There's no success without failure

There's no success without failure
21 Nov, 2007, 0029 hrs IST,Vithal C Nadkarni, TNN

As a successful venture capitalist, Peter Morgan Kash has raised zillions of dollars and started up dozens of successful biopharma companies. He has also lectured on entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Business and Japan’s Nihon University.

One of the earliest lessons he learnt was that there is no success without failure. He started working on Wall Street at the age of 21 and by 30 made a sizeable fortune. “But in no time, I lost virtually all of it,” he writes in his book, Make Your Own Luck: Success Tactics You Won’t Learn in Business School. “What made the loss particularly difficult was that my setback was due entirely to my own poor judgement. No one had squandered my success except me.”

As it turned out, this period became one of the richest and most educational times of the New York businessman’s life. He went on to have several successes. “But I do believe that I would never have had them, if I had not failed so spectacularly early on,” he told this writer recently, during a first-ever visit to India. “In our culture, people tend to think of failure as a static condition or a termination point at which a person’s inability to achieve their goals, aims and desires becomes apparent. This is often viewed as a more or less permanent condition. That, however, is a completely erroneous understanding of failure.”

After studying the lives of dozens of successful entrepreneurs, Kash found that all people who succeed go through periods of their lives when all their efforts seem to fail. Yet what separated the real businessmen from the boys was not failure per se, but how they responded to difficult times.” Remember that a negative multiplied by a negative can be a positive,” he says. “Today I realise that life is a wave pattern — there are ups and downs, good times and bad.

Life doesn’t stop at any one point on the wave. Success and failure are just two words we use to describe different points on the wave. Wherever you may find yourself on the wave, know that this is temporary,” he explains, echoing the great Buddhist doctrine of anitya .

But as a doer, he also has antidotes: first, listen to your heart, on what you truly want and then never give up. Listen also to your critics, although you must not measure yourself by their take. Learn to pay the price of success. Finally, have faith in yourself and the web of life. Even a negative from someone can lead to a positive outcome.