Fear of failure grounds our success story
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Fear of failure is deeply ingrained in society and impacts entrepreneurship. The author recounts building a popular blogging platform as a teenager in the early 2000s that had hundreds of thousands of users but he was unable to pursue it further due to societal expectations to attend college. While regulations need reform, a fundamental shift is also needed in how society views success and failure to reduce the dampening effect on innovative ideas. Entrepreneurship requires taking risks but the fear of failing holds many back from pushing their ideas to completion.
Fear of failure grounds our success story
- 1. Fear of Failure Grounds Our Success Story Reducing entrepreneurial red tape is need of the hour
- 2. Contd… The Indian startup ecosystem has taken shape and exploded in the last few years, and so have the countless stories surrounding them. Unsurprisingly , lessons of unsuccessful ideas and attempts haven't gotten as much precedence as successful counterparts. When such discourses on entrepreneurial challenges do happen they are usually ascribed to inefficient governance, and shortfalls in infrastructure, investment and institutional involvement. A factor that is generally overlooked, but has profound effects, is the cultural impact at micro (familial) and macro (societal) levels, on the process of entrepreneurship. As a society , we have imbibed the taboo of accepting failure. The instilled fear of risk-taking and the difficulty to even characterise “failure“, do not help the cause.For an entrepreneur, this could define the fine line between pushing an idea to the last mile and giving up on it entirely .
- 3. Contd… In the summer of 2002, I was an inquisitive 15-year old prowling the internet over dialup and dabbling with programming, building one of the earliest blogging engines, the rather unimaginatively named “boastMachine“ (bM). The idea of weblogs was just becoming mainstream, and the handful of blog engines available were overly technical and cumbersome to set up. Countless hours of development over the next two years made bM popular worldwide. At its peak, it powered several hundred thousand selfhosted blogs, gained institutional users such as the Michigan State University , was available in 17 international languages, and had become a regular candidate in the offerings of web hosting compa nies. A lot of this was before the advent of WordPress which appeared at the end of 2003. However, bM soon ran its course as its peak coincided with the completion of my secondary schooling. A break was unfathomable. Moreover, the success of a product on the internet was not seen as a measure of success at all, and its pursuit, maybe even monetisation, was thwarted by the fear of not being able to go to college from high school in a span of a few months. While I realise it was too early for my own family to comprehend internet entrepreneurship back then, the countless number of unwilling students going to engineering colleges still paints a grim picture.
- 4. Contd… The irrational fear of an uncon ventional path and the inability to think beyond the traditional framework of success kept me from pushing a globally successful product its last mile. There may be numerous innovative ideas and products out there that never come to full fruition because of spirits dampened by social circumstances. Reducing entrepreneurial red tape is indeed essential, but as a society, how do we go about bringing the muchneeded fundamental shift in attitude in the way we measure success and failure?
- 5. For details and bookings contact:- Parveen Kumar Chadha… THINK TANK (Founder and C.E.O of Saxbee Consultants & Other-Mother marketingandcommunicationconsultants.com) Email :-saxbeeconsultants@gmail.com Mobile No. +91-9818308353 Address:-First Floor G-20(A), Kirti Nagar, New Delhi India Postal Code-110015