It has been years since I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, but one of the things I remember the most was the way Robert Kiyosaki said he approached starting his business. He knew that four out of five businesses fail, so he figured he should plan on starting 5 businesses in order to get one that succeeded.
This is valuable thinking. When you approach your success goals with the idea that you will need to learn from some failures along the way, you can be much more realistic about what you are trying to achieve. It is also much easier to handle failure when you see it as part of your path to success. Failure should be a springboard to help you do better on the next try. But if you start out with the idea that a failure is something that is totally bad, it is a lot easier to give up when things don’t go the way you like.
Do your best to succeed, but give yourself room to make mistakes and learn from them.
Hi Mark
Great advice here, simple, straight to the point and hits the mark. I am looking forward to more failures in the future.
I don’t totally agree. This a mental thing, either you accept a defeat and it will come eventually, or you understand there is a possibility of a failure, but you will do everything to make the odds lower. Purposefully giving room for such defeats ain’t the right mind set in my opinion.
Great forward advice. I was always told you TRY > FAIL > ADJUST TRY > FAIL > ADJUST, until you get TRY > SUCCEED
Awesome thinking. I’ve never thought of it that way before, definitely sound advice for business success
Whether we are talking about business, charity organization, or purchase of pets, failure is a very important thing, because it teaches us more than any book…
Failure is just a different outcome from what we want. That does not mean that it is “bad”. From that “negative” outcome we can learn a lot!
Failure teaches us if we learn from it, but the advice to start 5 businesses since 4 will fail just sounds like a huge waste of time. In the sense that we should persevere, that’s great, but how could you possibly focus on 5 businesses at time?
I’ve found much of Kiyosaki’s advice hollow, and here’s a great article that documents many of the problems with the book: http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html
The idea wasn’t to start five businesses at the same time. It was to not get discouraged if a business fails and start with the mindset that the failure of one business is only a temporary setback.
Personally I’ve found Kiyosaki’s books to be useful. Now if that is the only thing you ever read, then of course you are going to have problems. But that is the case with pretty much any book that falls into the “motivational” genre.
The link you gave was very interesting and casts a lot of doubt on the facts presented in the Rich Dad Poor Dad series.
OR you could put your all into one business that you really love. That way you are not separated between 5 of them. Saying that I’ve started a few business that failed before this one that is succeeding.
The idea wasn’t to start all five businesses at once. It was to be prepared to try again if the first one doesn’t make it.