After waking up this morning this little gem made it’s way into my feed reader: AOL sells Bebo for scrap. Obviously I had to take a peek at this and see what it was all about, and more importantly if there was a message behind it to pass on. There most certainly is, and it goes back to a mindset that you need as a successful business owner: there are no complete losses.
No matter what happens with an investment and/or a chance that you take, there’s always something to learn from it. There is no such thing as a complete loss. Maybe financially there are complete losses, but certainly not in learning and figuring out why it failed. I’ve seen one of my friends continuously date woman after woman, taking them out to nice dinners and getting screwed over. I never understood why he kept doing it, until one day he sat me down and explained it to me. “I’d rather lose $100 on a night and know that shes not worth my time, than date her for 6 months on cheap dinners and the like, and have her screw me over when I’m emotionally involved”. It’s very simple to comprehend that your time is worth what you make it. Never accept that you’re worth anything less than you feel you are. Just because you are paid $10 an hour doesn’t mean you’re not producing $35 an hour type of work. Remember, if you were producing $10 an hour worth of work your company wouldn’t be able to sell it at $35 an hour to clients.
For some people, spending $100 on a first date night is absurd. For him it was extremely simple: if you can see through the BS and figure out what’s going on in her head the very first night by throwing some extra cash at it, it’s completely worth it in the long run. So back to the original point, figure out what it was worth and salvage it. Buy a property and it ends up not working out? Salvage what you can. Invest in a company and it goes under? Liquidate what you can to save as much as possible, and figure out innovative ways to handle the rest. No matter what, every single experience is a learning experience. Whether or not you remember or think about what you’ve learned, you’ve still learned something from it – even if it’s the littlest detail that will save you five minutes in the future, it’s still something.
Bottom line, something isn’t a complete loss unless you make it into one.
