Friday, March 9, 2018

Is failure an opportunity?



Failure is often treated with negative adjectives such as sadness or disgust. We are often scared that a failure will create a negative impression about us to our team or leads. We think that if we fail, it will get us a negative grade in our performance.

To understand whether it is actually a true, let us walk down the memory lane to our childhood. Do we remember how we started walking? If not ourselves, we would have definitely seen babies in our family or our siblings their attempt to start walking. The first time they attempted they have failed. The have fallen down. The immediate next reaction was to get up and try again.

The same philosophy applies almost everywhere. One of the important techniques to answer a question is by eliminating the wrong answers. You tick off the answer that you are sure is not right. Why don’t we apply the same, in our experiment or while ideating. When our idea fails, we just discovered a way that the idea should not have been pursued. It might be  that we just need to change the steps to develop the ideas or even we might be experimenting with the wrong audiance.

To justify this thought, let us look at some of the products stories and how they succeeded.

Bubble Wrap:  The initial intention of creating a bubble wrap was create a trendy new textured wallpaper. This was a total failure, until when IBM used it to package their newly launched computers while transporting them. It became a success overnight and today it is a defacto choice for packaging any delicate items.

WD-40: After 39 times of unsuccessful attempts the company perfected the formula and thus the name WD-40 “Water Displacement perfected on the 40th try”
So failures is not then end of the end of the road. It is just a step closer to success. The only hardship is to stay focused and persist the idea till you succeed. There is always a right time and a right way to present an idea.

In words of Henry ford, "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently".

Credits

3 comments:

  1. Timing will be an important aspect and it is definitely worth a retry. Failure is definitely an opportunity to improve and emerge stronger.

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  2. “It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”

    ReplyDelete
  3. A good one, failing fast is key! One can know about a 1000 other ways that will not work, isn't that half the battle won?

    ReplyDelete