New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

During U.S. Army Ranger training, we were trained in hand-to-hand combat, including how to fight with knifes and how to defeat an opponent with a knife (or unfixed bayonet).  We “fought” with rubber knives which helped us gain expertise without a lot of physical damage to each other, although a good stab carried a sufficient a level of pain to motivate one to fight hard and skillfully in order to avoid another one.  I will never forget the instructor’s advice when he told us to expect to get cut and shed some blood when we were in a knife fight.  He warned us to not to be surprised by either.

 

Entrepreneurship is a lot like knife fighting in that we should enter an entrepreneurial pursuit with the full knowledge that we will have some failures – we just want to work hard to have more successes than failures.

 

The fear of failure keeps many would-be entrepreneurs from stepping out in faith to try their hand at an entrepreneurial venture, but as we’ve learned as Christians, fear is often the opposite of faith.  Entrepreneurs will fail in various forms, but we do not need to fear it when it comes.  We should expect it, embrace it and learn from it.

 

I’ve excerpted below some questions and answers with an expert on failure, Nicholas Hall, who has chronicled entrepreneurial failures for several years:

 

Q: What can you learn from failure that you can't from success?

A: Nobody wants to be a failure. At the same time, there's no better education for an entrepreneur than failure. You can go to Harvard or Stanford, but that's not where you get your education. That's where you build relationships, but it's not what teaches you to have whatever it takes to get through whatever you need to go through to build a startup.

Q: Can you have success without failure?

A: No, I don't think so. I just don't know anyone, even if their first startup company was successful, that didn't bang their head plenty of times. Many went through failures in order to find success. Even the Microsofts and the Apples all had intermittent failures along the way.

You can have success day in and out, but I've found that to sustain the energy and enthusiasm that's going to get you farther, you have to deal with more no's than yes's. You need both, there's no question. But plenty of people [experiencing] startup failures understand that failure is a part of the process -- they just hope they can skip it. It's not like you go out and say, "I'll have two failures and then have success."

Q: What's the biggest lesson you learned from failing?

A: How costly it is if you take yourself out of the game. It's like what they say about the stock market -- that you don't know when the gains will come, but you get luckier often if you stay in the game vs. trying to figure out when to get in the game. If you fail, you have to bounce back.

Q: But once burned, aren't most people hesitant to try again?

A: Unfortunately, that's the way human beings tend to be wired. We take something from the past, tried that, and it didn't work. There's a tendency over time for what's possible to be achieved to be diminished. [People see] the future as getting smaller and limited. It really depends literally on how you're going to wear those glasses. Are they rose-colored or dark shades? Are you going to see what you have gone through as something to empower you or to limit you? No is temporary, yes is temporary, it's all temporary.

Q: What's the biggest hurdle to bouncing back?

A: Self-doubt. All of the biggest hurdles are internal.

Q: Does it ever become easier to fail?

A: What does become easier is to bounce back. That's really the most important thing -- to get back up at the plate and to start to understand over time it's just part of the process. And that you have to stay in the game, you don't have more time. You've got right now. The next second is a crap shoot.

 

- Excerpted from Business Week