JONATHAN JANSEN: How to fail your way to success. Like Elon Musk
'He was fired from his own companies, turned down by major investors and found himself on the edge of bankruptcy more than once'
Failing well? The term makes no sense. Failure means something bad happened. A company fails to meet its targets, leading to loss of revenues. A student fails an examination and might have to repeat the year. A marriage fails and ends in the heartache of divorce. Failure is bad, right? Not so, say the authors of books like The Upside of Down or The Importance of Failing Well or Fail Your Way to Success.During the past 10 months I have had many lunches and dinners with young and older entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley in California. Some are millionaires, including a fair spread of South Africans. Their success stories have one thing in common - failure. Over and over their experiments bombed, with lots of money and time down the drain. They stood up to try again and again until they won, and did some of them win big! As a window shopper in one of the most expensive retail outlets in the world, the Stanford Shopping Centre, I regularly drift towards a spectacular site in the place. T...
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