Last night I had a chance to share some of my epic entrepreneurial failures at Tel Aviv’s edition of Fuckup Nights.

If you’re not familiar with Fuckup Nights (or FUN), it’s a global movement born in Mexico in 2012 to share publicly business failure stories. Hundreds of people attend each event to hear three to four entrepreneurs share their failures. Each speaker is given 7 minutes and can use ten images. After each speaker, there’s a question/answer session, as well as time for networking. (I shamelessly stole this description from their Facebook Page).

Failure is not about endings. It’s about beginnings

Failure is a big part of the entrepreneurial life.

You either fail massively with your company shutting down, or have small fails with projects gone wrong, bad hires, wrong managerial decision, etc., etc.

If you look at failure as the end, you’re missing out on its biggest value – The learning process.

Failure is just a way of the universe to tell you “this isn’t working, maybe try this instead.”

If you’re truly open to learning from life, you will learn your lesson and be smarter for your next attempt. Making you better.

Failure is life’s way of stopping you from wasting too much time on what’s not working and push you towards the next thing that will.

Why failure resonates with us

I think the fear of failure is a cultural bias.
Two years ago I wrote a blog post on how the education system makes failures a negative and scary thing we should be ashamed of.

Because most of us have been manipulated from an early age to fear and shame our mistakes, we become fixated on it.

Some use it as a reason to procrastinate or never start. Some use it to gloat. Smart people use it to evolve.

Fail next

Celebrate your failures, appreciate your happiness as well.

Chuck Palahniuk (The man behind ‘Fight Club’) said once:

“We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace

Learn From Peace

I guess this is true for most of us.
We forget to be grateful when we’re happy, and we’re at our best.

Yesterday we celebrated the failures that got us to where we are.

For this post – I want to hear your lessons from when you felt successful.

What was your biggest lesson /outtake from a success you had?