Lesson 12

It’s crazy to me that there is only one week left in the semester. I have learned and grown so much as I have focused on the skills necessary to be a successful entrepreneur. This week was probably one of my favorites because it showed the importance of failing forward. In business and in life we all make mistakes, we all have disappointments and at times we all fail. This week we focused on learning from those mistakes, and failures and getting back up with every blow. Some of the most respected and successful people face many failures and disappointments on the road to success. The biggest difference is they learned from those failures and disappointments, got up and persisted on. This week I learned a lot more about Walt Disney. When he was young he was fired from a newspaper in Kansas City because they said he lacked imagination. He then started his own cartoon production company but ended up going bankrupt. He moved to California and started another animation company, where he created a cartoon character for Universal by the name of Oswald the Rabbit. Due to the contract Walt Disney signed he soon found out he didn’t own the rights to the cartoon he had created. Universal hired his animators out from under him and continued the cartoon without him. It was on the train ride home after learning he had basically lost his company that he created Mickey Mouse.  He faced many more blows throughout his life but he never gave up, he kept pushing forward. Many other people faced similar challenges. Michael Jordan was cut from his High School Basketball team and was told he would never be good at basketball; J.K. Rawlings was rejected by many publishers before she found one willing to publish the Harry Potter series. The one thing in common is that they didn’t give up and they learned so much along the way.

Failure has such a negative connotation in our society and people have become to see failure as a horrible thing rather than a learning experience. The one thing I really learned is that failure is not bad if you are able to learn and grow from it. I have thought back on mistakes and failures my dad and I have had with our company. Instead of seeing it as an opportunity to learn and grow I wrote it off as someone else’s fault. This is a common reaction but it stunts growth and keeps me from reaching my full potential. As I thought about failure I thought about the plan of salvation. We were sent her by God to make mistakes face disappointment and fail. That was part of his plan for us to learn and grow. Failure is such an important part of growth and if we don’t view it that way we don’t take full advantage of the opportunity to learn. This is something I needed to hear and hopefully I will be able to use these things to be a more successful business man in the future.