Failure: Why Taking Risks and Failing Is the Path to Success

Have you experienced a failure in your business (or your life)?

Would you like to discover how to turn failures into success and real growth?

For this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast, I'll explore why failure is important and the lessons I've learned from a major failure that happened to me this year.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

You'll discover the importance of failure in your work and your life, reasons you should embrace failure, and how the lessons and discoveries you make can help you succeed.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
Listen Now
You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Embracing Failure
Why a show on failure?

As C.S. Lewis said, "Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement." As we fail, we are pointed in a direction. We learn a lot from failures because they can help us get better.

We focus so much on success stories and what works that we often overlook the unmentioned road of failure, challenges, errors and mistakes that inevitably led to every single one of those success stories.

In 2014, I had a really big failure. In fact, it was my biggest failure ever. Many people don't know about it and this show is the first time I've spoken about it publicly. I would like to share what went wrong, the lessons I learned and the importance of failure to your business, marketing and life.

Listen to the show to hear why failure is so important to your business and life.

The importance of failure and reasons to embrace it

Henry Ford offers this great quote: "The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing." The path that we go down is meant to have challenges and mistakes. It's what strengthens us and makes us better.

Here are three reasons you should embrace failure:

1. It's part of the entrepreneur's journey. Whether or not you consider yourself an entrepreneur or business owner, this lesson applies to everyone. Nearly every definition of "entrepreneur" focuses on the word risk. Risk is at the core of all business breakthroughs and success.

With risk comes failure. It's inevitable and it's okay.

2. Nothing ventured. Nothing gained. If you're not willing to float a new idea for your company, experiment with your marketing or launch a new venture, the opportunity that sits in front of that idea will never manifest. It will never come true. You'll never really grow.

Social Media Examiner is my third major business venture in the last 18 years. It followed a design agency and a white paper writing consultancy, both of which were very successful and have since shut down.

In 2009, I started the media company which you now know as Social Media Examiner.

Along the way, I tried and failed at a lot of things. You'll hear four examples of my terrible failures, and why I didn't let these failures stop me or get me down.

3. New discoveries are born in the ashes of failure. The most important reason to embrace failure is that it makes way for new opportunities to grow into awesome things. There's no better time than right after you crash and burn to reflect on what you've done wrong and really learn from it.

I love this quote from Zig Ziglar: "It's not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts." You have to try, experiment, fail and do it over and over again.

In summary, failure is a necessary part of the process of making new discoveries.

Listen to the show to discover how two of America's most famous businessmen never gave up on their discoveries and why their persistence paid off.

My story

In July 2013, I launched My Kids' Adventures,