I failed my child, and became better for it

I was failing at the one resolution I had in 2023: to stop yelling at my daughter.

So I asked for her help.

I asked her to give me a sticker for every day that I made it without yelling at her.

On day 2 she floored me with a simple sentence:

“It’s ok if you yell, because you still love me.”

I’m sure parents reading this are having visceral reactions.

The biggest takeaway for me from the experience was what could happen when I asked for help even from someone I didn’t expect to be able to help much.

And, that I saw the true strength and potential in our relationship even with my struggles.

My daughter also decided to join my effort and try not to yell either - so there were two stickers on many days!

More than a year later I’m fully, imperfectly living it forward, having gained so much more than my original goal.

Lessons of Failure in Entrepreneurship

So what does this have to do with entrepreneurship and building new things?

Most people focus on the great thing they’re creating as an entrepreneur.

Day in, day out, you’re fixated on that goal with grit and passion.

You likely don’t think of the role of failure for leaders or the teams you lead.

And that’s a missed opportunity.

Failure is an impetus to look for new directions, to make a change, to cut short inefficiency. It’s a signal, not something to be avoided at all costs. As Steven Bartlett and Thomas Edison remind us well:

With mastery of failure, you become much more practiced at not being fixated on the wins or on things going stably and well most of the time.

In fact, your default state actually becomes much more agile, moving from failures and misses quickly into solving the emergent problems as they crop up.

And the only way to live like this is to develop a mindset where you derive most of your satisfaction from the hard work, process development, and wayfinding.

This is the mindset shift you need to foster and model for your team members as well.

There is no path of perfection or avoiding mistakes, because in the vast unknown of entrepreneurship, every path forward guarantees half of your choices are wrong.

Failures become the friction that calluses your hands as you climb the mountain face.

It’s a myth that entrepreneurs need to be perfect, the visionary leader who makes all the right decisions.

The reality is the opposite - with strong ventures and new solutions best birthed by villages full of our work, social, and family bonds.

And just as I gained far more from asking for help from my daughter, you can lead with humility and fearlessly frame failures as opportunities for the team to rally together and solve big problems.

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