“No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.“
Napoleon Hill

“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
Michael Jordan

“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
C. S. Lewis

Failure can be quite the problem. And the fear of it can be paralyzing.

So what can you do to motivate yourself to take a chance, to overcome possible failure and to use it to your advantage?

Here are a few timeless words of advice.

Redefine failure.

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Michael Jordan

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett

“An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.”
Charles F. Kettering

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
Henry Ford

Failure is something that may need to be redefined within your mind. It’s not something to attach too much meaning to. But people do though.

If you look at successful people then you see that they have an abundance mentality. They know there are new chances and opportunities if they fail. And that there are lessons to be learned from failures. Those failures are necessary to achieve success. Without them you don’t get the feedback that is essential for your future success. And by making mistakes for yourself you get experience. Reading about someone else’s mistake or knowledge isn’t the same thing as experiencing it for yourself.

Failure is a learning experience. It can help you. But first you have to try. Without trying you aren’t going anywhere.

Accept it.

“A lot of new obstacles are coming, a lot of new feelings are coming, … I’m just taking it for what it is and learning from the mistakes I had this year.”
Michael Phelps

Acceptance is very helpful when you make a mistake or fail. You can resist the failure/mistake and beat yourself up. This creates a lot of inner suffering and new resistance. And that makes it emotionally harder to keep going and trying since you associate mistakes and failure with so much pain.

Acceptance is a more useful approach. It can help you to release yourself from slipping into old, conditioned patterns of self-hurting behaviour when something “negative” happens. You can instead see a situation such as a failure with fresh eyes.

And instead of beating yourself up or feeling sorry for yourself you can see the situation in a more positive and constructive way. Like for instance by looking for the lessons or the positive stuff in your failure. One of the greatest things about acceptance is that it can give you freedom from your old behaviour patterns and “you acting as you have always done”.

Take responsibility.

“A man may fail many times but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”
John Burroughs

A very good point. As long as you own your mistakes and failures you can still learn. You can still adapt and find a better course to take.

But when you start blaming everyone or everything else then you don’t just look like a bitter failure. You also give you power away. The power over what you have learned so far and the power take action and do something. When you give that away it’s like you are sitting down on your hands and just giving up. You don’t have any power to move forward anymore.

Build inner strength.

“Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities”
Napoleon Hill

Failure and rejection won’t kill you. You may think that it does and it may feel like it almost will just after it has happened. But it won’t. Instead it makes you stronger. It makes you more confident in yourself. Because over time, by piling up the failures you truly understand that this isn’t such a big deal. You have handled it before and if it comes up in the future you know that you can handle it again.

By failing you build inner strength and gain understanding of how things work. This is crucial to be able to handle bigger responsibilities in life and to be able to grow.

Top achievers are not perfectionists,
they are improvisers.

– Douglas Vermeeren

Every decision you make in every moment
is determining the habits that you’ll have
today and tomorrow and the next day and
the outcomes that you’ll have in your life.

– Marci Shimoff

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When you open up your mind, when you set
a goal, when you focus on something, your
mind becomes open to all the possibilities
that are out there, all the opportunities.
You have opportunities every day,
thousands of them but you see them.

– Morris ‘the Miracle Man” Goodman

A couple of weeks ago I asked the question “The purpose of a company is …” in several LinkedIn and other social media groups; this is a short selection of the many comments:

….to add meaning to the lives of those who work for the company…..
…to contribute positively to the lives of those who come into contact with it at all its interfaces….

“When you join a company, you need to understand the purpose of the company. The purpose of the company should excite you. Explore and find the purpose, go along with it and enjoy it. If you don’t conform to the norms of the company, then you will be ejected”

I had the good fortune of meeting the business philosopher Charles Handy a couple years ago.

He told me the story (that he has often told) of gently provoking his MBA students to think beyond results, growth, and profit. He challenged them to ask themselves, What are we, the Company, building? Are we making this world a better place for our employees (and their families), our customers, our investors, and our communities and neighbors?

In his own words:

“The companies that survive longest are the one’s that work out what they uniquely can give to the world, not just growth or money, but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.”

…to design (timely) visions and produce meaningful offers
…to create structures for creative and freelancer-based employment where sharing is like facebook – simple and fair!
…to combine economic AND social aspects – means not to focus on profits as the only value…

The purpose of a company is to satisfy the needs of customers, the needs of the members of the organization, the needs of the ownership and the needs of society. (Society is usually represented by the government.) The reason all four groups need to be satisfied is that the withdrawal of support from any of the groups will destroy the company.

For me the Purpose of a company is to remain aligned to its goals and to focus on continuous development along with taking care of the needs of its surroundings and adapting well to them and in turn making the maximum positive impact to the society. This will automatically promote growth of the company and would help it fulfill all its roles.

If “purpose” means “why companies exist”, then i believe it is different for every company!
Different people go into business for different reasons.

Richard Branson, Sergi Brin, etc seem to have chosen to have fun and be trouble-makers in established market places, while the founders of the “1 percent for the planet” had mostly environmental sustainability in mind…

If i try to package it into a thought-provoking definition:

“the purpose of a company is the sum of the purposes of its people/employees, where the opinions of the founders & leaders weigh somehow more than those of the people at the bottom of the pyramid”.

According to me the Purpose of a Company ( Many times is a collective “purpose of the people who run it ) However, Here is what I would like it to be

1. To Create “wealth” and “Wellbeing” for all the stakeholders .
2. To be a catalyst in bringing about large scale “Social” change through encouraging and inspiring its people to also wear the hat of a Social Entrepreneur.
3. Bring about equanimity.

I suppose it depends on who you ask.

From a general perspective, Peter Drucker said: “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” From a legal/government perspective, a company purpose statement is simply an explanation of the types of activities you engage in to earn money. To the financial sector, the purpose of a company is to make profits and increase shareholder value. If you own or are the CEO the company, there could be a number of other purposes: to provide you with a certain standard of living, fulfill a life’s mission, provide a valuable product or service. As an employee, it may be simply to allow you to pay your bills, own a home, etc.

The purpose of a company is to create value to every party within its territory.

I think the purpose of a company is to strive for excellence in order to be able to set Benchmarks in whichever field it is involved in. It would use the initial financial investment by the investors to innovate a product/service which is not only efficient, but profitable as well.