Failure: The Greatest Teacher

Week of 11/30 - 12/6

This week, my team and I pushed out our first customer survey for our startup as well as conduct interviews with other customers. If I told you that it was that easy, you would probably call me a big liar. Through our customer surveys, we experienced some success however, we experienced more failure than on this path. Society deemed that failure was a word to bring you pain and suffering throughout your journey and be your ending point, however, an entrepreneur's greatest teacher is a failure. Udai Yadla once said that "Failure is the greatest teacher" and that we should look positively at it instead of negatively. To me, failure is just another way of saying that I've made progress and challenged myself to take these risks in order to better myself. This concept of failure has also applied to my ISM class where I would fail to give a good speech or fail to interview someone in the proper manner, however, that only got me to practice my skills more instead of accepting the fact that I failed once and I should give up.

What does that mean for me going forward? Failure will allow me to walk paths I never have before and see the reality of things. For an entrepreneur, failure is your best friend whether you like it or not and it is your choice on how to deal with that failure. In terms of the failure, we encountered with customer surveys and interviews, my team and I will look back on what questions we need to ask in our surveys as well as analyze customer behavior with our survey. This won't solve the problem right away, however, it is somewhere we can start and work back up from. No matter how hard your life may be at times, it is best if you learn from that experience rather than end your journey right there.