my graduation, there was no P.E. exam for architectural engineering. The only options for a P.E. included taking the civil or the structural exams. The civil exam covers design of all structures and not just buildings (transportation, highways, environmental, and so on) courses, which were not required in my degree in architectural engineering. The structural exam covers all structures and all loading conditions and not just buildings (bridges and earthquake loads, and so on). The easiest route, the route most people take, is to sit for the civil exam, which has a much higher passing rate then the structural exam. My stubbornness forced me to focus on the structural exam, which has the lowest pass rate of all the P.E. exams including civil because it is the field most closely related to my degree. Why would I take the civil exam, which includes areas of practice and design that I never learned in school and strive to learn those concepts, essentially self-teaching myself university-level courses in transportation, highway, and environmental design, if I did not plan to work in civil engineering? Therefore, instead, I decided to take on the challenge of self-teaching myself university-level courses in bridge and earthquake design. The results were predictable. I did however manage to secure a 69 when the passing rate was 70. But as they say, close is only good when playing horseshoes and with hand grenades. Today, there is a P.E. exam for architectural engineering, but I have never practiced it due to the dedication to my area of specialty. The irony is, if I had become and architectural engineer, I probably would not have my own firm today and be considered an expert in my field. I have come to understand and determine that a P.E. is helpful to have in my field, but it is not essential to success. Nonetheless, I have not given up on this goal. I have decided to set my pride aside and learn the basics of transportation, highway, and environmental design, and so on, through online courses and retake the exam. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, online courses are much more prevalent and accessible. I plan to take the civil engineering P.E. exam this coming April in 2021. Wish me luck.
Chapter 9: Do Not Be Afraid to Fail
Recommended Activities
1. Make a list of times you have failed in the past and include details of what you failed at and why.
2. Recall and write down how you handled it.
3. List what you learned from each of your past failures.
4. Write down your definition of happiness.
5. Write down your definition success.
6. Rethink your definition of failure based on your new definition of success. Failure is the lack of (insert your definition of success). Do this for each subgoal.