7 Ways to Learn From Your Mistakes as an Entrepreneur

7 Ways to Learn From Your Mistakes as an Entrepreneur

If you let your ego get in the way, you’ll never learn from your mistakes. Don’t be afraid of failure Learning from your mistakes as an entrepreneur means expecting to fail and being okay with that. If you have one or more failed ideas behind you already, remember to focus on the user of your product next time. Your goal should be to make your next venture more successful than the last. People who write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them. Investigate every mistake When I make a mistake, I always ask myself the same questions. Find the time to make progress every day. Your idea might fail. How many of those 46% of people actually have a great idea, but aren’t doing anything about it? Many of them, like me, go through a few ideas or more that end up being absolute failures before finding an idea that works.

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mistakes

Mistakes are inevitable.

As an entrepreneur, you need to make friends with failure fast.

Try saying that ten times.

But seriously, over 50% of small businesses fail within four years.

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I don’t say this to scare you.

I say it to motivate you.

I had two failed companies and was $1 million in debt all before I turned 21.

Wondering how I turned it all around to become the successful entrepreneur I am today?

Simple.

I started another company.

It sounds like a punchline, but it’s true. I failed twice.

I hit the jackpot when I created CrazyEgg.

Well, it wasn’t really a jackpot.

It was years and years of hard work, learning from my past mistakes, and hiring the right people to help me build it.

It’s sort of easy to put in the long hours to make your dream come to life, but learning from your mistakes is much harder.

Today, I’m sharing some of the ways I’ve learned from my mistakes over the past decade of being a young entrepreneur.

Check your ego at the door

This is the most important thing you need to do.

If you let your ego get in the way, you’ll never learn from your mistakes.

To be open to change, you need to accept the fact that you don’t know everything. You’re not the smartest person in the room.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be confident in yourself. As an entrepreneur, you need to believe in yourself and your abilities to be successful.

But ego is more than confidence. Having an ego means you think you’re not just good, you’re the best.

In a survey by PayScale, 43% of respondents felt they were their company’s top performer.

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Most of those people are probably not their company’s top performer.

When you’re an entrepreneur, success can be seductive. You can easily get caught up in wanting more money, prestige, or a nicer home.

But chasing superficial rewards only serves to strengthen your ego.

I was the same way when I was younger. I was making over $20,000 a month with my consulting business when I was still in high school.

I remained focused on my dreams, but I wasted a lot of time and money on things that didn’t matter.

Now, I don’t have a home. I travel full-time and focus all my energy on my software companies instead of doing consulting.

Consulting brought in good money and was good for my ego. But my real passion is to make software products that help people build their own companies.

It took me years to learn that.

When you ignore your ego, you find out what really matters to you.

Don’t be afraid of failure

Learning from your mistakes as an entrepreneur means expecting to fail and being okay with that.

More than okay: welcoming it.

When it comes to tech startups, 9 out of 10 will fail. That’s a lot higher than the half of all small businesses that fail.

Vator looked at the top 20 reasons startups fail.

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“No market need” was the most common reason, accounting for 42% of all startup failures.

See how that’s related to ego?

You might think your product idea is awesome, but unless you step outside your head and ask people, you’ll never know.

If you don’t do any market research, you can’t be surprised when you launch to crickets, and no one buys it.

Your business isn’t about you.

It’s about your customers and the problem you solve for them.

If you have one or more failed ideas behind you already, remember to focus on the user of your product next time.

If you have regular access to someone who’s your target user, incorporate them into your startup. Ask them questions. Find out what they like and don’t like about it.

Make your product better with their feedback.

And if you still fail, that’s okay. Take the lessons you learned from one project and move on to the next great idea.

Failure doesn’t even have to mean the failure of your entire business. It could be just one aspect.

Like running low on cash, so you need to attract investors to keep going.

Or finding out a crucial piece of your software doesn’t work just a few weeks before launch day.

If you can solve the problem, you succeed.

If you can’t, you fail.

But failure isn’t permanent.

As long as you have an open mind, you can learn from every experience you have, whether it’s good or bad.

Your goal should be to make your next venture more successful than the last.

Keep a list of mistakes

This might seem weird to some people, but I like to keep a list of all my mistakes.

I don’t do it to torture myself about the past. I do it so that I’m always prepared for the future.

I look at my list to own my past mistakes and say, “Yep, I really did that,” or, “I really messed that up.”

Too often, people want to forget about their mistakes right away and move on.

But that doesn’t help you learn.

When I look at my list, I’m reminded not just of what I did wrong, but how far I’ve come and what I’ve learned since then.

Looking at my mistakes is a positive thing for me.

I can reflect on my entrepreneurial journey so far and see where I came from, where I am now, and where I have yet to go.

It’s been proven that writing things down improves memory.

People who write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them.

By writing down every mistake, I have a record of everything I’ve learned. How cool is that?

There’s some real psychology behind list-keeping, too.

The ‘Zeigarnik effect’ was discovered in the 1920s and still holds up today. It found that our brains remember upcoming tasks we haven’t started yet better than ones we’ve already done.

If I didn’t write down my mistakes, I would likely forget most of them once they were over.

I want always to be learning and growing. So for me, keeping…

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