How can you develop a growth mindset to learn from your start-up failures?

Failure in entrepreneurship and the start-up world is absolutely inevitable. The sooner you learn it, the more room for flexibility and growth you have. Seeing setbacks is a path to mastering everything you see as a hurdle in your business. To top it all off, the amount of persistence it requires is almost inappropriate for a healthy balance to keep yourself running. But it is what it is, you have to disregard logical reasoning to be vicious to an extent that you're almost blinded by your vision. Blinded to an extent that it feels like your religion, and it won't work unless you're unable to put your mind, heart and faith into it.

Has nothing to do with mindset, it has to do with the learning that you get and how it informs your future decision making. The BIGGEST and most BLATANT failures have informed and driven my GREATEST successes. Failing is part of the process, condition yourself to understand and learn from it.

The potency of the pruning process is intangible wealth that tangibly impacts. Challenges are data points to catalog and plot a legend for becoming legendary against the visionary goals set. The speed to get to them may aid in adjusting quicker. Not all "runways" and "vessels" are the same in aiding for taking off. The resources and timing can play a role. Embracing the perpetual pruning that comes at each level of attainment is readiness applied. This is often anchored well. When entrepreneurs recognize early the value in growth mindset to take the lessons and learn from them. Testing and adjusting while leading anchored in wisdom of the heart cultivates an environment to mirror when projects are lead by other teams with this blueprint

Startups are hard. Like chewing glass hard. People who haven't started them have no idea how difficult it truly is to be successful. The traditional, financial definition of success of your startup is more a reaction to the market saying: "you've made or provided something we want, at massive scale." Think of yourself more as an economic behavioral scientist running experiments. You have to pursue non-consensus and right opportunities to really succeed as a startup, which means many people are likely to doubt you along the way, especially at the beginning. Hopefully you've identified something that's likely to be right that others just haven't seen yet.

What I teach my students is to Embrace Resilience and Perseverance: Failure can be emotionally challenging, but developing resilience is crucial for navigating through difficult times. Cultivate a positive attitude, acknowledge your emotions, and practice self-care to maintain your mental well-being. Surround yourself with a supportive network of friends, mentors, or fellow entrepreneurs who can provide encouragement and guidance. Remember that perseverance is a key trait of successful entrepreneurs.

With a growth mindset, feedback leads to breakthroughs. Some tips: 1) Ask customers candidly why they churned or refused to purchase. Listen openly. 2) Debrief thoroughly with your team on what went well and what didn't. 3) Reach out to mentors and investors for an objective third-party perspective. 4) Reflect on your own leadership. How could you improve? 5) Seek feedback broadly - don't just ask those likely to flatter you. 6) Focus on learnings, not emotions. Feedback is a gift, not a judgment. 7) Absorb insights humbly. Defensiveness blocks growth. 8) Identify patterns in feedback to prioritize areas to improve. 9) Co-create solutions with your team. Collaboration builds commitment.

It's essential to foster an ecosystem that thrives on constructive feedback. Encourage your peers, mentors, and stakeholders to provide candid input, creating a supportive culture of growth and improvement.

When you are soliciting feedback, check your ego at the door. Don't defend your idea/position, their view of your service or product is critically important. After you've processed the feedback, the next step is ultimately your decision.

In an infinite game, we don't play to win but instead to get better at playing. If one starts to think about winning and losing as a startup, the results become binary and finite. It's easy to default to a finite mindset since we are surrounded by legacy ventures who exist in low growth environments where the economic pies they are fighting over are well defined and zero sum. If the pies are not growing, if I win, you lose and vice versa. But entrepreneurs, by their nature, exist in high growth environments. They are birthing new economic pies out of nothing, and discovering the future as it happens. The journey of growth and exploration here is as infinite as the horizon of possible futures is infinite. We must cultivate this mindset.

In my experience, feedbacks are tricky, as depicted by the behaviours of the founders. One should be highly skilled in using the feedback, otherwise you can develop hindsights, and you will be stuck. One way to avoid such trap is to listen to both types of feedbacks, both positibe and negative.

Don’t just look at results. Praise the effort behind them. Applaud team members for their hard work, dedication and willingness to try new things. Recognize late nights, creative thinking and perseverance in the face of challenges. Effort shows commitment to growth and learning. It will lead to better outcomes over time. Reward intelligent risks and innovations that don’t pan out as planned. Analyze what went right and what can improve. Don’t just focus on what failed. Keep morale up by highlighting progress made, not just distance still to go. With a growth mindset, effort counts more than outcomes. Setbacks are lessons, not endings. By celebrating effort, you encourage continual improvement. You build resilience to keep trying.

A constant theme I heard in a course was "Be Successful". This echo all around makes it really difficult for people to celebrate failures. Effort should be celebrated for sure. The courage to take a new path should be celebrated even more!

Perfection can be a stifling goal. Instead, prioritize the process itself. By focusing on the journey and the incremental improvements along the way, you can create an environment that values continuous growth and learning.

Shift your focus from solely celebrating outcomes to valuing and acknowledging the effort invested. Recognize that it's effort that fuels growth and learning, reflecting dedication, passion, and persistence.

I'd say it is important to have a small group of supportive friends and family that you can share your efforts and successes with. Entrepreneurship its self is a lonely journey therefore having a group that you can rely is important.

Looking outside yourself is powerful for growth. Connect with others who have been through start-up struggles and success. Keep learning from others while creating your own path. Learn from their stories and advice, especially how they overcame failures. Gain insights into their mindsets, methods, and lessons learned. Avoid comparing yourself or simply copying them. Appreciate their journey while understanding yours is unique. Adapt their strategies and tips to fit your specific context and goals. Blend their hard-won experience with your own vision. Growth comes from openness to learn while staying true to your purpose. Let others expand your thinking so you can keep developing your greatest strengths.

We should try to be intentional, and deliberate in what we are trying to learn from others, from a particular experience, stint or role. That does not mean we ask for others to share with us their experiences or tips endlessly, neither does it mean lining up 10 mentors thinking that 10 is better than 1, nor endlessly reading books after books. Prior to engaging a mentor, taking up a new role or starting on a new chapter, think about what is it that we are trying to gain/learn/experience by going through this, and what quantify as objective achieved. Being conscious and intentional of it, guides us in better internalizing the value and be always aware that we are still on track, instead of wondering around aimlessly or lost in transition.

I have found that people do not share their failures. Obviously it doesn't feel nice going around posting about your failures but where you do find people occasionally discussing failure is small industry specific networks or local groups. Feel free to research and join some groups in your area. Here you will find people who are willing to share their failures which you can learn from.

I think 80/20 is important to keep in mind here. In my experience, 80% of my startup knowledge has come from 20% of my friends with experience starting companies of their own. Two ways I've done this so far: 1. Monthly CEO peer group with founders within 2-3 years of my company stage. These are well-structured, consistent dialogues to keep one another accountable and problem solve together. 2. Identify mentors along the next 5 to 10 years of your potential career arc. A lot can change for founders in that time, but having a peer and 1-2 mentors at farther stages of their career gives you something tangible to aim for. Be specific and intentional with those interactions, especially those "stretch" mentors (h/t Ann Hiatt for framing)

There's no better place to learn from others experiences than a close circle of entrepreneur friends. Build your own circle and nurture it so everybody can share ideas, experiences, challenges and failures without criticism and charged with friendly and constructive open minds. Alike any other personal relationship, TRUST is the key element that you have to cultivate.

Failure is common when trailblazing. The most successful entrepreneurs dust themselves off after setbacks and grow wiser. Failure provides a chance to learn. View setbacks as data, not defeat. Ask: What went wrong? Identify the root causes through introspection. How can I improve? Develop new skills, get advice, change strategies. What would I do differently? Update your plans and approach. What insights did I gain? Failure teaches hard lessons. Extract the wisdom. How can I bounce back stronger? Allow failure to strengthen resilience. What opportunities does this open up? Endings enable new beginnings.

Closing my business down was the best thing I’ve ever done… however that’s only because in running a business you learn, develop and grow so many transferable skills. Yes, the business did not succeed - but no, that doesn’t mean it was a failure. Every outcome is a learning opportunity ????

I have loved the quote, "it takes a decade to become an overnight success." Those quiet moments of building, rebuilding, understanding what isn't working, and pivoting...those are the building blocks for the success our startups seek. You can't buy that knowledge– it often is earned through lived experience. I have been working on my social enterprise for over a decade– I know we wouldn't have the opportunities, ideas, and team members that are emerging had we opted to abandon ship earlier. Rest when tired (or feeling disillusioned), but I encourage finding a way to keep taking one more step forward.

My first startup failed after 2+ years of long hard work! It was a humbling moment for someone who had not really tasted signifcant failure in his career. After a few weeks of going through the usual cycle of pain, depression and disappointment, I realized that I had learnt a lot of "What not to dos". Today, I use that learning to teach founders how to avoid failures. Failure has opened me to multiple opportunities to work with accelerators, meet with smart founders and many consulting assignments. What I did not realize at that painful time of failure is that it would open a new career opportunity. While I am aware that this may not work for everyone, this is my way of saying that failure is not permanent. You will get another chance!

Success is achieved when you stand as a lone wolf, self-reliant in your journey. It's in these moments of individuality that you can confront failures, learn from them, and grow. When you rely on others, it's easy to place blame rather than seeking solutions, which can hinder your progress.

Start-ups are not for everyone. They are full of chaos, unknowns, and tremendous learning from failures. Start-ups are all about testing and learning; so a growth mindset is the only way to approach one. And this should be done as a team - discuss what’s working and what’s not, celebrate every victory no matter how tiny, learn from each other. If the entire team doesn’t embrace the growth mindset, likely the start-up will fail. But even if that happens, so long as you have the growth mindset, you will take lessons from your time there to wherever you go next.

You have to understand 95% of startups fail. You have to know that going in. Failures will lead you to success. My first startup went up in flams but the lessons I learned helped me scale and exit the next one. You have to look longterm and accept failure.

Failure in the biotech start up arena has been a relatively common occurrence of late. While it is comforting to commiserate with others on this shared experience, it's still essential to learn and understand what could have made the venture more successful. These endeavors should focus on testing a hypothesis, and even if fundraising didn't afford the opportunity to conduct the intended experiment, you should still ask prospective investors if the share the vision of the mission's objectives. Don't assume that if the investment climate was better, you'd easily secure the funding needed to move forward. Always seek honest feedback on what the company is trying to accomplish.

I have failed 2 start ups: What I realized is that most start ups don't fail due to the lack of an individuals capability, but from the lack of speed to execution (action on things that are broken). The ultimate demise of a startup founder is not in failing to keep a company alive but in the inability to have the self awareness around what they did wrong and could have done better. To develop a growth mindset 1 should ask 4 simple questions: 1: what did I do wrong 2: what did I do right 3: what mistakes I must avoid 4: what actions I must take This framework will give you a perspective on how to execute in the next round of your fight. Remember an entrepreneurs journey is like a bout. You can lose rounds, but still win the fight.

Absolutely. As an entrepreneur and franchise owner, I've experienced my fair share of ups and downs. The coast of Maine taught me the value of patience, while the dynamic pace of Nashville instilled a drive for innovation. With each setback in my business, I leaned into my growth mindset. I remember one summer when a venture I was incredibly passionate about fell through. It was tempting to wallow in the disappointment. Instead, I gathered my team, sought feedback, and we dove into understanding what went wrong. We celebrated the effort we had put in, even though the outcome wasn't what we expected. The key was never to let failures define me but to let them refine me.

View failure as feedback, not an indictment of your worth or abilities. Stay positive. Analyze what went wrong objectively. Look for root causes instead of blaming. Learn from mistakes. Study others’ failures too. Extract the lessons. Identify areas for self-improvement. What skills do you need to build? Who can coach you? Draw inspiration from iconic entrepreneurs who succeeded after failing. Reframe the narrative. Failure is not the end, it’s just part of your entrepreneurial journey.

Failure is inevitable in your startup journey. My failures: 1) $10K & 1 year for 2 products → thrown in the bin 2) Started our company blog in 2017 → got 0 traffic 3) Began SEO in 2019 → no success for 1.5 yrs What matters is if you can learn & adapt and it shouldn't affect the way you ship or launch things. I think every founder is worried about success/failure and rightly so. But when it becomes an obsession or constant thought, it just takes a heavy toll on everything including work, health, etc. The acceptance that failure is just part of the journey.

I think it is important to analyze your failures for what potentially caused it to result in a failure. Make a note of it and watch for similar indicators in your future endeavors. This will help you avoid the same mistake again.

You learn the most from your failures; not from your success. This is a bitter pill to swallow, but failure will tell you everything you need to know about your strengths, weaknesses, and market realities. If you look at failure on a day-to-day basis, it might be overwhelming, since you feel as if there are more failures than wins. But if you take a 2-3 year window, you'll see that you've won more often than failed. Remember that a growth mindset is always long-term. Build discipline and stick to a routine/process. Avoid short-term gain and flashy new things. Good luck out there!

An amazing tech company I worked with had a whole wall of 'failures' displayed. * People who worked on 'failed' products were celebrated * Learnings were shared widely * Effort was remembered and appreciated. Consider how you use your physical environment to tell stories and show what you value.