Many people are afraid of feedback. You try something, you get a result. Whether the result is good, or bad, it lets you know how you are doing. Most people love good results. They strive for them. They are the only reason, after all, that they take action. Similarly, people hate bad results. Ask out a girl, she says no. This fear is what keeps men paralyzed with fear.
It's also the same fear that keeps millions of people with great ideas from starting a business. What if I fail? What if nobody buys my product? What if somebody else has a better product?
The truth is that bad results, or negative feedback from your actions, are just as valuable as good results, or positive feedback. Strangely, most of us have a hard time accepting bad results. We blame others, hide our heads in the sand, and refuse to acknowledge that a course of action that we've taken has given us other than what we expected.
Do you remember when you were a baby? Probably not. But if you did, you'd remember that all natural learning, all natural acquisition of skills and development of abilities is based on trial and error. Babies know this instinctively. They try something, it works, they do more. They try something else, it doesn't work, they do less.
Why is this? Because all the adults around them give them positive reinforcement both ways. We get an "A" for effort whether we succeed or fail.
Why does this change when we get older? Maybe because we put too much emphasis in what others think about us. Maybe because we are afraid that any failure in business is an indication of a deeper, horrible truth. One that we dare not face.
But the honest truth is that if you are going to succeed in business, I mean really succeed, you have to accept failure just as openly as you accept success. Failure can teach you much more than success. Sure, you may try something and make money. But do you know exactly how? Do you know exactly why?
Without an open acceptance of failure as well as success, you won't really know what you're doing. By accepting both as a normal part of business, you'll be continually fine tuning your skills and building more and more successful strategies.
Imagine if you could measure your skill when it comes to making money in a business. What if you were certain that you could double your skills every year, for the next ten years. How much better would you be? How many more products could you produce? How much more money and wealth could you generate, not only for yourself, but for society as a whole?
All it takes is accepting the feedback that you get. And just like a child, unaware of the negative labels put on "failure," just do more of what works, and less of what doesn't.
In a few years time, you'll be one of the top business people in the world.
