Could failure be your first step to success. Too?

“To be successful, you have to develop an appetite for failure.” is the personal motto of Simeon Hurwitz, one half of the dynamic duo known as the formidable, Hurwitz Brothers, owners of the Hurwitz Farming enterprise in Mpumalanga.

At the culmination of our second FNB Agriculture Academy Mindshift Navigating the Credit Process Programme, held at the Hurwitz Farm in April 2023, we had the honour of celebrating as 18 more delegates successfully completed the FNB Advanced Agriculture Programme.

An intensive 6-month period of online training, writing, planning, organisation, and presentation concluded with a rewarding peer review event, and graduation ceremony held at the Bullring, on the Hurwitz Farm.

Delegates were treated to a tour of the farm and got to experience “agriculture” on a practical level and pose agric related questions to the Hurwitz Brothers.

It was during this tour, whilst viewing feedlots, quarantine bays, bull pens and feed mixing sheds, with the feel of grass under our feet, and the smell of freshly churned soil, that the gregarious nature of the Hurwitz brothers elicited a powerful discussion about farming, the agriculture environment, and the fear of failing.

As people, we often hold ourselves back from taking risks, starting new projects, calling a potential stakeholder to seek out mutually beneficial partnerships, or aggressively pursuing our desires, for improvement, for fear of failure.

Failure forces us to confront our own limitations. It exposes our vulnerabilities. And it often leads to a period of indecision and procrastination. We waste mental energy ruminating on how we should have or could have. We shrink or play small, or we bunker down and wait for the storm to pass.

But what if, we do develop an appetite for failure?

Does it mean we look forward to failing? That we subconsciously seek out failure or never take risks again.

Never, says Simeon Hurwitz.

It simply means that we stop viewing failure as defeat, as the end of the line, as the last word. We learn to accept failure as a steppingstone, to success.

We view failure as valuable feedback.

A gentle reminder that we must stop the urge to resist and embrace the setback. We take a deep breath, and we digest the unpleasant circumstances we find ourselves in.

We examine the data at hand, we learn the lessons, until it stimulates our appetite for success.

It is only then, we can change our belief, enthusiastically draft new plans, act, and discover the infinite possibilities. We gather the resources and invite the advisors and cheerleaders to join us on our journey to success. And we keep going, slowly building back our momentum, and claiming our success.

And when failure inevitably knocks on our door again, we gently remind ourselves that “to be successful, you have to develop an appetite for failure.”