Everything You've Been Taught About Failure is Wrong

According to The Australian Bereau of Statistics, a total of 97% of business fail and 60% fail within the first three years of operation. 97%!!! After being in business myself over the past few years, I can absolutely, without a doubt, say that I don’t blame them. Business is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve shed tears and a rollercoaster of emotions over the past few years. I’ve wanted to throw the towel in, I’ve been scared, happy, ashamed, excited.. All the

Not knowing what the struggle is, or how it would feel its hard to determine when you’re down there going through the shit how you’re gonna handle it.

So far my struggles this year alone have included:

• putting $30,000 into a styling and real estate business that I hated but felt I had to keep working at due to my efforts to date. I quickly realise that amount of money and energy wasted in 1-2 years over a lifetime isn’t a great deal in the grand scheme of things.
• Being 10 months pregnant (because lets be real its actually 10 months not 9), trudging up and down 30 stairs every day of a house I could not sell after sinking over $5,000 of my personal money to style and try to sell it before the seller pulled the pin and told me she’s taking it off the market.
• Accepting that due to my lack of experience, I could not recover the agreed funds from the seller due to a wrongfully written contract. I trusted the seller to come through in the end, but she suddenly forgot about our agreement.
• Realising that not only did I dislike the business I put two years into building, but my lack of experience failed me and accepting that I only had myself to blame.
• Figuring out my next move after recovering from a cesarean section with a newborn baby at home. I think it was pure adrenaline that got me to the next stage.
• Learning a whole new business over again. I’d never had a product based business and I had to start fresh.
• Faulty products. My first large shipment of glasses were faulty. I had waited months for this shipment and I had been sold out of stock for about the same time.  I had preorders waiting to go out and being out of stock for so many months meant there was not enough time to send them back and wait for a replacement. I had to find a solution fast. And I did. 
• Keeping up momentum when I ran out of stock. This was hard and sales dropped of for some time even after we restocked.
• Coming to the realisation that you can keep doing the same things to create sales and one day you will sell a lot and the next day you wont.
• Never having enough money. Putting everything back in to the business and struggling big time to keep up with bills.

Now, on the flipside, what did I achieve this year?

• Creating a business I absolutely love working on ever day and am actually happy in- this is one of the most important things, if not the most important. If you’re in a business you hate, you won’t want to do the work that needs to be done.
• Selling out of two styles within 24 hours and netting $5,000- more than I made in the two years prior in a business I loathed.
• Being featured in major news publications: Daily Mail, Marie Claire, Instyle Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald.

 Do you see any patterns here? In a year, the biggest things that stick out to me that Ive gone through have been 10 shit things and 3 good things. That’s roughly every one good thing, there’s three shit things. 70% of the time its shit and 30% of the time is incredibly amazing.

This, I think, is what many people over look. The amount of shit you have to pull yourself through to get one good thing. And what’s worse is that when you experience that one good thing you best believe that right around the corner are those three shitting things. Not in that particular order, but you get my drift.

 On the flip side, when you’re going through the shit, you best believe there’s something incredible waiting for you around the corner. It’s a fucking rollercoaster, I don’t know any other way to explain it and if you aren’t prepared and are totally blindsided you will probably quit and think you’re not made for this, unknowing that you are exactly where you are supposed to be and this is exactly how its meant to play out.

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