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Zachary Aldwin Milkshake in the Boardroom
I remember the first time I failed. I was four years old and in nursery school. We had to make a butterfly by cutting out paper wings, colouring them, and gluing them onto a toilet roll.

Being a smug little squirt at the time I rushed ahead, got it horribly wrong, ended up making a mess of the project and this earned me a hand to my rear to remind me in the future to do what I was told.

So there I am, a snotty nosed kid sitting on the porch, smarting a little from the spanking, realising that failure is an unpleasant experience, more than that it is plain dangerous.

At the tender age of four I learnt to fear failure. Our school system teaches us to fear failure.

Our parents teach us to fear failure. You get a D on your report card and you try feeding it to the dog as you walk in the gate before your parents find out.

Failure is painful. Failure knocks the wind out of your sails and leaves you with a pit in the bottom of your stomach.

Failure makes you want to curl up under a duvet with a tub of chocolate ice-cream and watch reruns of Disney cartoons just to make the pain go away.

It does not matter if you are failing for the first time or for the hundredth, you feel the same pain. The difference is whether you are able to bounce back from it.

The A grade student often fears failure; they do not do it very often so they have no way of dealing with it.

Also for the A grader, usually their future is pinned to their academic success so failure to succeed at school is equated to a failed life.

Failing is paralytic and best avoided. Compare this to the kid who borders on the C range. Every time they dip below 50 percent they experience the blunt of failure.

After the first few times ,however, they realise that while failing is a horrific experience it is not the end of their world, they can move on and try again.

Their life is not tied to academic excellence and they find other ways to succeed. Many ‘second-rate’ students make great entrepreneurs.

If you fear failure, the best way to avoid it is not to try something in the first place. Many times we do not write that book, start that company, or build that prototype, because we are afraid it may fail.

And if it fails we will feel bad. The fear of failing instituted in a nursery school lesson stops us from stepping out.

Having a great idea is easy, doing something with it, facing the risk of failing, is the hard part. Picking yourself up from failure and doing it again is even harder.

Stepping up is hard. The other great hard part in business is gaining the trust of your clients to the level where your business actually works.

It is not enough to just write the book; you have to sell it to people, gaining their trust enough to have them buy it.

That is hard. The actual legal start up process to getting a company can be relatively simple, taking that company and using it to make the money to pay your staff is hard.

We fear failure so we avoid it. We dislike doing the hard part so we evade it. We let ideas swim about in our heads and blame everything but ourselves.

A number of South African restaurant franchises have just opened or expanded in Harare in the last couple of months.

I am yet to see an advert from any of them (if they did advertise then I missed it). Their success locally has not just been about the novelty value; it has been that they have already done the hard part of gaining our trust. ‘When?’ I hear you ask.

Every time someone has travelled to South Africa in the last 10 years. The people who went to South Africa to look for goods we could not get locally, they ate and drank at these restaurants down there.

When a local branch opened, there was no need to advertise, thousands of experienced travellers already knew what to expect and trusted the brand. The hard part of gaining our trust had already been done.

If you want to open a new restaurant at the same standard and in the same field as the recent imports then you will have an even harder job to fight for that trust.

If you had the idea of opening a similar place but never acted on it then I’m sorry but you might have missed the boat.

There is a chance that if you swim fast enough you may reach the boat, but then you will have to row a little harder to catch up what you have lost.

If you let the fear of failure stop you from starting, if you are unwilling to face up to the hard part of developing clients, then do not be surprised when someone else steps into the void and does it instead of you.

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