If there is anything that I am grateful for is that many of the things that I am doing today, I started early on. Although, some, I stopped at some stage; having tried them out at my younger age helped me a lot in accumulating lessons and building my confidence. And of course, I’m still in my younger years. Counting a few years before I hit the big 30. Yeah, I know. I look older than I really am.

Anyway, I am certain that you have heard about failing early a few times before. Here is why I think it’s powerful:

Imagine you have a business idea, and you are convinced it’s one of the best ideas you have ever birthed and that the day you put it out there it will be ground breaking and you will coin it. This is the case for many entrepreneurs and many who are thinking of starting businesses. After all, if we didn’t believe that the ideas that we have are going to be ground-breaking and successful, we wouldn’t give them a second thought.

Anyway, back to the scenario that we are imagining. If you were to spend ten years without implementing your ‘great’ idea, possibility is that you will for that long while thinking that it’s the best of ideas and your gateway to the “top”. Then after sometime, you finally get to implement your brilliant idea only to find it’s a flop. It will probably take you sometime before you come up with and implement another ‘great’ idea.

But had you implement it earlier, you would have thought and tried out many other ideas in that ten years. And who knows, maybe one would have succeeded by now. This scenario may be a bit exaggerated, but is the situations we can all relate to. Almost all of us think ideas that we think are great and never have been thought of, but a quick Google search reveals otherwise. Not trying and failing early, means that we delay our own growth. I have learnt that every failure we experience teaches us a lesson or two, whether about business or ourselves. In order to fail early, we must start early.

Also, if it wasn’t for the many failures that we experience, our characters wouldn’t have developed or strengthened. For me, failing early has taught me that failure is a part of the process and not the ender of my process or journey. So by failing early, I have gotten to grow stronger and to understand myself even more. How to deal with failure and how to soldier on after failing. Failing early helps one to grow a thick skin. It builds up resilience.