Quotes

Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once. – Drew Houston

Failure is a normal part of entrepreneurship, most entrepreneurs face failure at one time or another during their business venture. Startups fail is even a normal process in the startup ecosystem.
Take for example the famous Edison, quote:
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – Thomas Edison

Failure in business is a philosophical question, some think it’s better to fail fast, others disagree …
ex: The best way to fail, is to fail Fast. NOT True!

Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.

– Drew Houston

Back to the quote, worrying about failure will only make the entrepreneur hesitate more when taking decisions, and thus in the process becoming risk averse. Taking risks is a integral part of entrepreneurship, thus an entrepreneur should take calculated risks from time to time. To be able to take risks, you will need to embrace the possibility of failure not reject it.

The second part of the quote, brings another philosophical point, you only have to be right once! Often true, but not always, thus consider it for it’s motivational value rather than it’s concrete value. Be right with a big idea, and you will be able to cover all the previous failures. But you might be right about 100 thing and still fail your business, thus failure can not be simplified and generalised in a quote.

This quote applies to a lot of fields, and not only to entrepreneurship. Even in fields like discovery, research, finance, etc … Often being right once is all it takes, because people will remember what you were right about! But as i said above, the quote can be right but is not always right.

I would rectify it to by adding “sometimes” before the second half:
Don’t worry about failure; sometimes you only have to be right once.



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Abdallah Alaili

I'm a serial entrepreneur (mostly tech) and micro-investor (tiny), this is a blog to learn from other entrepreneurs and spread the wisdom to many more. You can find me on: Instagram - Twitter - Linkedin - more about me