I am sure most of you have heard the term ROI or Return On Investment.  This applies to a lot of different things, including investments themselves.  Everyone wants to know “If I invest in this stock, what will I gain in return?”  Even when hiring a new employee a company will want to know what their return on the investment in this new person will yield for the organization.  Any time there is money on the line, people want to know what they are going to get out of the risk they are taking.

But let’s talk about something else today, in particular, your ROF.  Return On Failure is not something I hear spoken about very often, but it is the secret to how the game of life is played.  When you were a baby, you tried to crawl and slowly figured it out.  Then you tried to walk for the first time and fell on your butt quickly.  And then you tried again and fell again.  But instinctively you knew this was something you had to learn to do.  You saw others doing it and intuitively understood that this was the next logical part of the process.  So, you tried again, and again until you could waddle across the room without falling down.  Your family likely applauded your efforts and encouraged you through all the wobbles and falls to get up and try again.  You were undeterred by your failures at trying to walk for the first time, so you continued on until you got it figured out.

THAT IS HOW LIFE WORKS

This is the perfect analogy for how things throughout the rest of your life should work.  Yes, there are times when you have tried at something enough times and failed with no real hope of improvement or success, and it will be time to move in another direction.  But the key takeaway here is that you need to try new things and keep trying, not to give up with one fall (failure).  The Return On Failure approach is encapsulated within this thought shared by TV Host Steve Harvey that I heard the other day:

“Within every failure you receive two things: a lesson and a blessing.  You have to stick around long enough to understand both of these things.  If you quit and run away, you will miss the blessing of the experience you gained and the lesson of what you did wrong but now know not to do again.”

So true.  Far too many people are afraid to try something new in the first place, and then there are plenty of people who stick their proverbial toe in the pool but change their mind about entering the water.  When you add up these two categories, think of how large of a percentage of people that includes.  Those of us who are brave enough (crazy enough?) to dive into something new and try to make it work seem to be in rarified air.  I am not suggesting that you take out a second mortgage on your home and quit your day job to start a business.  Even to me, that sounds crazy.  Maybe reckless is a better word than crazy, but either way I am not suggesting that you throw caution to the wind and jump into the deep end of the pool immediately.  You need to be strategic about how you approach a risky new venture of any kind.  You don’t start a new hobby of hiking by climbing Mt Everest first, and you don’t quit your day job to become a public speaker.  Ease your way into it…

BUT… you need to formulate an idea, set a plan in place and get to work.  You need to ASSUME you are going to fail, and then you are going to keep trying.  You should plan for failures to be part of the process, just like when you were learning to walk.  Now of course if you are starting a business venture, you need to understand that unless you have unlimited sources of money, you can only have so many failures before you run out of time (and money).  Keeping a business alive for the first couple of years is like having the business on life support.  Any little thing can derail the whole thing.  If you have investors involved in the process, now you have way more pressure for success.  Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart, been there done that.  And I am not going to do it again at this stage of life.  I have too much to lose and too many years behind me to live like that again.

The best piece of life advice I could impart to you would be simply to not let failure deter you from anything you do.  Ask that person out again, try to make the team next season, throw your hat in the ring for that promotion again.  It is how successful people get that; they fail and fail again but they keep trying.  Best case scenario, you fail forward.  But failure is a part of the game, so the sooner you get used to that the better off you will be.  You are not good at anything you are new to, and even the things you do a lot of doesn’t mean you are failure-proof.  Take golf for example, a scratch golfer will shoot even par more often than not, but they will still be able to tell you about every poor swing and missed putt.  Life is very similar.  And if it wasn’t, wouldn’t you be bored to tears?

As always, I wish you luck in your endeavors.