Silicon Valley’s startup culture has a saying: fail fast and fail often. Those startups believe you should learn how failure can be a blessing in disguise by mining the lesson in each failure for future growth and expansion. For instance, in:

Failing Startups

As Robert Kennedy noted, only those that dare to fail “greatly,” end up achieving in a big way too. By being willing to take a risk, even a big risk, you stand to win big when it does work. The more action you take, the more risks you face, the more likelihood you’ll fail. Failing gives you experience to overcome future challenges to eventually create a successful business model. It also makes you bolder, more proactive, and gives you the confidence to attempt bigger goals as the years go by.

Failing Business Relationships

Either you struggle to create venture partnerships to fund your business or you have trouble getting new customer relationships. Even having relationship troubles with suppliers or vendors can be a learning experience in how to create the types of long-lasting, profitable, relationships that drive a business to success. It can make you a genius at human psychology, which leads to knowing how to market your products to your ideal customer base and how to create winning deals for venture partners and B2B relationships. It fine-tunes your communication skills, both in writing and in person.

Failing With Money

The business model worked great, you had the clients and the B2B partnerships all in place, but you just couldn’t get enough funding or a big bill caused you to close your doors before things got off the ground. This type of failure teaches you how to work on a shoestring budget, so that your thinking becomes more creative in the future around money issues. Instead of renting or buying a building, for instance, you might rent office space in someone else’s business for your next startup, thus saving money.

Hard-won lessons learnt through failure are impossible to get via academic schooling. They test a person’s drive, perseverance, and ability to think on their feet. This helps them to become better as an individual and smarter as a business person. They are blessings in disguise that directly contribute to the final goal of having a successful business.