Through my journey as an entrepreneur, immigrant, stateless refugee, and even homeless at one time, I learned that sometimes you’re on top, and sometimes you’re on the bottom. And often, it feels like it is never going to end — no matter which side of the scale you’re on.

Fortunately, life is a cycle. You’ll go up, and you’ll go down. That’s just part of the journey.

Over the years I have learned that sooner or later, you are going to fail, no matter how good or bad you are. You’ll fail your loved ones, you’ll fail on a business task, your car fails you — so many things can go wrong.

Many people let that failure DEFINE them, despite the much deeper experience they have to showcase.

Working with thousands of entrepreneurs and leaders globally, I have been blessed to learn that you can, instead, let failures REFINE you — you can learn from them, reposition yourself, gain insights, gain resiliency, and it might allow you to come out stronger than when you went down.

The defining moment of failure in just an experience. It allows you to keep trying in a different way, because maybe the timing was off, the people, the team, the pricing, or the market were not right. Maybe you were focused on the wrong customer.

All these things are part of the journey through which you continue to evolve.

Starting today, let failure REFINE you, not DEFINE you.

BEFORE YOU GO

We see our blogs as opportunities for dialogue. Please share your thoughts as comments.

1. What can you learn from your failing moments?

2. How can you refine your approach to the business, the team, the leadership?

3. What other tools have you used to keep going when things didn’t go the way you expected?

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Faris Alami is Founder and CEO of International Strategic Management, Inc. (ISM). He works internationally, presenting Exploring Entrepreneurship Workshops and other entrepreneurial ecosystem — related ventures.