I want motivation after my first startup failure.
Failure ? Did someone say failure ? I heard get ready for another try.
In every walk of life, we do something and then we want to reap results from it. Sometimes we get expected results and sometimes not. And the later one is what most of the people call failure.
Is this a failure, perhaps not. There may be wrong planning, wrong timing or the wrong circumstances. So better tighten up your belts for the next try with better planning and learnings from the past.
Let me share a wonderful story of a man, where if he has called the unexpected results a failure. He would have never changed the industry and made the dent.
Jack Ma, Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group.
Alibaba founder Jack Ma was rejected from 30 jobs, including KFC, before becoming the richest man in China.
The businessman revealed that he failed a college entrance exam three times. Once he ruled out college, He applied for 30 different jobs and got rejected in all of them.
He even tried to get a job with the police but“unexpected result (failure)”
He even went to KFC with other twenty four people, twenty three were accepted the one who rejected was him. Again “unexpected result (failure)”
When Jack founded Alibaba in 1998, he met with many obstacles. The venture didn’t turn profit for the first three years. Even then he did not felt discouraged and decided to come up with something creative.
He identified problems and decided to find creative solutions for the same. One of the company’s main challenges was to do payments on the website. No banks did business with them because of non promising company profile.
So He decided to start his own payment program called Alipay. The program transfers payments of different currencies between international buyers and sellers.
Most of the people at that time called it a stupid idea but he didn’t care about the people as long as he could see people using it.
Today, 800 million people use Alipay. Alibaba, attracts 100 million shoppers a day. Jack Ma is worth an estimate $20.4 billion.
Whatever you assume a failure is actually a learning. Try to see it from the broader perspective. Implement learnings from the failure the next time you do something similar. Keep on trying is one thing but to improve with every attempt is the mandate.
Action Points :
If you have already worked on something passionately and not found expected results. Follow these steps
- Make note of the problems and the shortcomings of your venture.
- Try to find the solution for the same and implement it on smaller market/people first, probably your friends/colleagues.
- If successful, try to include it in the mainstream venture. Otherwise go to step 1 again and start a fresh.
All the best with whatever you want to do in your life.
The only important thing is to keep moving. Sometimes the journey is more meaningful than the destination. And sometimes failures make more sense than playing a safe game.
The show must go on.
Author : Rohit Sharma
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