Falling on Your Face
“There is no failure, only feedback.” —Art De Vany
“Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts.” —John Wooden
The investing business is one in which you will be wrong. A lot. Even the best investors, with long track records, continually make mistakes.
But they’re making mistakes because they’re swinging the bat.
Warren Buffett has famously said that the investing game is one in which there are no called strikes. You don’t have to swing at every idea that comes your way. You can just sit with your bat on your shoulder and wait for the so-called fat pitch.
But you do have to swing to get the rewards that come from investing.
Fear of failure can keep potential bottled up in any walk of life. And in investing, fear of potentially losing money in the stock market can cause some people to guarantee they’ll lose money in real terms as they lose purchasing power to inflation over time.
That doesn’t mean one should take unnecessary risks for the sake of taking risks or that one should try to fail. But you want to make Relentless Progress in getting better at the things you do. And as much as it would be nice to only learn from the mistakes of others, the best-remembered lessons are usually the ones you learn from your own efforts.
“One of the things I always tried to coach myself on was not being afraid to fail. When you have something that doesn’t work out, a lot of times, people’s reaction is to get very protective about never wanting to fall on their face again. I think that’s a big mistake, because you never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times in the process of getting there.” —Steve Jobs (“Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words”)
“Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done. In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt. You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch. When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning. In any case, to apprentice as an entrepreneur you must act on your ideas as early as possible, exposing them to the public, a part of you even hoping that you’ll fail. You have everything to gain.” —Robert Greene (“Mastery”)
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