from: Failure is Everywhere…Don’t Underestimate Collateral Damage

….My biggest business failure was not an event, it was a long bungled process full of mistakes. I guess people would like failures to be packaged up quite simply around one decision, but I don’t think any ONE decision leads to failure. We are free to change our minds and therefore, mistakes can be undone and businesses and life’s put back on track. When failure comes, life feels like it halts around you and you go into awful damage control and cleanup. I have been there and done that and it’s awful. I will fail again no doubt, but I have many processes and procedures in place that should prevent a total damage control, life halting situation.

It’s the fear of failure that some times leads to failure and maybe I am lucky in business to have been in that hole.

I remember when I knew I was cooked back in 2001. It was not that the stock market had crushed me, my fund or my business, rather the stock market had crushed the people around me. I had a false sense of security from having gotten to cash quite quickly when the bubble imploded. I remember all the long talks with my new bearish friends that Phoenix was dead and there would be tumbleweeds blowing down Camelback quite soon.

Of course I was wrong (it’s happening now ), and in my glee for sidestepping the end of civilization, I forgot that my partners could be imploding. In fact they were.

My failure came from focusing solely on my little controllable world…

-Howard Lindzon