Tag Archives: learn from your mistakes

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Why to Learn, What to Learn, and How to Learn Efficiently?

Everything starts with learning. If you want to do anything in your life, learning is the first and right approach that you need to take, because this is how you are going to discover your options and see if you like to take action on one of these options based on your passion and your gut feeling.

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Why to Learn?

Some of us learn to achieve a goal or vision, to do something the right way, to see our alternatives, to change our lives, to live better lives, to equip ourselves before opportunity knocks on our door, to better manage our risks so we’ll be more comfortable, to provide the best future for our kids or our family, to understand how we can be happier, to add value to a community or society, to help others, to change the world, to solve a problem, to save a species from disappearing, to help our country, to manage a company more efficiently, to raise our kids the right way, or to enhance our self-esteem.

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How Many Times Should You Be Broke In Your Life Before You Become a Successful Entrepreneur?

“Broke is temporary; poor is eternal.”  – Robert Kiyosaki

I’ve been broke many times. You know that time called “back to zero,” when you have nothing and sometimes you even owe thousands of dollars? Yes, I have been there many times, even after I made the transition to entrepreneurship. I call those times the “restart times” or, even better, “the restart time but be wiser this time.” It does not matter if you are back to zero after some failures; what really matters is what you have learned through that experience and that you know how to come back and stand on your feet.

Entrepreneurs who persevere survive in business - learn entrepreneurship tips directly from Ahmed Al Kiremli

One of the reasons I have been able to come back is that I learned how to invest. I continued to be broke for a couple of years, because whatever I was making I was reinvesting, testing new ideas or businesses. Of course, some failed and others worked, so I was always lacking in cash flow. Sometimes you need to be able to break into a certain level of cash flow to be able to finance your other projects, but when you are in an early stage of breakthrough, the restart times might repeat again and again until you find your own magic formula of success.

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Failure and the Price of a Mistake

The price of a mistake - Ahmed Al Kiremli

“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” – Bill Gates

Most people are scared of failure, especially when they make the transition to entrepreneur. Just like when they take an adventure, fear and failure are the biggest concerns of those people. But failure is the biggest tool of learning in life when you take action. When you fail, you learn – you just learn. After you fail, you start thinking, you take a break for a while, then you come back and try to correct your mistake.

If you have a certain project that you’re already working on, then usually it’s a kind of experiment. However, try as much as you can to calculate the possible failure’s reach, so you know where you’re heading and what the worst-case scenario is.

“Never test the depth of river with both feet.” – Warren Buffet

In some projects, the worst-case scenario may exceed what you have expected, especially if you don’t have certain experience. Sometimes something goes very wrong. However, trying to visualize and calculate the lowest possible point will give you some indication of where you are heading.

Sometimes when you look back at what you have done before and the challenges and failures that you have faced, you realize that it’s really what shaped you to succeed later. Failures will make you stronger with time and make you succeed in the future.

The biggest fear of most people is the fear of failing. I think that the most important thing to remember is to not quit your dream because you have failed before, because the biggest failure is quitting your dream. When you have started something, you have to either finish it or quit it after trying all the possible possibilities to make it work. Sometimes you try your best and the business still doesn’t work. However, you should know when to quit certain businesses to reduce damages when there is no hope of success so you can start over again somewhere else. Sometimes it’s good to fail fast and quit a project if you feel that it’s not going to work for you from the beginning so you can shift and focus on something else instead of wasting too much time and then quitting.

In some of my businesses, I felt the business at a certain point started declining. I tried my best to find solutions to buy time to test more methods to try and make the business work, but then I realized that there was no hope to continue based on the tools that I had at that point. In cases like this, you should shut it down and then start something totally new or try with another location for the same business idea that you tried before. But don’t forget to apply the lessons you learned from your failed project to the new project.

Most employees want to feel secure and don’t want to risk anything – I understand that. My advice to you is to minimize the risk by staying in your job while working on a part-time project. Try to dedicate one hour a day to learning something new. I assure you that if you put your mind into it, you will achieve something out of it, whether it’s a year or three years or five years from now.

Well some of you will say, “I don’t care. I work 9 to 5 and I drive 1-2 hours to come back home very tired and then I spend some time with my family and watch some TV.” That’s also completely fine, and I understand that, but still you can find 1-2 hours a day to work on something that will materialize in the future if you focus on it. If you are completely against investing 1-2 hours a day in something, then when you get fired from your job when you are 40 or 50 and you do not know what to do next, face the moment of truth and don’t nag about it.

You need to be responsible from the beginning and plan and think about what will happen in the future if you’re going to continue doing what you are doing now. Most people ignore everything; they don’t care. They just watch “American Idol” in the evening, sleep, and go to work. They keep nagging about the rat race that they are in, and for sure there is no solution for that unless you do something about it. And then they face the moment of truth when they lose their job and they don’t know what to do, because they have spent all their life just doing one thing and building only one column of income.

So you need to keep trying and understand that failure is the biggest teacher in life and business. It’s part of the game, part of the equation of success and of any business. When you approach any project or challenge in your life with this mindset that failure is an opportunity and it’s part of the game, then you will feel comfortable.

Share with us the story of your biggest failure in the comment section below?