Stay Connected
Atlanta Black Star/Business
BusinessEditor's PicksLifestyle

Dealing With Failure Without Excusing Personal Accountability

Posted byBy Stan | Published on: CommentsComments (0)

Encountering failure as an entrepreneur is normal and to be expected. To some extent, failure is sometimes worn as a badge of honor. Statements like

“If you haven’t failed 5X as many times as you succeeded you’re not prepared for success.” by Jay Adelson , Co-Founder Digg

reinforce the belief that failure is an essential ingredient of startup success.

But Why Did You Fail?

There are many possible explanations for an entrepreneur failing, including the commonly heard:

‘the timing was wrong’

‘we ran out of cash’

‘Investors just didn’t have the vision we have’

The same enthusiasm that entrepreneurs have when talking about failure, is not so common when accepting personal responsibility for failure. Without genuine accountability, however, the true value of failure is lost.

Owning Failure

The above justifications for failure can all be attributed to poor planning, execution or presentation by the Founder /CEO. To truly benefit from your failures you must make the shift from talking about the causes of failure in the abstract e.g. instead of ‘we ran out of cash’. Instead acknowledge and accept the failure as occurring ‘because you failed to budget properly and secure a fresh injection of cash’.

It is only when you hold yourself accountable…

Read more: Investor Pitch Clinic

Democracy needs journalism it can trust.

This election season, the stakes are higher than usual — and so is the pressure on newsrooms to soften their coverage, stay quiet, or just disappear. Independent reporting, the kind that answers to readers instead of advertisers or political pressure, matters more in a moment like this, not less.

For over 14 years, Atlanta Black Star has stayed independent and reader-funded. We have no corporate owner and no shareholders telling us what to cover or how to cover it. That independence is also our biggest vulnerability: nothing protects it except readers choosing to fund it directly.

Newspaper ad revenue has fallen more than 80% since 2005, and local newsrooms are closing at a rate of roughly two a week nationwide. When outlets go under in a moment like this, it's rarely the independent, reader-funded ones that get to stick around.

We know a request for support isn't why you came here. But without readers choosing to fund this work directly, the depth of reporting we can do at home and abroad shrinks along with everyone else's. If you're not in a position to give, that doesn't change how much we value you as a reader.

If you are able to, a recurring contribution does more for us than a single one-time gift, because it lets us plan the next investigation instead of just the next invoice. It takes about 30 seconds, no long form, no account. Thank you for continuing to support independent journalism and freedom of the press.

Give once Give monthly Support another way

Related Stories

Back to top