Is pride your biggest failing?

Are you too proud (or ashamed) to admit your startup failures ?

Startups are often touted as failing through poor uptake, weak marketing, lack of resources or money, bad management, poor product/market fit, bad design, competition, wrong co-founders, poor teams/code/design etc.

But they aren't the real reasons -they are the outcomes of the real reasons. If you think about most startups, they come into being from the original vision of one person. In your startup, that's probably you.
Lets look carefully at why startups really fail:-

• You didn't know enough - which meant that you didn't do the either right things or at the right times, or both.
• You did know, which meant you made a conscious decision of actions, which ultimately lead to failure.
• There was an unexpected, unlikely or improbable event, or set of events, that occurred, from which you could not salvage or recover from.

Experience can take many forms, but the best of these is honest (though not self-critical) self-evaluation, which does require you to be honest with yourself. Your ability to see, to anticipate, to use good judgement and therefore to act, are often the best predicators of success. Sometimes that may require a bit of experience, being open to synchronicity, and the occasional dose of luck.

So startup success is often more about the clarity of your vision, than any other single factor, because everything comes from that.

Not for a moment am I advocating for not taking a risk with your next big idea, just because the last one didn't work. Far from it.

I'm also not suggesting that you should beat yourself up, or take the blame for everything -just that you accept responsibility for what happened.

If you have had startups that failed in the past, first identify the outcomes as to why they failed, and then honestly work back to the real reasons.

Only then can you truly embrace what it is that you must become, in order to get to where you want to go. That should give you, and every other member of your 'tribe', some insight into what you, or they, have to do next time. And then tell the world.

You paid the price, so learn what it is that you learned, and then share what you learned. In doing so, you will rid yourself of the pride that is holding you back.