How often do you fail?

If you don’t fail regularly, you’re not trying hard enough.

If you’re hunkering down and playing it safe in this market, ironically, it will likely take you longer to find your way back to prosperity and growth.

Why?

What worked before isn’t working today.  What will work today is likely going to be something new, something undiscovered, something you don’t currently know how to do.

If you expect you’ll find that breakthrough idea by doing what’s safe, what’s known, you’ll probably be waiting for quite awhile.

But if you don’t mind failing, and either work in or can create a culture of failure (as a means of learning and innovating) within your organization, then you have the context in which to take risks, try new things, fail a good percentage of the time, but constantly measure, learn and improve from those failures so that your path to innovation and growth is much shorter.

Look over your past month of work.  How often have you failed?  What have you learned from that failure?

If you can’t come up with many examples, think of things you might have done, or tried, but were afraid to do so.

Are they worth trying now?