We need to embrace failure
We don’t celebrate failure properly. Someone who has failed is someone who has tried, quite unlike those who sit on the sidelines and criticise.
Failure has to do with encouraging and celebrating effort rather than outcome, something that is often lost as we tend to focus only on the “winners” in particular industries, sectors, sports.
By focusing on effort, we encourage everyone to move forward, take a risk, and contribute towards achieving the common goal.
In contrast, focusing on “winners” glorifies success and discourages those who are not confident enough or don’t want to risk failing.
I refer to “winners” in inverted commas simply because “winning” is not a singular thing.
Being in business means that you are building something, a product or a service or a combination thereof, which means that your efforts to build, sell, and manage never stop.
Furthermore, winning can be defined any way you want it, e.g., turnover, absolute profit, profit margin, number of employees.
For example, using 2020 numbers, Walmart is the largest company in the world by turnover ($559,151m turnover, $13,600m profit), Microsoft is the largest by profit ($168,090m turnover, $61,270m profit), and Apple by market capitalisation ($2.1tr).
When building a business, many people will offer you advice, but none will tell you to “make lots of mistakes”.
They might say “take risks”, “don’t hold back”, or “I trust your abilities”, but they probably won’t be able to support why they say it or indeed be willing to help you achieve your goal.
Supporting from the sidelines requires zero effort on their part and, of course, zero risk of them being associated with a potential failure of your business.
Of course, when the business becomes successful, they will be the first to say, “I told you all would be fine”, and even try to gain some credit for making a random recommendation.
This is similar to the government or bank employee approach to building a career: avoid doing anything because by doing something, you risk it failing, so stay in your place and wear your blinkers until you get promoted to the top as a result of never doing anything wrong.
In business, you need to celebrate failure, define success on your terms, and be prepared to do things independently.
So, let’s talk about mindset; if you are never failing, you are probably never really winning either.
If everything you do is working, you probably aren’t taking enough risks, which means that even if you are achieving small wins every day, you aren’t challenging yourself to achieve big wins that will set you apart in a meaningful way.
Taking calculated risks is great, but it’s the uncalculated ones and those that go beyond what is obvious that will move you forward.
When someone on your team fails, talk about it and even celebrate it.
It’s much easier to talk about failure in hypothetical terms than embrace it but highlighting these moments when they happen helps ensure this mindset becomes an active part of the culture you are building.
That means creating a space where it’s okay to publicly share what went wrong and what the team can learn from that failure next time.
That’s why failure is a good thing – someone tried something, it didn’t work out, and now you are all wiser from
it.
This brings us to WiRE:
What is our goal? To bring transparency to the real estate market.
What does that mean? To collate all the information and data that relate to every single property on the planet, make it accessible to everyone for free, and thus help people make better decisions about their homes.
Isn’t that too grandiose? Yeap. That’s why it is worth it. According to all known aviation laws, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly.
Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground.
The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible (from the Bee Movie).
One-year-old baby Asya Polatli is undergoing a rare gene treatment in Nicosia for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) following the arrival of her medication.
News of the arrival of Zolgensma medication was posted on the Asya Bebek Facebook group page, set up by volunteers to support the Turkish Cypriot baby.
Baby Asya, as is she now known, started her medication and her parents are delighted over the arrival of the medication.
“We are about to take our medicine any moment now. “We hope that every family who has a child fighting disease has access to medication.
“Believe us when we say it is like we are living a dream. We love you,” was the message Asya’s parents sent out through the Facebook page.
According to her father, Ozan, Asya, who is turning one year on Tuesday, was said to be the first child ever to receive the treatment in Cyprus.
Zolgensma is a one-off gene therapy used to treat children with SMA under two years old, with the whole treatment costing around EUR 2 mln.
The Republic of Cyprus will cover the cost of the treatment after the government intervened to offer the child the treatment she needed.
Baby Asya was admitted to Makarios Hospital in Nicosia on 27 September after being flown in from a hospital in Ankara, where she was on a different treatment.
The plight of Baby Asya has united the Turkish Cypriot community in recent months.
A massive campaign tried to raise the money needed, but it could not reach the necessary amount.
The issue was brought to the attention of Foreign Minister Nicos Christodoulides and President Nicos Anastasiades by Sener Elcil, the general secretary of the elementary teachers’ union KTOS.
Elcil had sent them letters asking for the Republic to intervene to save the girl’s life.
SMA is a group of hereditary diseases that progressively destroys motor neurons in the brain stem and spinal cord that control essential skeletal muscle activity such as speaking, walking, breathing, and swallowing, leading to muscle weakness and atrophy.
Baby Asya is suffering from Type 1 SMA, with her family and physicians hopeful that the treatment will end the child’s suffering.