The Only Successes In Business Are Failures

I continually read articles on BN that say, 'people fail in network marketing because' and then they give their views on why people stop being network marketers. In fact metwork marketing is no different than small businesses in general in this respect.

This article is about the misuse of the words failure and success when talking about how to be successful at anything, and I mean anything you really want to do. The statistic that 90% of people fail at network marketing is a serious misunderstanding of the idea of failure. The correct statistic is that 90% of people who start a small business 'quit' or 'stop'. Quitting and stopping are different from failure. People may stop or quit because of a failure they experienced which is different.

The correct statistic for failure is that 100% of people in network marketing have failed. The difference between those who go on to succeed and those who go on to stop is their response to failure. Failure is good for business, in fact it is essential. Apple used to (not sure if they still do) give employees who failed a prize as long as they learned from the failure.

Tim Sales has an excellent video about this. He gives the scenario of when he went on a golfing holiday. He was new to golfing, bought all new golfing equipment and was looking forward to improving his golfing. When he went on the holiday he failed to be as good as he expected to be. When he got home he put all the equipment away and never played golf again. So he stopped playing golf as opposed to being a golf failure.

Failure is how we learn, this is the case from when we are babies and throughout our lives. If you have never failed then you have never tried to do something. I defy anyone to say the first time they were being taught something they did it right the first time. It's just the way our brains are wired. To expand our skill set we have to try, fail, try again until we succeed.

The best thing you can do in order to succeed in any business is to get into the mindset that 'failures' will happen and it is your response to that failure which will determine whether you 'quit' or succeed. Therefore you role as a Leader is to support people through their failures and help avoid the person quitting.