Life is not a long calm river. It’s more legitimate to open up to new perspectives than to start discrediting yourself and repeating yourself over and over again that you should have done otherwise. Today, failure is regarded as a predictor of certain success. but how much? Should we glorify failure outright?
Success or failure is part of the rhythm of life
This ritual, which marks the threshold of transition to the upper class, is etched into the collective unconscious of the French and weighs like a threat. The athlete sees what is called failure as training. Thus, in order to cross the bar, with each jump in height, it is raised by a few millimeters or centimeters, but failing that the player is overtaken. Failure is associated with the perception of shame and judgment of others and the need to achieve and live inner freedom by setting one’s own goal to free oneself from it. The notion of failure in business has evolved greatly, going from the most reprehensible taboo to true praise. At first despised, it is accepted and then becomes the object of a veritable cult straight out of the United States.
The taboo of entrepreneurial failure in France
While failure in the United States is regarded as a necessary learning process before achieving its goals, France sees it as a de facto taboo. In fact, our country dedicates a real creed to excellence and does not give the right to make mistakes. Even if it eventually leads to even more resounding success. In France, each closed company was filed and assessed for a period of up to 3 years. The “040” indicator showed that the company was in bankruptcy. The banks then refused to support this type of company in any other project.
Today, new reforms seek to dismantle this rating system to give failed companies a fresh chance. But with the United States open to economic culture, failure is able to get rid of the taboo that has defined it to become an inevitable path that is the condition of success. In other words, a few years were enough for the trend to reverse markedly.
Turning Failure into Success or American-Style Optimism
If we look closely at the concept of failure in the United States, we can easily see a certain worship of it. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, founded conferences called “Falcon”, where he listed the various failures he experienced in his career and also referred to the experience of other entrepreneurs present at his conference. The main idea of these conventions is summed up in the famous quote Paolo Coelho: “All the battles in life teach us something, even the ones we lose. , So if Google can’t define success outside of failure, why can’t we? This is how the French economic culture began to glorify failure, sometimes even abusing it!
Failure in business: a necessary condition for success?
This trend has been reversed to such an extent that now the question arises: “Does failing really make you come back better…? » Of course, the elimination of guilt from failures is a significant achievement that can truly double the motivation of any entrepreneur. But from there to see failures in order to be a necessary condition for success, probably not! You can get success without going through the necessary hurdles. It is true that many famous names praise failure and see it as a necessary condition for success, such as Bill Gates, Akio Morita (creator of Sony), Soichiro Honda or even Walt Disney…. And the list is long! Still, it would be completely simple to associate success with failure. Let’s say that creative failure is one we know how to manage and from which we know how to draw the best conclusions. To enable us to bounce back, this must be turned into a lesson, both professionally and humanely.
And to conclude, let’s take inspiration from this Japanese proverb “Fall seven times and get up eight times.”